To discover the anatomy of hold music we manually called over 70 customer service lines across the UK. This covered the following industries:

  • Retail/eCommerce
  • Utilities
  • Government departments
  • Banking
  • Entertainment
  • Food & Drink
  • Internet Providers
  • Mobile Phone Networks

From the hold music, we logged the song title and artist using the app Shazam, and whether the song contained any lyrics. Further research was then carried out, identifying the Genre through Shazam.

We logged the main instruments used via the track’s online information. Beats per minute were identified using SongBPM.com. We then used the mean and most averages to find our perfect recipe for hold music.

You can download the full report below:

Even with the rapid changes we’re seeing in technology, phone calls are still one of the most trusted customer service channels.

Even Gen Z continue to show a preference for phone calls (70% said they’d rather reach out to companies via the phone, according to McKinsey), so it doesn’t look like we’ll be hanging up the phone any time soon.

With contact centres dealing with more complicated and stressful customer experiences, we wanted to look at one of the first touchpoints in that journey…the hold music.

Hold music has often been a talking point, and consumers can find it fun, relaxing, intriguing or, indeed, incredibly stressful. We decided to delve into hold music, to uncover what different industries are using and what makes the perfect hold music.

This in-depth report analyses the hold music of 60 of the UK’s biggest most prominent businesses across several industries, breaking down the results and the impact hold music could be having on customers.