Music Is the Most Underestimated Asset in Brand Building. That’s the Inconvenient Truth

For almost 20 years I’ve watched brands obsess over what they look like, and almost completely ignore what they sound like. We built platforms, worlds, identities, tone-of-voice manuals thicker than most novels. We optimised colour palettes for every touchpoint, rewired logos to work on a smartwatch, ran social-first, mobile-first, creator-first, whatever-first campaigns. We A/B tested headlines for performance down to the comma.

And then we slapped whatever music 'felt right' on top at the end of production.
That era is ending. Fast.

I say this as someone who’s spent almost two decades inside brand work – as a creative, a producer, and now VP growth and strategy at Supreme Music, a music agency that lives and dies by how sound moves people. I’ve seen both sides. I’ve pitched the film. I’ve sat in edit rooms at 2:13 in the morning convincing a client why that needle drop matters. And now I sit in rooms where CMOs quietly admit they have no idea what their brand sounds like.

We talk about distinctiveness all day. Then we leave one of the most distinctive tools on the table.

Let’s talk about why that’s no longer acceptable.

The last 20 years: brands went from storytelling to systems

The early 2000s were still about 'the big ad.' TVC first. Mood film first. The brand was, functionally, the campaign.

Then fragmentation hit.

Social. Mobile. Retail media. Voice. Influencers. CX. UI. UX. CRM. AR. Events. TikTok. In-store radio. Post-purchase emails. Automated chat scripts pretending to be human at three a.m.

Brand stopped being a 60-second film and became an ecosystem.

That shift forced discipline. We built brand platforms, playbooks, asset libraries. We invented sonic logos (a short, ownable sound mark) and audio guidelines but treated them like 'nice to have,' not 'core infrastructure.'

What happened visually in those 20 years is obvious: any serious brand today has a defined visual system. A type hierarchy. Motion rules. Colour logic. Iconography. Product UI language. Social templates. OOH templates. Internal decks that dictate how internal decks should look.

Try replacing a brand’s colours and logo and you’ll get legal on the phone.

Now try replacing the music. Almost no one blinks.

This is the gap.

Visuals are now crowded. Sound is not.

On social feeds in 2025, mute is default. That’s what people say.

But scroll culture is lying to you!

Playback happens. People wear headphones. They listen while they cook, drive, run, work. They live in audio. They consume podcasts, playlists, audiobooks, shortform video with voiceover, ASMR, game streams, branded TikTok sounds used in 43,000 fan edits. The screen can be in your pocket. The brand can still be in your head.

That matters.

Because once the eyes are gone, sound is the only brand signal left.

Ask yourself: if your logo disappears, can someone still tell it’s you?

If the answer is no, you don’t have a real identity. You just have assets.

Music is not decoration. Music is memory engineering.

We know this from research, from psychology, from basic human experience.

A melody can trigger recall in under a second. A timbre (tone color – the “texture” of a sound) can signal mood before a single frame lands. A rhythmic pattern can make something feel like “our world,” even if you’ve never heard that exact track before.

That’s branding.

Branding isn’t “does it sound cool.”

Branding is “does it sound like us, recognisably, again and again, in every channel, without people needing to read a caption?”

When you get this right, you buy recall for free.

When you get this wrong, you pay for it forever.

The cost problem

Let’s be honest about why brands avoided doing this properly.

1. Music was often handled too late. By the time the editor calls the music house, the budget’s already burned.

2. Stakeholders are emotional about music. Everyone 'has a feeling.' Feelings are not a strategy.

3. Legal and rights are messy. People hate dealing with buyouts, performance rights, talent unions, stems, cutdowns, adaptive mixes. So they avoid it until finale panic.

4. No benchmarks. Everyone can see the brandbook red vs the competitor red. Almost nobody has a dashboard for “this is what our brand sounds like versus the market, and here’s the lift on recognition across touchpoints.”

So music stayed subjective. And subjective = negotiable. And negotiable = forgettable.

This is where the future breaks from the past.

The future: audio is infrastructure

The next phase of brand building is not 'make me a jingle.'

It’s architecture.

We’re moving from campaign music to brand sound systems.

That’s what I work on now with Supreme Music. And I’m biased, obviously, but I'm also tired of watching brands pour millions into distinctiveness and then share a sonic identity with five other players in their category because “the brief said modern and uplifting.”

Here’s what a serious sound system actually means:

1. Strategic audio DNA. You define the core attributes of the brand in sound, the same way you define tone of voice in copy. Tempo ranges. Instrument families. Human vs synthetic. Warm vs cold. Sparse vs layered. Mature vs playful. Heritage vs future. This is not poetry. It’s decision-making.

2. Ownable core elements. The sonic logo. The mnemonic (a short musical trigger – think Intel-level, but yours). The textural bed. The percussive identity. The voice profile. Not one track. A kit.

3. Adaptive variations for every channel. Your hero film, fine. But also your app open sound. Your customer service hold music. Your podcast intro. Your retail playlist curation. Your social hooks. Your event walk-on. Your internal all-hands sting. Your car interface beep in model year 2027. This is where recall actually compounds.

4. Testing and validation. You don’t guess. You test routes. You measure distinctiveness, fit, appeal, attribution. You see how fast people can link “this sound” to “this brand” without a logo on screen. You track over time. You treat music like a first-class asset, not a vibe.

5. Scalable rights and production model. You own what matters. You don’t end up re-licensing your own identity from some library in 18 months because usage expanded to “global digital including but not limited to emerging platforms.”

That’s not “can you compose us something nice.”

That’s brand building!

Why this suddenly matters more than ever

Interfaces are going ambient

We are moving into a world of screens you don’t look at. Voice assistants. In-car voice. Mixed reality. Background agents. Notifications via audio cue. Micro-UX sounds (the tiny sound a product makes to confirm an action). You’re not always reading. You’re often just hearing.

Translation: your brand will speak before it’s seen.

AI kills generic fast

Anyone can now generate something that sounds 'cinematic,' 'hopeful,' 'playful tech,' 'confident luxury.' That used to feel premium. Now it’s drag-and-drop.

The only defence is identity. Not quality. Identity.

Quality is now cheap. Distinctiveness is the moat.

If your sound could belong to any brand in your category, congratulations, it soon will.

The emotional layer nobody likes talking about

People don’t build relationships with platforms. They build relationships with presence.
Presence is voice. Presence is tone. Presence is rhythm.

Sound speaks to the nervous system directly. It bypasses rational language. It codes safety, tension, confidence, intimacy. That’s why music choice can make a brand feel human or corporate in a single bar.

In a low-trust world, that matters.

If your brand wants to be trusted, it can’t just show up everywhere. It has to feel consistent everywhere.

Consistency is not sameness. Consistency is recognisability.

This is what music, done right, delivers at scale.

My prediction

In the next five years, visually distinct won’t be enough. Everyone will look good. Everyone will move well.

But not everyone will sound like you.

And that’s the point.

Some background information:

Kat has studied cultural and communication science before she obtained also a Diploma in creative advertising. She is a published book author and certified neuro linguistic programmer with a passion for the unconsciousness.

Located in Berlin, Hamburg, Dusseldorf and New York, Supreme Music is one of the leading music productions, with three core offerings: Supreme Music, Supreme Sounds, Supreme ID providing music comp.