Storytel is a Swedish audiobook and ebook publishing company founded in 2003. The company offers a subscription-based service in which customers can listen to audiobooks and read ebooks on their mobile phones. Storytel's aesthetic profile was refreshed in 2019 and a new tone in the brand's expression was established. Because music branding is such a valuable service, it was an obvious next step in the branding process. A major problem awaited: how could Storytel design an audio branding universe that would express the business and its service while also working globally, given the diversity of cultures, languages, and music? Lexter (now Efterklang) returned to the heart of the matter: the stories.
Humans have been telling stories for thousands of years. People are linked by stories across generations and cultures. And, while written stories have existed for a long time, oral stories have existed far longer. Efterklang started listening to the stories and voices in Storytel's large audiobook library, and noticed something else among all the amazing stories. To their ears, the voices were like music.
Efterklang began collecting and composing musical building blocks based on the narrator's voices and stories found in Storytel's vast audiobook archive. They intended to represent these nuances using the building blocks, just like Storytel has a warm, playful, and inviting brand identity among many other attributes. They could make synthetic musical instruments out of voices by stacking and processing them in various ways. Warm synth pads and whistling were made by extending, adjusting, and filtering the voices. The result produced friendly, lovely choirs by granularizing the vocals. A "dooh-like" choir sound was developed that could play whimsical tunes by layering individual stories together.
They began to construct the sound of the brand -the Storytel audio universe– with nothing but the recorded voices of Storytel's audiobook narrators. A soundscape of sound effects, instruments, one-of-a-kind noises, and logos based solely on voices, linking people from many languages, cultures, and eras around the world. All of this was put into a digital audio branding platform, complete with all of the unique sounds and logos, as well as special synthesizer patches, so Storytel could make fresh audio branded music anytime they needed it. The audio universe is a versatile brand building tool that may be used in a variety of marketing platforms. The Storytel audio universe debuted in April 2020 and has already been used in a number of commercials and audiobooks, ensuring that a uniform audio brand is presented and conveyed all over the world.