THE BRAND-BUILDING POWER OF SOUND, AND WHY IT’S NEGLECTED

Brands obsess over how they look, but too often leave how they sound as an afterthought. With music proven to drive serious brand value, why is it still getting turned down in the boardroom, asks Rodger Morley, Sonic Branding Partner at Epidemic Sound.

Ipsos’s ‘Power of You’, a meta-analysis of 2,015 American video advertisements, found that sonic brand cues – short, memorable sounds used to represent a brand’s identity – were 8.5 times more likely to appear in the top tier of ad performance compared to the bottom tier.

The same study found that such sonic cues accounted for only 8% of the brand assets that brands use in ads. In other words, the element with the highest yield in branded video is the one brands invest in least.

The root cause of this paradox is often misunderstood. Heads of marketing well know that distinctive brand assets build equity over time, so it’s not a lack of knowledge. And nobody running a brand needs convincing that sound carries. The reason is operational.

In HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing survey of more than 1,500 marketers, 83.5% said they’re expected to produce more content than before, with 35.7% saying they’re asked to produce much more content.

Meanwhile, the legacy music licensing model is rooted in an era of local television broadcasts and radio play. When an organization attempts to scale a unified audio strategy using this traditional system, they hit two immediate roadblocks.

The speed mismatch

While a digital campaign can be conceptualized, edited and distributed across social platforms in a matter of days, clearing a commercial track through traditional rights holders can take weeks of legal back-and-forth. Social media moves at the speed of culture; legacy licensing moves at the speed of contracts.

The fragmentation of rights

The traditional music ecosystem is built on boundaries. Rights are strictly divided by geography, media format and duration. A track cleared for a broadcast television spot in North America often requires a completely separate, costly renegotiation to be used on a European channel or an out-of-home display.

The resulting compromise

Faced with this bureaucratic maze, marketing and legal teams are forced into a defensive posture. Instead of asking, ‘what is the best, most recognizable sound to build our brand identity? ’ they are forced to ask, ‘what music can we clear by Friday without risking a lawsuit?'

So audio is reduced to a last-minute procurement task, often handled in silos by different regional agencies. The bottleneck is operational, so the fix is operational too.

Generative AI is another problem, not the fix

For many, the instinct in 2026 is to hand this global licensing headache directly to a generative AI model. It’s a tempting shortcut, but one that trades an administrative headache for a crisis of authenticity and latent copyright liability.

The risk comes from how these models are built. Most of them are trained on existing recordings, often with no assurance that those recordings were ever licensed, so a generated track can carry unresolved copyright claims that pass to the brand that publishes it.

The legal exposure is only part of the cost.

A recent consumer study by Luminate found that US audiences are increasingly uncomfortable with generative AI in music, with consumers nearly twice as likely to be disengaged by AI-generated audio as interested in it. Speed without provenance lowers brand value. Music made by a model trained on uncleared catalogs is another liability the brand discovers only when the takedown notice arrives, or a Reddit thread surfaces about where the music came from.

Operational AI: Scaling without the headcount

To enterprise marketing teams, the true value of artificial intelligence in 2026 is operational, not generative. To scale omnichannel production rapidly, organizations need a streamlined content supply chain where AI tools act as enterprise-grade infrastructure rather than just creative novelties.

Emerging tech is answering the industry call-to-action. For example, Epidemic Sound’s platform is built for this operational reality. Combining globally cleared music under a single license with workflow technology, it lets enterprise teams, and the agencies producing on their behalf, scale video output without scaling the legal, procurement and post-production work.

How AI is changing audio workflows

This is where the workflow fundamentally changes shape. For instance, using Epidemic Sound’s AI-powered Assistant, a team can search for artist-created music using conversational language against a creative brief, reaching the right track in minutes. The AI acts as a high-speed navigator through a massive catalog of over 55,000 tracks and 250,000 sound effects. And because the rights are owned outright, teams can confidently know that every file is cleared for global, omnichannel use.

Other tools mean that one track can be instantly customized, altering its structure, length, and mood, to fit a 15-second social cut, a 30-second pre-roll and a two-minute brand film. There’s no manual editing bottleneck or separate legal negotiation required for each format.

This changes what music can be inside a brand. It stops being a last-minute task handled in silos and becomes a planned, repeatable part of the content supply chain. Teams build a consistent sonic identity, reuse it across markets and manage it as the strategic asset the performance data says it is. The highest-yield element in branded video, finally managed like one.

Source: thedrum.com