Amplifying Value: Labor, Technology, and Creativity in the Jingle Industry

David Hesmondhalgh wonders why “highly educated” and “middle-class” workers have chosen a life of “precarity,” “exploitation,” and “misery” in the cultural industries. As a practicing jingle composer in the television advertising industry from 1998 to 2020, I became increasingly interested in researching and documenting the dramatic changes I experienced in how I worked, how my clients valued my work, and the role that my work played in popular culture. Creatively, the most recent thirty-year period could be historicized as three eras: the waning days of the “jingle” era, ending in the early 1990s, the “creative underscore” era dominating the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the “licensing and library music” era, from the early 2000s onward. Inside the industry, these decades were shaped by three major factors: the digitalization of music recording and music distribution technology, the advertising industry’s appropriation of popular music for television, and the decreasing power of labor unions in the creative industries. While the practices of jingle-writing, underscoring, and licensing, existed simultaneously, each period was characterized by one approach dominating the airwaves and driving (and being driven by) business practices. In addressing Hesmondhalgh’s question, this chapter leverages my insider status to explore the role that composing, recording, and postproduction technologies, and their move from elaborate recording studios to laptops running digital audio workstations, has played in deskilling the American advertising music industry. We didn’t get from enormous vocal anthems to pop and indie artists by accident, nor was this transition inevitable. Through an ethnography of its trade organization, the Association of Music Producers (AMP), I show how the shift to remote work reduced composers’ ability to build social capital and maintain value for their work, and how an organization such as a trade association can give dispossessed creative communities leverage in a rapidly shifting industry.