God Save the Jingle

You’d be forgiven if you can’t hum the 18th-century Cumbrian folk song “Do Ye Ken John Peel.” But in 1942, a version of that tune, reworked with lyrics about Pepsi-Cola, was the most recognized melody in America. Three years earlier, two men walked into the office of Pepsi-Cola’s president, carrying a phonograph. They played a demo of what would become one of America’s earliest advertising jingles. To the tune of “Do Ye Ken John Peel,” it went: Pepsi-Cola hits the spot / Twelve full ounces, that’s a lot / Twice as much for a nickel, too. Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you. The jingle became a hit. People played it on jukeboxes around the country; it was translated into 55 languages. Electronic chimes atop a Pepsi-Cola plant in New York rang the first seven notes on the half hour. Other companies recognized the power of hummable commercials, and there were soon so many on the radio that listeners complained. Eventually, The New York Times ’ radio station banned these “singing commercials,” but companies could get around the ban by launching instrumental versions instead. America has had a love-hate relationship with jingles since, but they’ve continued to provide paychecks for musicians. Most of the music industry is made up of people in the gray area between “rock star” and “hobbyist,” like the session musicians and composers who make not just albums, but commercial soundtracks and jingles. When a report surfaced in October that OpenAI was developing a music-generation tool similar to products like Suno and Google’s Lyria, I wasn’t worried about the rock stars. These artists at least have their celebrity to trade on. But advertising musicians’ work is usually anonymous, and you don’t need to be Stravinsky to compose the 800-588-2300-EMPIRE tune. Are the jinglers going to be okay, or will advertising melodies be yet another livelihood cut down by new technology? Jingle writing has become less of an art and more of a science over the past several decades. There are conventions now that did not exist in the “Do Ye Ken John Peel” era, and conventions could make it easier for the work to be automated. For starters, jingles have gotten shorter and shorter over the years, morphing from 30-second songs to what are sometimes called “mnemonics,” or short sonic tags like the Netflix tudum and Liberty Mutual’s “Liberty, Liberty, Liiiberty, Liiiberty.” (Liberty Mutual’s CMO, Jenna Lebel, told me that they originally tested a version of the song that repeated liberty six times, but they felt that was a bit much and cut it down to four, which went over well.) Sonically, jingles—I just can’t get myself to call them mnemonics—are simple. Timothy D. Taylor, an ethnomusicologist at UCLA who wrote a history of advertising music, used to keep a database of every jingle he came across, labeled by genre. “Many of them were written like they were a song for children,” he said. “The very simplicity of them was part of the reason they stick in your...

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