Who Chose That Sound?
- ErikWalterThompson
- 2 days ago
- 12 min read
Your brand is broadcasting audio all day, on more surfaces than most marketing teams have ever counted.
Start with the ones you control outright. The videos on your own social accounts, which for most consumer brands are now the largest volume of audio the company publishes anywhere. The content you commission from creators and pay for, where the terms are yours to set. The film on your homepage with the color grade you approved twice. The hold music on your customer service line, the loop at your trade show booth, the sizzle reel that opens your events, the sound your app makes when an order goes through.
Every one of those is a broadcast, and most of them got their audio by default rather than by decision: a track the production company already had access to, a song the social agency picked because it was going viral, a creator's pick from whatever was trending the day they filmed, or a royalty-free library subscription somebody bought two years ago that nobody has revisited since. Different people, months apart, none of them in the same meeting.
None of that is a failure of taste. Most of those choices are fine, and after twenty years of making records I can tell you some of them are better than fine. The gap is structural, and it is worth understanding what it costs before deciding what to do about it.
Your Brand's Radio Station
Take every channel your brand uses to communicate and mentally strip out the visuals. No packaging, no color, no logo, no typography, no photography. What remains is audio, and all of it is going out under your name.
That is your brand's radio station. You own the broadcast rights. You decide what gets played, whether or not anyone at your company has ever framed the decision that way. When I ask a marketing team who decides what their brand sounds like, the answer is usually whoever is closest to the content: the social team, the production company they work with, a creative director. All reasonable people, and none of them hired to set brand-level direction for sound.
Real stations are programmed on some principle, whether that is a format, a rotation, or just a sense of what the station is for. Yours can be evaluated the same way, and the questions are not complicated.
If the audio going out has no relationship to the brand, the broadcast still reaches people, but nothing accumulates. A listener has no reason to connect what they heard to who you are, so the impression lands and then dissolves.
If the register changes every time, the station has no format. Listeners learn patterns through repetition, and a signal that never repeats gives them nothing to learn.
If there is no owned audio yet, that is the normal starting position rather than a failing. Until there is, the sound can still be curated with the same discipline your brand already applies to its writing and its visual choices. Consistency is available to you immediately, and ownership takes longer.
Every brand with a social account is already running a radio station. Most have never decided what it plays.
The platforms, meanwhile, have already noticed you are broadcasting. On TikTok and Instagram, audio published from your own account gets credited as original sound followed by your brand name, which tells every viewer that this audio belongs to you.
I found that credit line running on one of the two biggest posts a premium snack brand had ever published. Behind it was audio nobody at the company had specified or documented, and which no one there could describe. The single biggest post, bigger still, ran on a library upload of a Tchaikovsky ballet.
Both reached several hundred thousand viewers, against a day-to-day range in the hundreds to low thousands. Neither one left the brand with anything it could use again.
Distribution is a multiplier, and a multiplier applied to nothing returns nothing.
Not a Sound You Buy
The whole idea compresses into one sentence, and everything below it is an expansion.
A sonic identity is not a sound you buy. It is a decision you make about every sound you use.
Stated in full: a sonic identity is the set of decisions a brand makes about its own audio, together with the assets those decisions produce and the guidelines that keep them consistent. It answers three questions. What does the brand sound like, where does that sound appear, and who owns it.
That framing matters because it relocates the work. Most people encountering this category assume the deliverable is a piece of music, in the way a visual rebrand delivers a logo file. The music is real, and you do end up owning assets. But the asset is the output of the decision rather than a substitute for it.
If you want the short, self-contained definition, it lives in our sonic branding glossary, alongside the terms around it. The glossary answers what the words mean. This piece answers what the decision involves and why so few brands have made it.
Four terms get used interchangeably and mean different things, which is worth sorting before going further.
Term | What it is | Scope |
The practice of designing and owning how a brand sounds | The discipline | |
The complete system one brand ends up with | The outcome | |
A short audio cue that triggers recognition | One asset inside the identity | |
Full-length owned music built out from the sonic logo | One asset inside the identity |
Sonic branding is the field. A sonic identity is your outcome inside it. You may also see it called an audio identity or sound branding, and the label matters far less than whether you own what you sound like.
The Difference Between Sounding Good and Being Remembered
A fair objection at this point: our content sounds fine, the music is well chosen, and our creators have good taste. That is often true, and it does not close the gap.
That brand was one of six I audited across June and July 2026, and the pattern was consistent enough to be uncomfortable. One of them had used 43 licensed tracks from 43 different artists across 14 genres, with no artist repeating beyond four posts and no track exclusive to the brand. The register swung from classical library edits to café bossa nova to chart EDM, sometimes inside the same posting week.
