The future of music branding

Forecasting and future casting have always been very active components of the branding industry, and designers enjoy speculating on the future of their own practice, based on what is happening in the world of technology or how new minds are approaching specific challenges. But trend forecasting and future prediction actually help us shape what we want next from the practice we are involved in. This is why it is important to always keep an eye on emerging technologies and innovative ideas, not to preclude anyone from the ability to think of the unthinkable. Innovation is always exciting, but I must admit that the domain of audio has some rare and exquisite new ideas lining up and ready to be used.

Here's six trends to be aware of moving forward with music branding 2.0:

1. Programmatic Advertising with AI Voices

Programmatic advertising is a form of digital marketing that uses algorithms to automate the buying and selling of advertising space. Advertisers can use programmatic advertising to target specific audiences with more precision than traditional advertising methods, and publishers can use it to maximize revenue from their ad space. Programmatic advertising is on the rise. Companies can access data from third-party providers and then tailor their offering based on the profile they can compile with available data. One of the future trends is targeting advertising and programmatic advertising. In the near future, this could become increasingly more widespread, thanks to technological evolution in the field of digital & synthetic voices. Here's a KOL sharing his thoughts on this: “Right now, to have personalized experiences in our industry would be very time-consuming, and I would be seeing something like this more in 8-10 years' time. We already have personalized experiences, but in order for us to have a great variety of voices, you need to have good synthetic voices. It is very stunning to see where we are right now with this technology, but I think we need more time to nail the whole voice thing. It is quite hard to fool us: humans are very, very sensitive to human voices and very good at recognizing if it's a real voice or not. In terms of music, it wouldn't be hard for an AI to pick the right music given a certain situation. It is also a matter of how much money the effort will cost and how efficient the personalized audio experience turns out to be. It will come in the future, but as long as humans are actually doing audio branding, there will not be a personalized audio branding experience because there would be way too much work.”

Another industry KOL thought that programmatic advertising was indeed going to be big in the future and began investing in it several years ago. His idea was:

2. The return of the jingle

It has been described as “the return of the jingle” but in a different form. More and more music branding agencies and brands are realizing that the connection that people have to voice is so much stronger than just listening to a melody. If you analyze this from a brand recall perspective, there is literally nothing else that can beat having vocals and a melodic hook together. That is why we remember nursery rhymes in our forties that we were singing when we were five years old. Two separate studies help corroborate the fact that recall is boosted by either saying the name of the brand in the audio logo and or adding a melody to it. The first report from Veritronic. Veritronic is a technology company that specializes in developing innovative solutions for businesses of all sizes. For them, technology should be used to simplify and streamline business processes, and their goal is to provide clients with the tools they need to succeed. Their services include web and mobile development, cloud computing, data analytics, and more. In their 2021 Audio Logo Index, they uncover the following: “It seems so intuitive at this point: put your brand name in your audio logo and it’s going to be easier for people to know that sound is you, which in turn creates brand affinity. Nine out of the top-10 audio logos in this index include the brand name. Audio logos that use the brand name score 29% higher overall.”¹

The second report comes from SoundOut, the world leader in strategic sonic branding and audio marketing testing. They specialize in helping organizations trigger the right emotional response from their customers by matching brand personality and attributes to music by providing the data and insight needed by clients to increase the certainty of achieving a strong ROI from their audio branding investments. In The SoundOut Index: The Sonic Effectiveness Matrix Effectiveness Edition they explain how an audio logo with melody and lyrics has better chances of being appealing, recalled and fosters propensity to buy.²

3. From Product Sound to Content Sound

Primarily happening in the technology sector. We find ourselves interacting with product sound every day (e.g. video call incoming sound, instant messaging app notification sound) and these sounds have an incredible scale and reach. They are, of course, distinctive brand assets that companies build over time. Companies have now realized how powerful these sounds are and are trying to deliver advertising content with these specific sounds embedded in them. As a consequence of this, the two distinct entities “brand as a product” and “brand as visual, advertising") are going to merge in the future. Product sounds will and already have become part of the advertising campaigns worldwide. Experience and Communication in brands will become even more intertwined and, in the future, sound will bridge the gap between these two.

4. User Generated Content Sonic Brand

Users (especially on short video sharing platforms) are starting to use sonic assets of brands in order to create memes and organic trends on the various platforms. We've seen so much content generated by users that use distinctive brand assets, especially on TikTok. With TikTok's confirmation as the fastest-growing social app, marketers looking to interact with their audience will be more interested in music. Every month, a billion individuals use the app — more than Google and Facebook combined, and almost three times the worldwide audience that Spotify attracts. TikTok has put sound and music at the center of its marketing strategy, and it's already paying off, both as a launchpad for new musicians and as a platform for marketers looking to engage with the TikTok generation.³

5. Functional Music

Functional music looks at how different frequencies, different sounds and music can positively affect various physiological and emotional responses in humans. Some experiments have been conducted with health care brands like Siemens Healthineers or Legal and General in the creation of music playlists that can help people relax, focus, sleep etc.

6. Conversational Interfaces

Conversational interfaces are becoming increasingly popular, as they offer a more humanized way to interact with consumers. However, many organizations have not yet caught up with expectations, and most use cases are anchored in delivering convenience. Consumers are ready to see higher levels of personalization, emotional connection, and value. Businesses and brands are actively creating sonic identities, with screenless purchasing via smart speakers expected to reach over $40 billion in 2022, up from $2 billion today in the United States and the United Kingdom. “Alexa is reported to have 50,000 skills (functionalities), be compatible with 20,000 connected devices, and is used by more than 3,500 brands. Google's voice interfaces support more than 30 languages and the company plans to roll out voice capability to 80 different countries. Microsoft and Amazon have announced a partnership between their voice assistants – Alexa and Cortana – to enable additional functionalities and greater reach for their customers”⁴ Speech shopping is expected to expand to $5 billion by 2022 in the UK, up from $2 billion today, with 16 percent of consumers utilizing voice to make a purchase, according to OC & C Strategy Consultants. Smart speaker ownership in the UK has now reached 29%, according to YouGov. As this technology becomes more ubiquitous, these gadgets provide the ideal platform for a company's audio branding and sound communications. “Over the next three years, 70% of consumers, on average, will replace their visits to the dealer, store, or bank with their voice assistants”⁵

Conversational interfaces will become increasingly more important and when they do, brands have to be ready in order to embrace that their presence also has to be heard.