Spend ten minutes with a media director, and you’ll get a precise calculation of share of voice, a tracker against share of market, and a forecast for the next four quarters. The math is rigorous. The reporting is weekly. It’s an adult conversation.
Spend ten minutes asking the same person about the music inside that media, and the rigour evaporates. The track was “a really nice find from the agency.” The brief said “optimistic, modern.” The creative director (CD) signed off because it “felt right in the room.” The next campaign will use a different track, from a different reference, briefed by a different team.
Same brand. Two budgets. Two discipline cultures. One treats share of voice (SOV) as a planning lever, while the other treats music and sound as a finishing touch. That gap quietly costs brands more than almost any other production decision they make.
What share of voice taught us, and what it didn’t
The framework most marketers work with today owes its bones to John Philip Jones in Harvard Business Review in 1990, followed by Les Binet and Peter Field’s analyses of the IPA Databank. The headline is well known: brands whose SOV exceeds their share of market (SOM) tend to grow, and the rate of growth is roughly proportional to the gap between the two. Industry shorthand puts it at around half a point of annual market share growth per ten points of positive excess share of voice (ESOV), with creative effectiveness as a multiplier.
Multiplying a brand’s ESOV (calculated as SOV – SOM) by 0.05 gives you its projected annual growth rate in the market.
That work changed how marketing budgets get defended in board meetings. Spend became defensible, and creative quality became a quantified efficiency lever.
Notice what’s still missing. The voice itself, the actual sound a brand makes when it shows up in a TikTok, a TV spot, or a podcast pre-roll, has never entered the same conversation. Share of voice has been treated as a media question, while the voice itself has been treated as a creative question. And music? The part of that voice that hits hardest emotionally? It’s been treated as a finishing question.
That’s a category error—and it’s expensive.
The macro case is already won
Look at how settled the audio argument has become at the channel level. Spotify’s 2026 Sound-On Era report puts numbers on what brand teams have suspected for a while. 92% of US consumers stop other online activities to stream audio. 87% silence videos on other platforms to listen instead. Consumers are 36% more likely to trust music or podcast ads than social media ads. LinkedIn’s Hilary Batsel reports 4 to 8 times ROI on incremental revenue from audio in their marketing mix modelling.
The medium doesn’t just capture attention; it earns trust and pays back. The case for audio investment, at the channel level, no longer needs to be made.
Which makes the next observation harder to dismiss: The medium has already been measured. And yet, still, the voice inside it—the music actually carrying the brand—is chosen on instinct.
Tammy Henault, former chief marketing officer (CMO) at the NBA, Paramount+, and the New York Times, puts the point in the same report: “Brands need to stop thinking about audio as a bolt-on, and start thinking about it as a foundational element to their plan.” If audio is foundational, the music inside it isn’t the wallpaper.
Buying share of voice at a markup
The reason ESOV correlates with growth is that consistent presence builds mental availability. The math assumes the brand on Monday’s spot is recognizably the same brand as Wednesday’s spot.
Visual identity is built to honor that assumption. Same logo, same palette, same typography. The recognition compounds.
Music, on the other hand, isn’t currently built to honor it. Across a typical brand’s annual output, you can find acoustic folk in one campaign, electronic textures in another, sweeping orchestral in a launch film, and library cues from three different production houses underneath the rest. Each track was sensible in isolation, but together, they don’t form any kind of sound. They form a portfolio of unrelated sounds attached to one logo.
So, while media spend buys impressions that land, the brand fingerprint inside those impressions (the part that makes the next ad feel like a continuation of the last) is mostly absent. The brand pays for excess share of voice and gets back a series of disconnected presences. The compounding factor that the whole framework depends on is leaking out through the speakers.
What “measurable” actually means in music
The pushback I usually hear is fair: Music isn’t visual identity—you can’t just grid it. Music is emotional, contextual, mood-driven. True. You also can’t grid color the way you can grid layout, but that hasn’t stopped brands from defining color palettes and measuring how consistently they show up.
Now, I’m not suggesting we reduce music to a formula. I’m arguing that music has measurable properties, and those properties can be tied to brand intent in a way that survives translation across teams, agencies, and markets.