Individually, most of those choices were defensible. Collectively they taught a listener nothing.
That is what we call Sonic Schizophrenia, the condition of a brand sounding completely different in every campaign, with no through-line and nothing a listener can learn.
Another brand in the set looked like the opposite case. It behaved exactly like a company with an audio identity, running a single track across thirteen posts as an informal anthem, with two nationally recognizable founder voices carrying most of its video. The behavior was real and it was applied consistently.
The brand owned none of it. The recurring track belonged to a musician, and the voices belonged to two people. Nothing in that system would survive a licensing lapse or a personnel change, and nothing in it would transfer in an acquisition.
A third brand, sitting under a parent group reportedly valued near three billion dollars at its 2024 sale, produced audio constantly through a standing live-streaming program, events, activations, and reaction-format ads. Across a sample of 150 posts on one platform, it had published 95 distinct pieces of original audio plus more than 60 one-off library tracks. That is the highest output in the set and the lowest repetition.
Of the six brands I audited, one owned a sonic asset.
The gap is a category norm rather than a resource constraint, which is exactly what makes it available.
The two brands at opposite extremes make the point cleanly. One had gone dormant, posting almost nothing for months. The other was posting daily. Both landed in the same place on the dimension that builds equity, for opposite reasons. Volume did not close the gap and neither did restraint. Ownership was the only thing that did.
The Four Things a Sonic Identity Has to Do
If a sonic identity is a system rather than a purchase, it needs a way to be evaluated. We assess it across four dimensions, which is also the fastest way to understand what one actually is. We call this framework the Walter Audio Index, a structured way of rating how a brand's sound is behaving, using only what is publicly observable.
Consistency. Is the sonic approach stable and repeated across touchpoints? The bar is repetition rather than uniformity, because a listener cannot learn something they encounter once.
Congruency. Does the sound match the visual and verbal identity you have already built? This is where premium brands most often leak value. A patisserie-grade visual world paired with audio recorded on a phone in a parking lot actively contradicts what the packaging is claiming.
Distinctiveness. Could this sound plausibly belong only to your brand? Congruent and distinctive are different axes, and this is the one people conflate. One audited brand had a calm, restful audio register that fit its sleep positioning better than anything else in the set. It could also have belonged to any meditation app or wellness brand on the market. Congruent, and impossible to own.
Ownability. Do you control exclusive audio, or are you borrowing what anyone can license?
This dimension is the one that converts the other three into an asset. It is also where the Audio Identity Gap lives, the space between how consistently a brand looks and how randomly it sounds.
One brand in the set rated well here. It had commissioned a recording it owns, built around its own name in the hook, and deployed it across both paid and organic channels. OLIPOP is the exception in the set rather than the rule, and worth naming precisely: this was an audit-grade read of publicly observable behavior, not a claim about what that asset has or has not done for the business. What it demonstrates is narrower and more useful. In a category where nobody owned anything, one brand owned one thing, and that alone put it in a different position than competitors producing far more content.
A note on what this framework does not do. It rates observable brand behavior. It does not measure whether consumers actually recognize your sound, because that requires putting the audio in front of consumers and asking. It produces a profile across the four dimensions and an overall signal, not a single number, because a brand can be strong on repetition and hopeless on ownership, and averaging those two together would hide the only finding that matters.
Why Smart Brands Get This Wrong
None of this is a competence problem. The teams running these brands are good at their jobs. They have built visual systems with real discipline.
The problem is that sound is the most abstract thing they are asked to manage.
You cannot see it or point at it. When someone says they want the music to feel "warm and punchy," that phrase may mean two completely different things to the two people in the room, and both of them will leave believing they agreed. Music briefs get written in adjectives, approved in adjectives, and delivered against adjectives. Then the result feels wrong, nobody can say why, and the fix is another round of adjectives.
Twenty years of working with artists who could not articulate what they wanted produces requests like wanting the bass to sound more yellow. That is the actual condition of the medium rather than a joke about clients. People feel sound precisely and describe it terribly.
The reason most brands have never made a decision about sound is that they have never had a vocabulary to make one in.
So the decision gets deferred, post by post, to whoever is closest to the file. Nobody concluded that sound did not matter. The conversation just kept ending somewhere nobody could act on.
This is also why the fix is a system rather than a song. A sonic logo gives a brand a fixed reference point that survives being described badly, because a three-second cue can be played rather than described. A brand anthem extends it, since building the longer piece out from the logo means every exposure to the anthem also reinforces the shorter asset. Written guidelines make the whole thing repeatable by people who were not in the room.
If the word that came to mind reading that was "jingle," the distinction is worth drawing carefully, and we have done it at length here.
