This is what advertising music means today: Instead of jingles, we have singles.

“The industry that I was in is no more,” says Steve Karmen, who has been nicknamed “The King of the Jingle” and whose greatest hits include the long-running “Nationwide Is On Your Side” and the state song “I Love New York.” At 79, Karmen, a lifelong composer and show-business veteran, laments, “There are no jingles.”

What killed the jingle? It owes its demise not only to shifts in the advertising business but also changes in the music business, and how the two industries became more entwined than ever.

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The first documented use of the word “jingle” dates back to 1600, but it took a couple hundred years before the term gained a commercial connotation. It first referred to the sound of clinking metal, and then it came to denote a repetitive short verse, but without musical accompaniment. By the time music had become a handy tool for American pitchmen of all stripes, from politicians to preachers, it was no wonder that early advertisers seized upon the idea of selling with sound: Before radio was widespread, some companies put out printed sheet music that included ads for their products.

Though there is some debate, credit for the first commercial jingle usually goes to a Wheaties spot in 1926. The company that made Wheaties, the Minnesota-based Washburn Crosby (the predecessor of General Mills), tried to resurrect the flagging cereal on the radio with a song from a local barbershop quartet. It went like this:

Have you tried Wheaties? They're whole wheat with all of the bran. Won't you try Wheaties? For wheat is the best food of man. They're crispy and crunchy The whole year through, The kiddies never tire of them and neither will you. So just try Wheaties, The best breakfast food in the land.

It was straightforward, and sounded more like a dirge than the upbeat ditties that would come in the following decades. But the promo worked spectacularly, and the jingle made its way around the national market. It was a new way to advertise: The jingle was a natural fit for radio, and later television, both mediums well-suited to audio.

Jingles soon developed into a distinctive musical genre. “If you heard a jingle, you wouldn’t mistake it for any other kind of music,” says Timothy Taylor, an ethnomusicologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture. “People talked about the ‘Madison Avenue choir,’ the sound of lots of voices singing together in praise of something and a soft jazz or light orchestral background.” What resulted was as effervescent as a nursery rhyme, whether or not the product was aimed at kids.

These jingles didn’t sound like pop songs, but as their popularity grew, a few found crossover appeal. 1939’s “Pepsi Cola Hits the Spot” became a hit in its own right, and Pepsi released more than a million recordings of the song. The “Chiquita Banana” jingle, first broadcast in 1944, taught American listeners how to store and eat the tropical fruit (Don’t refrigerate! Brown spots are good!). At its height, the song was played, on average, 376 times a day on the radio, according to the company, and a number of popular artists covered it.