When music becomes a brand

In 1994 Brian Eno got an odd request from Microsoft. A long list of adjectives (the sound had to be inspiring, universal, optimistic, emotional, futuristic, sentimental) and, at the bottom, a note: it had to last three and a quarter seconds.

Eno said he found it so funny that he took it seriously. He wrote 84 versions, and the one they picked became the Windows 95 startup sound. My favourite detail is one he added himself: he made it on a Mac.

That's what a sound logo is: a few seconds that have to say who you are and survive thousands of plays without wearing thin. It sounds easy. Try writing a musical phrase someone will hear every morning for ten years (and won't hate by month two).

Over in Cupertino, Jim Reekes had already faced the same problem. The Mac startup sound from the Quadra 700 onwards, in 1991, is his: a C major chord played on a Korg Wavestation, both hands stretched as wide as they'd go. Two years later he made another, fuller one, which Macs used for almost twenty years.

In 2012 that second chord became a registered trademark in the United States. The filed description is almost comically precise: an F sharp major chord, about 30 cents sharp. To protect a sound the way you protect a logo, you have to be able to describe it, and with a single chord that's no small thing.

So why does a chord, or three seconds of music, work like a name?

Because ears don't have eyelids. You look at a logo if you choose to; a sound reaches you anyway, often before you know where it's coming from. And the shorter it is, the fewer chances it has to bore you.

The Nokia Tune, maybe the most heard melody of the nineties, wasn't written by anyone in Finland. It's four bars of Francisco Tárrega's Gran Vals, a guitar piece from 1902. In 1993 a Nokia executive, Anssi Vanjoki, put it forward as a ringtone, and from 1994, with the Nokia 2110, it rang out of millions of pockets.

The 2017 version of this piece said Nokia had "bought the rights". It didn't need to: Tárrega died in 1909, and his waltz already belonged to everyone. The brand became Nokia's; the music stayed Tárrega's.

In 2003 McDonald's went the other way round. It started with a German agency, Heye & Partner, and a slogan, ich liebe es. The sung motif you know (that "ba da ba ba ba") was born in the studio, and the song with Justin Timberlake's voice was the launch. The song was forgotten fast. The five notes are still on air, twenty-three years later.

Then there's Netflix. Its "ta-dum" was designed in 2015 by Lon Bender, an Oscar-winning sound designer, after dozens of candidates were thrown out (one of them, reportedly, ended with a goat's bleat). It lasts a couple of seconds, and for a lot of people it's the sound that means "here we go".

When Netflix started taking its films into cinemas, those two seconds on a huge screen felt too short. In 2020 a long theatrical version came out, written by Hans Zimmer: sixteen seconds built around the same hit.

In Italy, for twenty years, advertising even had a time slot. From 1957 to 1977 there was Carosello, and its theme marked the moment television stopped for the ads. Less a brand than a ritual: afterwards, as the saying went, off to bed.

All these sounds could hardly be more different. A chord, a waltz, five syllables, a drum hit. One quality holds them together, and it's the hardest one to write: they make you remember them without ever asking you to.