Artificial intelligence is coming for Jingle — And maybe for the entire audio advertising industry

In the mid-1990s, Jason Page, then a struggling singer trying to break through with his rock band, could make a living writing Mountain Dew, Taco Bell and Pepto Bismo earworms for the jingle houses that dominated the music industry in advertising for decades. But during an interview a few weeks ago, Paige – who eventually became better known as the voice of POKEMON the “Gotta Catch 'Em All” theme song — activates an artificial intelligence program. Within minutes, he emails eight studio-quality, terrifyingly catchy punk, hip-hop, EDM and klezmer MP3s centered on the reporter's name, the word Advertising sign and the phrase “the jingle industry and how it has changed so much over the years.”

The point is self-explanatory. “Yes,” says Page, of the industry that once sustained him. “It's dark”.

Today, the jingle business has evolved into an assembly line of composers and performers competing to turn the next “plop plop fizz fizz” into a more multifaceted relationship between artists and companies, including brand relationships (like Taylor Swiftof the long-term target agreement). Super Bowl synchs worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. production music that allows brands to choose from hundreds of thousands of pre-recorded tracks. and “sonic branding,” in which Intel bong or Netflix tudum are used in a variety of marketing contexts. Performers and songwriters make a lot of income from this type of commercial music and they are much more open to doing so than they were in the corporate-skeptic 90s. But artificial intelligence, which allows machines to make all these sounds much more cheaply and quickly for brands than human musicians ever could, remains a looming threat.

“It certainly has the potential to cause disruption,” he says Zenon Harris, head of creative and licensing for West One Music Group, a Los Angeles company that licenses its 85,000-song original music catalog to brands. “If we could use it as a tool, instead of replacing it [musicians], that's where I see it headed. But money dictates where the industry goes, so we'll have to wait and see.”

This vision of a future dominated by artificial intelligence in a critical revenue-generating business is as disturbing to singers and songwriters as it is to Hollywood screenwriters, radio DJs and voice actors. “I just did a branded life insurance deal to pay for the making of my record,” he says Grace Bowers, 17, Nashville blues guitarist. “I'm definitely not the only one who does this. Artists turn to whoever they can [make] money, because touring and playing music is not the biggest earner. If Arby's came to me and said, 'Can you write me a jingle?', I'd say, hell yeah!”

End of an era

Since the late 1920s, when a barbershop quartet sang “Have You Tried Wheaties?” on the air at a Minneapolis radio station in the late '90s, jingles dominated the music business in advertising. Jingle houses such as Jam, JSM and Rave competed fiercely to secure contracts with major brands and advertising agencies. In the process, they created lucrative side gigs for up-and-coming talent for decades, such as Luther Vandross, Patti Austin and Richard Marx, who, as jingle veteran Michael Bolton wrote in his biography, “all shook the jingle-house tree ».

“If you wrote a jingle that was going to be a national campaign and you sang on it, you could make $50,000 and you could do three of them a year,” he recalls. John Loefflera singer and songwriter who worked on 2,500 jingle campaigns as head of jingle house Rave Music, before serving as a BMG executive for years.

The jingle era ended, for the most part, in the late 1990s as television was fragmented by four must-see broadcast networks into dozens of cable channels, followed by streaming video networks like Netflix. (Steve Carmenthe ad agency vet who wrote “Nationwide … is on your side,” wrote what many consider a posthumous posthumous for the era with his 2005 book, Who Killed the Jingle?) “I wish young artists these days had the opportunities I had,” says Loeffler. “It's very different.”

Today, artists are much more likely to have broad brand relationships with companies like Target — Swift has appeared in ads and the retailer has sold exclusive editions of her albums for years, and Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo and others have similar deals — except it's to write catchy for TV and radio. “I personally haven't heard the word 'jingle' in the lifetime of the Citizen,” he says Theo de Gunzburg, managing partner of Citizen, a five-year-old music label that employs studio artists to create original music for advertisers. “The customers we deal with want to be taken more seriously. The public is more demanding.”

