When B(r)ands Find Their Sound
How sound becomes the creative advantage brands have ignored for a century.
When B(r)ands Find Their Sound
Music is the sense brands never learned to use. Sound carries memory, emotion, and identity in a way visuals never could, and the tools that once blocked access have finally fallen away. When the cost of musical exploration drops, brands gain a new palette that can shape feeling, story, and worldbuilding. The ones that lean into sound will feel alive while everyone else stays flat.
The Sense We Forgot
Music is how humans decorate time. The legend Basquiat said that.
The summer you turned sixteen has a soundtrack. The night you drove too fast on a wet road has a song stitched to it. A wedding. The breakup. Saturday cartoons as a kid. The song you listened to on repeat while unpacking your first solo apartment. You remember exactly what was playing.
Sound is where memory lives.
Neurologically, music reaches the emotional and memory centers of the brain faster than images or words, which is why familiar songs can trigger such rich, involuntary recall. Studies on music and long term memory show that emotionally charged pieces are remembered significantly better than neutral ones, and that positive valence strengthens recognition over time.
Brands have spent a century trying to own identity through visuals alone. Logos, color, typography, composition, photography, motion. A whole industry tuned to the eye.
And still, every brand on earth would trade their entire visual system for a four bar intro that hits like Led Zeppelin, Michael Jackson, Taylor Swift, or Lil Wayne. Not to imitate them. To access that gravity. The way a single riff can make strangers feel like they share a history.
But they could not get there. Too expensive. Too slow. Too tangled in rights and revisions and legal ping pong. So most brands settled for silence. Or worse, generic filler that takes up space without saying a thing.
This was never a failure of imagination. It was a failure of access.
The Door That Stayed Locked
Music has always been our most powerful emotional technology. It has also been one of the hardest to touch.
To produce one original track the traditional way, you needed all of it. Songwriting, composition, production, session players, studio time, engineers, mixing, mastering. Then the paperwork. Publishers, labels, sync licensing, rights clearances that could drag on for weeks while the campaign deadline kept walking closer.
For most brands, that is not a creative process. That is a warning label.
A single well-known song in a national campaign can easily cost in the tens or hundreds of thousands once you fold in both sync and master fees, especially when multiple rights holders have to be negotiated with one by one. The time cost stacks on top. Legal teams, approvals, revisions. All while the media clock is ticking.
So they compromised. Royalty-free libraries. B-tier licensing. Safe loops designed to avoid complaints instead of earn attention. Audio that sits behind the visuals, wallpapering the moment instead of shaping it.
The problem was never desire. Founders want their brands to feel alive. Filmmakers want scores that make their frames feel inevitable. Creative directors know exactly what it feels like when sound lands.
The problem was the door.
The Door Flung Wide Open
I am not a producer. I have no formal training. I cannot engineer a session or sit behind a mixing board and pretend I know what any of the knobs do. I only learned how to tune my guitar properly a few weeks ago.
But I grew up listening. Youngest of four. I did not pick the songs in the car on the way to baseball. My Pops and my siblings did. My taste arrived later, somewhere between moody teenage years and the feeling of putting headphones on in a dark room just to disappear for a while.
Decades of knowing what a song should feel like. When a bridge earns its arrival. When a lyric makes you look out the window a little longer. When a beat makes you lean forward instead of drift away.
And recently, I made music.
Idea to lyrics to finished track to full music video in five days.
No studio. No mixer. No engineer. No band. No budget.
Just intent. Just taste. Just a willingness to try.
Platforms like Suno, combined with language models that can interpret detailed creative direction, have dropped the marginal cost of musical experimentation close to zero for anyone who knows how to describe the feeling they want. Research from Deloitte Digital suggests that generative tools in marketing can cut content production time and cost dramatically while expanding output volume.
The art did not get replaced. The barriers got removed. The thing I spent my whole life loving became something I could finally participate in.
That shift is not about me. It is about a structural change in how music gets made. When the cost of curiosity drops close to zero, the map of who gets to play changes forever.
What This Means For Brands & Creators
If someone with no technical skill can make music that feels intentional, what happens when brands bring that same energy into their creative system?
