The company that has a monopoly on ice cream truck music
In 1973, an electrical engineer named Bob Nichols was watching the film The Sting when a song on the soundtrack — Scott Joplin’s 1902 ragtime hit, “The Entertainer” — caught his ear.
He could imagine trucks gliding through the American suburbs, the tinkling notes summoning children to buy snow cones, sundaes, and bomb pops.
And he was uniquely poised to make it happen: as the founder of Nichols Electronics, a tiny Minnesota-based company, Bob supplied the music boxes — preloaded with dozens of jingles — for the vast majority of the country’s ice cream trucks.
In short order, “The Entertainer” was on Nichols music boxes all over the nation. And 25 years later, it has become the country’s ice cream truck song of choice.
That’s according to Bob’s son, Mark, who now runs Nichols Electronics alongside his wife, Beth. Today, Nichols Electronics no longer controls just the vast majority of the music box market; it is the market.
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