Think about how much thought went into the way your business looks.
The logo went through rounds of revisions. Someone agonised over the exact shade of blue. There’s a brand guidelines document that tells everyone which fonts to use, how much space to leave around the logo, and what kind of photography fits the brand. You’d never let a supplier stretch your logo or swap your typeface for Comic Sans.
Now think about how your business sounds.
What music plays when a customer is on hold? What does the voice on your phone system sound like, and who chose it? What’s playing under your latest social video, and does it have anything in common with the music in your last radio ad?
For most businesses, the honest answer is: nobody really decided. And that’s the gap I want to talk about.
Thousands on the look, almost nothing on the sound
I’ve spent years working in audio branding, and one pattern comes up again and again. A business will invest thousands in a rebrand: new logo, new website, new signage, new everything. Then, when it comes to audio, the brief is “just pop some music on the phones”.
It isn’t that these businesses don’t care about their brand. They clearly do. It’s that sound simply isn’t seen as part of the brand. It’s treated as a technical detail, something that comes with the phone system or the video template, rather than a creative decision.
But your customers don’t separate your brand into “the parts we designed” and “the parts we didn’t”. To them, it’s all you. If everything they see feels polished and premium, and everything they hear feels like an afterthought, that mismatch is noticed, even if it’s never put into words.
Your phone line is a brand experience
For a lot of businesses, the phone is where customers spend the most time actually hearing the brand. And it’s often at the moments that matter most: making an enquiry, chasing an order, sorting out a problem.
Think about what that experience is like. A customer calls. They hear a greeting, then perhaps a menu of options, then they wait. Whatever plays during that wait is your brand talking to them, at a time when they may already be a little impatient.
If that’s a crackly loop of tinny music, or the same ten seconds of a track repeating, or silence that makes them wonder if they’ve been cut off, it says something about you. If it’s warm, clear, well produced and sounds like the business they think they’re calling, it says something very different.
This is one of the most overlooked touchpoints in branding, and one of the easiest to get right.
Music changes how people feel about you
Try this. Take any video of someone walking down a street. Put a gentle piano piece under it and it feels reflective. Swap in a low, pulsing string section and suddenly it’s tense, like something is about to happen. Add an upbeat acoustic track and it’s a lifestyle advert.
Same pictures. Completely different feeling.
That’s the power sound has, and it applies to brands just as much as films. The music attached to your business tells people how to feel about you: whether you’re friendly or formal, energetic or calm, cutting-edge or trusted and established.
If you don’t choose that feeling deliberately, you’re leaving it to chance. And chance rarely picks the feeling you’d have chosen.
The problem with stock music
Stock music has its place. It’s quick, it’s affordable, and some of it is very well made. But it has one big limitation when it comes to branding: it isn’t yours.
The same track you picked for your company video is available to anyone with a subscription, and that includes your competitors. It might be on a hundred other corporate videos already. It might be the backing track on a TikTok that has nothing to do with you.
There’s a practical catch too: licensing. Music from design platforms like Canva, and from many stock libraries, is typically licensed for use within the content you create there, such as a social post or a video. Playing music down your phone line is a different thing entirely. It counts as a public performance, which needs its own licensing, and if the track is by a commercial artist you’ll also need a licence from PPL PRS. So even if you wanted to use the same track on hold to keep things consistent, you often wouldn’t be allowed to without extra licences and fees. Your brand ends up with one sound on social and a different one on the phones, simply because of the small print.
More importantly, stock music was written to fit everyone, which means it wasn’t written to fit you. It can set a general mood, but it can’t express what makes your business different, because it knows nothing about your business.
That’s why every DJi client gets an original piece of music, written exclusively for them. Not because stock music is bad, but because a brand identity should be something only you have, and something you can use everywhere, from your phone line to your social feed. You wouldn’t use a stock logo. Why use a stock sound?
It also takes the licensing headache away. Our music is original and isn’t registered with PRS, so you don’t need a PPL PRS licence to play it on your phone system. Every client gets all the licences they need to use their audio anywhere: on hold, in adverts, on social media, at events and beyond. One sound, used everywhere, with no small print getting in the way.
Sound like you, not just “corporate”
When businesses do think about audio, there’s a common trap: aiming to sound “professional”. The result is usually the same safe, polished, slightly bland music you’ve heard on a thousand phone lines and explainer videos.
Professional is the minimum, not the goal. A boutique hotel, a family-run building firm, a tech start-up and a solicitors’ practice should all sound professional, but they shouldn’t sound the same. Each has its own personality, its own customers and its own reason for existing.
The question isn’t “what sounds corporate?” It’s “what sounds like us?” Maybe that’s warm acoustic instruments for a business built on personal relationships. Maybe it’s crisp electronic textures for a forward-thinking tech company. Maybe it’s something bolder. The point is that the choice should come from the brand, not from what everyone else is doing.
A sound you can actually use
There’s another trap at the opposite end. Some businesses do invest in sonic branding, commission a sonic logo, sign it off and then… it sits in a folder. It appears in the brand guidelines PDF. Maybe it’s played at the end of one advert. And that’s it.
A sonic identity that only lives in advertising is like a logo that only appears on billboards. Most of your customers will never hear it, because most of them will never see your adverts. They’ll call you, visit your website, watch your social videos, or walk past your stand at an event.
That’s why I believe a sonic identity has to be practical. It needs to come as real, ready-to-use assets: a phone greeting, on-hold music and messages, intros and outros for video, short edits for social, background music for events. Each one built from the same core idea, so they all reinforce each other.
The best sonic identity isn’t the cleverest one. It’s the one your customers actually hear.
Where to start
You don’t need to overhaul everything at once. Start by listening. Call your own phone line and wait on hold. Watch your last few videos with the sound up. Ask yourself one question each time: does this sound like us?
If the answer is “not really” or “I’m not sure”, that’s where sound can start working harder for your brand.
If you’re new to the idea, we’ve explained exactly what sonic branding is, how a sonic identity is built and what it costs in our complete guide to sonic branding.
And if you’d like to talk about how your business sounds today, and how it could sound, I’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with DJi Studio for a no-pressure chat.
About the author: Dan is the founder of DJi Studio. Before starting DJi Studio, he spent 8 years at PHMG, working on audio branding and on-hold production for businesses of all sizes. DJi Studio creates original, broadcast-ready sonic identities, from sonic signatures and radio ads to on-hold messaging and social audio.