The palette expands. Genres become tools the same way fonts and color palettes already are.
An older audience might connect with a sound that echoes Chuck Berry or James Brown. Rhythm, groove, swagger, the feeling of something with roots.
An artistic or cinematic brand might live closer to Jeff Buckley or The Cranberries. Atmospheric, haunting, beautiful in a way that feels a little cracked open.
A streetwear label might move with J Cole or ASAP Rocky in its bones. Confident, layered, cool without trying too hard.
A youth driven brand might feel like Tate McRae or Sabrina Carpenter. Bright, self aware, emotionally fluent in the language their audience already speaks.
Each of these is more than a playlist choice. Genre carries cultural code. Research in sonic branding shows that short musical motifs and styles can operate like auditory logos, instantly signaling distinct brand meanings and even influencing willingness to pay.
And that is only full songs.
Now slice it smaller.
Anthems for product drops. Character themes for spokespeople or animated characters. Sound cues that announce a moment before a single word appears. Mini scores for short films and launch trailers. Seasonal soundtracks for campaigns. Product moments that always arrive with the same tiny melody. In store loops that evolve by hour. Sonic signatures that hit in two seconds but feel unmistakable. Animated musical shorts. Short form vibes for social that make your world feel cohesive.
There is already a deep body of work on how in store music nudges behavior. Think about bars or fine dining. Studies have shown that classical music can quietly push diners toward higher ticket items, and that matching national music to wine selection shifts which bottles people choose without them realizing it.
Most brands are still using that power to sell more Merlot.
They could be using it to build worlds.
Picture someone walking into your shop, nodding along to the overhead music like everyone does when the right song is playing. Then they pause. They walk up and ask, “Are you playing music that is literally telling your brand story? Did I just hear the cross streets outside in the lyrics?”
That is not a gimmick. That is a memory waiting to be born.
This is what happens when the cost of exploration drops. Trying becomes easier than explaining why you cannot.
The brands that experiment will find their sound. The ones that wait will keep filling space with noise.
The Line Worth Drawing
There is a distinction worth stating clearly.
Music generated with machines is not the same thing as human performance. It probably never will be. The texture of lived experience, the way a real voice cracks on the word it needed to, that remains human.
But most brands were not buying human performance anyway. They were buying filler. Tracks chosen because they were cheap and safe, not because they carried meaning.
Using new tools to create a sonic identity is not about pretending you made the next great record. It is about extending the essence of your idea into the sense of sound. Turning your brand into something people can feel with their ears, not only with their eyes.
The emerging ethic around generative music is simple. Use machines for execution and speed. Guard human intent and narrative as the part that actually means something. Industry conversations around AI music are already pushing toward transparency, ethical training data, and clear attribution for who did what so it will only get more important to be honest about how you work.
My personal rule is simple.
If the words matter (they do), write them yourself.
If the intent matters, be honest about it.
Do not pretend the source is something it is not.
You already know your brand better than any model. You know the story. You know the feeling. You know who you serve.
Think of the tools as a very fast band that never gets tired. Your job is to be the conductor, not the ghost writer.
The Sense We Finally Get To Use Again
This is not a story about technology. It is a story about senses.
Brands have spent a century perfecting what we see. Color systems, type scales, grid layouts, motion design. Visual language built with almost obsessive care.
Now they can finally refine what we hear.
Sonic branding is still wildly underused. One recent analysis found that only a small fraction of brand assets use distinctive sound cues at all, even though those that do see clear lifts in recall and purchase intent. Other work on sonic branding shows that well designed audio identities can be several times more effective at driving ad recall than visuals alone.
Music becomes another way ideas are consumed. Another pathway into emotion. Another layer of identity. Another way to make a story feel alive before the audience even knows why they care.
The cost of musical expression has dropped close to zero. The only requirements now are curiosity, the willingness to try, the humility to refine, and the taste to know when something lands.
The brands that use sound will feel alive. The ones that avoid it will feel flat.
This was never about machines. It was always about the human sense we forgot to design for.
Sight got a century head start. Sound is ready to catch up.
You'll hear it coming.