Citizen employs 10 full-time staff, including five composers, to create original music for advertising campaigns, and, like West One and many other music labels, maintains a library of licensed tracks. The company's commercial work includes Adidas' “Runner 321,” which juxtaposes Michael Jordan and Babe Ruth with clips of athletes with Down syndrome, all with its own athletic percussion tracks. Major music publishers also maintain in-house services for this type of music production. Warner Chappell Music's extensive online library includes a hip-hop-style track called “Ready to Fight,” described as “driving trap drums, electric guitar, bold brass, cerebral synths, and brooding male vocals.” WCM represents “specialist songwriters who like to write in short form” and “are great at writing pop hits,” he says Dan Grosspublisher's director of creative timing, who was previously music supervisor at leading advertising agency McCann.

Ba Da Ba Ba

The buzzword for music in advertising today is “sonic branding” — designing a short musical calling card, like the Intel bong, that reflects the feel of a product and can be used in ads, promotions, app sounds, TikTok videos and Instagram and even virtual reality games. “The message of flexibility is really key,” he says Simon Kringel, director of sound for Unmute, a Copenhagen agency that has worked with brands such as magazine publisher Aller Media to develop compelling music snippets that serve as what he calls a “watermark.” “The only chance we have is to make sure that every time we interact with our audience, there's something that triggers that brand recall.”

Kringel avoids using the term “jingle” — “that whole approach has faded,” he says — but the most memorable old-school jingles have taken on a classic rock quality in recent years. The 20-year-old McDonald's “ba da ba ba ba”, “Nationwide… is on your side” and more are repeated non-stop in TV streaming commercial breaks. State Farm “like a good neighbor…” remains the emperor of earworms, and the company is deploying the Barry Manilow pen ringer in strategic ways. Around 2020, says State Farm's chief marketing officer Alison Griffin, the insurance giant conducted a study on its own marketing assets. “They found that 80% of people recognized the notes, 95% recognized the cue – and when they were put together, there was almost 100% recognition,” he says. “We recently tripled with the jingle.”

Similarly, Chili's recently went retro, hiring Boyz II Men to update their '90s 'baby back ribs' jingle with a new ad. “Jingles don't feel as hip as maybe brands want them to be,” he says George Felix, chief marketing officer for Chili's Grill and Bar. “But there's definitely still runway for jingles if you do it right.”

For now, brands are still spending lavishly on advertising music of all genres — and every once in a while, a real ringer comes along. Temu, a new e-commerce company owned by a Chinese retail giant, is reportedly spending $3 billion on advertising this year, emphasizing the insanely catchy “oh, oh, oh, Temu” jingle that aired during the Super Bowl.

Watching the AI

Still, some in the commercial music industry worry about what Paige's punk-EDM-hip-hop-klezmer AI-jingle exercise portends. “I think that the [AI] Are the fears overblown? No. I worry; Yes,” he adds Sally House, CEO of The Hit House, a 19-year-old Los Angeles company that hires composers, engineers, sound engineers and performers for music on Progressive, Marvel, HBO and Amazon Prime Video spots. “We're all waiting for copyright to come to our rescue and the government to do something about it.”

But Warner Chappell's Shaw says his team gets requests for “custom compositions” because brands want to work with the publisher's A-list songwriters. “AI doesn't really affect us in this case,” he says.

At Mastercard, which underwent a two-year process to unveil a piece of upbeat, new instrumental music as part of its sonic branding in 2019, AI could be useful for future advertising campaigns. But not for creating MUSIC. Mastercard used its own creative people, as well as composers, musicologists, sound engineers and even neuroscientists, to work on its distinctive tone. “If I tell the AI ​​engine what the audience is, what I'm trying to create, what the context is, and ask it to put something together based on Mastercard's tune, it will do a really good job,” he says. Raja Rajamannar, a classically trained musician who is the company's head of marketing and communications. “But if I had to create the Mastercard audio architecture, I can't outsource it to artificial intelligence. The original creation, at this stage, must clearly come from human beings.”

Paige agrees. Even if AI eventually cuts out the space—and certainly from the potential profits for writers—it won't completely overturn the need for real musicians to make commercial music. Classic jingles endure, he says, because they contain humanity and spirit — and because people “know there's a human behind the Folger theme song.”