3-second salt company jingle becomes #1 karaoke song in Japan across all genres

Everyone’s feeling a little salty this summer. It’s often said that as technology gets faster and faster, our attention span shrinks in response. TikTok feeds condition millions of people to…

Hey, where are you going? OK, fine. I’ll get to the point.

Major Japanese karaoke service provider Joysound released their weekly ranking for the first week of July, and surprised everyone with the announcement that a 3-second jingle for a brand of table salt was the most sung track of all tracks in the entire country. Let’s take a listen. About a month ago, we reported “Hakata no Shio” (Hakata Salt) reaching number four in the national ranking, which was already impressive in its own right.

That achievement only seemed to have fueled interest in the sound logo, which is a very short melody announcing a company’s name or slogan. Sound logos are so short, they make the “Sometimes you feel like a nut” jingle sound like “Freebird.” This marks the first time a sound logo has ever topped the charts in the thirty years since such records were kept.

In our previous article, we mentioned several reasons that sound logos in general were growing in popularity, such as the timemaxxing trend. But what is it about “Hakata no Shio” that makes it such a wildly popular sound logo among classics like “Sehhhhhh-gahhhhhh” or the haunting, “Onedan ijo, Nitori!” (More than just a nice price, Nitori!)

▼ Sega ▼ Nitori The answer lies in its challenge. One of the many features most karaoke systems have is the ability to rank your performance in the sense of how closely it matches the original pitch and timing. Joysound can also keep track of national scores and found that the average for “Hakata no Shio” was 61.

36 out of 100. It is said that even cracking 70 on this sound logo is extremely difficult. Not all systems are created equal, but Joysound’s evaluation breaks down as follows: Pitch (40 points), Stability (30), Dynamics (15), Long Tones (10), and Technique (5).

Right off the bat, it’s easy to