What You Are Actually Building
Sound is processed through the brain's emotional centers faster than it is consciously identified. That is why a person can recognize a piece of music as belonging to a brand without being able to say how they know. What is being built are Memory Structures, the networks of association through which your brand exists in someone's mind, and what makes them fire is repetition of the same cue. We have written about the mechanism in detail in We Don't Have Earlids, which is the piece to read next if this section is the part you want to pull on.
Ownership and repetition are the same good, which is why this compounds instead of merely tidying things up.
In a 2020 meta-analysis, Ipsos evaluated 2,015 pieces of US video creative against branded attention, a measure combining ad recognition with correct unprompted brand attribution. Sonic brand cues were 8.53 times more likely to appear in high-performing creative than in low-performing creative, the strongest result of any asset type tested. Licensed music scored 1.20, near the bottom of the same ranking. Sonic brand cues appeared in 6% of the ads studied, while logos appeared in 91%.
Owned and borrowed audio are not variations on one approach. On this measure they sit at opposite ends of the table. The direction holds across a large sample, though the 8.53 figure rests on a small subset of ads and is better read as a strong signal than as a decimal.
Every impression built on a licensed track builds memory for the track rather than for you.
This is the shift from OpEx to CapEx, from a recurring operating cost to an asset the brand holds. A license is paid again for the next campaign, the next term, the next territory, and when it lapses the audio disappears and takes the association with it. An owned asset is something your brand keeps, and it appreciates every time your station plays it. We have made the full financial case for that distinction in a separate piece.
There is also a quieter cost to leaving the station unprogrammed. Whatever filled the vacuum arrived on someone else's terms, and those terms are narrower than they look. Music available inside a platform's library is licensed for use inside that platform. The moment the same content becomes a paid unit, a website hero, an event reel, or a broadcast cutdown, that coverage does not necessarily travel with it. It is worth knowing where your audio came from before you find out at scale. That is a question for your counsel, not for us, but it is one an acquirer will eventually ask.
None of this is an argument against trend audio. A station with a format still plays other people's records. What fails is range with nothing constant underneath it.
You own the station. The only open question is what plays on it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does my brand already have a sonic identity without knowing it?
Possibly, in raw form. Many brands have what we call a latent sonic asset, something that has developed organically and functions like a recognizable element without ever having been designed or secured. A recurring narrator's voice. A product sound. A track that keeps reappearing because someone likes it. These are real signals, and they are worth finding before you build anything new. The limitation is that an organically developed element is usually not owned and not documented, so it cannot be protected, extended, or transferred. Finding one is a good starting position. It is not a finished identity.
Can't we just pick one song and use it consistently?
Consistency is half of it, so this instinct is better than most. The missing half is ownership. A licensed track used consistently still expires, still gets licensed to someone else, and still means the recognition you build is attached to a piece of music you do not control. In the Ipsos ranking above, licensed music performed close to the bottom while owned sonic cues performed at the top, which is the gap between those two halves expressed as data. A sonic brand asset is something the brand holds outright. That is what makes repetition accumulate into something rather than rent something.
Do we need a sonic identity if we don't buy TV advertising?
This is the question the category has been slowest to update. The old logic held that sonic identity was for brands running broadcast, where a five-second audio cue had somewhere to live. Short-form video ended that. One brand in my audit set had published more than 1,500 posts on Instagram alone, alongside a standing live-streaming program and a TikTok following in the hundreds of thousands, with no owned audio anywhere in it. You do not need to buy a channel, because you are already operating one.
How long before a sonic identity starts working?
Recognition is built by repetition, so the honest answer is that it depends far more on deployment discipline than on elapsed time. A brand publishing daily with a consistent cue accumulates faster than one publishing monthly. What changes immediately is the internal decision-making: the moment guidelines exist, every new piece of content stops being a fresh argument and starts being a deposit. The compounding is gradual. The end of the guesswork is not.
Is a sonic identity only worth it for large brands?
The reverse, if anything. A category leader has decades of accumulated recognition to fall back on when a piece of communication fails to register. A challenger has no such buffer, so weak or undifferentiated work builds nothing at all, and in the worst case the impression gets filed under whichever brand already owns that territory in the buyer's mind. Distinctive Assets are how a smaller brand makes sure an impression files under its own name, and they contribute to Mental Availability, how readily a brand comes to mind when someone is ready to buy. Sound is available to own before it is famous, which makes it one of the few assets a growth-stage brand can claim while it is still cheap to claim.
Walter Audio is a sonic branding agency building owned, data-backed audio assets for CPG brands and growth capital portfolios. For definitions of the terms used here, see the Sonic Branding Glossary.