And those properties aren’t some kind of mystery. You have tempo, key, harmonic palette, instrumentation, rhythmic feel, production register, genre adjacency. You can score emotional valence and arousal, for example, against models that have been around in music psychology for decades. The frameworks exist, but does anyone use them as part of their brand governance? And what happens when they do?
The shortest way to describe what changes is that music gets a DNA. A defined set of parameters, written in attributes rather than reference tracks, that says what this brand sounds like in operational terms. Some practitioners—myself included—call it mDNA.
The label matters less than what the approach unlocks. Four, in particular, are worth making explicit because they stay invisible until a brand tries to live without them.
It kills taste arbitration. The most expensive recurring meeting in brand music is the one where four people argue about which of four tracks “feels right.” With a parameter set in the room, the conversation moves from “I prefer this one” to “this one fits the brand definition, this one doesn’t, and here’s why.” It gets you faster decisions made in calmer rooms, with defensible choices.
It makes the brief portable. A reference track tells the next composer in the next market to copy something, which they can’t legally do and wouldn’t be on-brand if they could. A parameter set travels intact, in any language, and produces work that fits without being identical. That’s what lets a brand sound consistent across thirty markets without sounding like it’s repeating itself.
It makes music testable before the spend. Brands already do this for taglines, thumbnails, and cover images. But they’ve rarely done it for music because there hasn’t been a framework against which to score. Once a brand has its parameters, every candidate can be evaluated against the brand’s defined sound and the campaign’s objective. The most emotionally consequential choice in the production finally gets the same evidentiary standard as the others.
It makes drift visible. Most brands can’t answer the question “how on-brand has our music been over the last twelve months?” How could you when there’s no scoring system behind it? With one in place, however, some campaigns sit inside the brand’s sound, some at the edge, and some…completely off the map. Those outliers signal where your compounding effect is quietly leaking.
The point of an mDNA isn’t to make every track sound like every other track. It’s to set the boundary inside which originality is welcome and outside which the brand stops sounding like itself. Inside the boundary, composers, supervisors, and agencies do their best work. Outside it, the brand pays media money to feel like a stranger to its own audience.
The decision moment most brand teams skip
In a normal media planning conversation, no one would dream of making the spend decision without a target audience, reach goal, and measurement plan. In a normal music decision, the brief is descriptive (“uplifting, contemporary, with energy”), the selection is curatorial, and post-campaign attribution is, in most cases, simply absent.
This is a failing of the decision architecture, not the people involved. The job has been defined as “find a great track” rather than “make a defensible choice between alternatives that all fit the brand and serve the objective.” Those are entirely different prompts and entirely different jobs.
How do you solve that? With two implementation shifts.
The first is moving the music brief upstream. In most organizations, music gets briefed after the script is locked and, quite often, after a rough edit. By that point, the only conversation available is which track to license, not what role music should play in the campaign. Pulling the brief earlier, before the storyboard is final, lets music become a structural decision rather than a finishing touch.
The second is building a feedback loop. After each campaign, score the music that ran against the music that didn’t, against outcomes that matter (recall, attribution, attention, brand-linked memory). Over a year, those data points become a private benchmark. Over three, they become an asset.
A planning rule for sound
The asymmetry between how brands plan their voice and how brands plan their sound is no longer defensible. Frameworks, data, and measurement infrastructure all exist. What’s missing is the decision to treat sound as part of the voice rather than as decoration on top of it.
A brand with rigorous ESOV planning and casual music governance is asking its money to do something its system isn’t built to deliver.
This isn’t a creative argument. Composers, music supervisors, and creative directors are usually the most relieved when a brand finally writes down what it sounds like, because it ends years of arguing the same battle from scratch on every project. Which makes this both an operational argument and an economic one.
I believe music is the most emotionally efficient asset a brand has. But it’s also the most underbriefed, the most underaudited, and the most underleveraged. Closing those three gaps doesn’t require a new department. It requires applying the same standard to sound that the industry already applies to everything else the budget pays for.
That’s the work. Slow, structural, and worth more than another quarter of media weight at the same brand fingerprint cost.