Audio logos, beds and the system around them
A sonic identity is a small kit, not a single jingle: an audio logo of a few seconds, a brand theme, music beds in several moods and tempos, and edits for 6, 15 and 30-second ads with clean endings. Deliver stems as well as mixes, so editors can drop the melody under dialogue or extend a bed without a new composition. Keep the motif recognisable across uses, with the same intervals and rhythm whether it is played on piano for a calm film or on synths for a launch. Markets can change instrumentation and arrangement, but the motif should survive, or the identity fragments.
Licence clarity and protection
Before using generated music commercially, read the terms: the brand needs rights for advertising and broadcast, in every territory and for as long as the identity lives, not a personal or limited-use licence. Ownership is a separate question. In the US, material generated without sufficient human authorship is not protected by copyright, so a composer's hand in the core motif makes it easier to defend. Trade mark law offers another route: the EUIPO has accepted sound marks filed as audio files since October 2017, and a distinctive audio logo can be registered in the EU, the UK and the US. File before the campaign, not after a copy appears.
Loudness norms
Loudness is regulated for broadcast and normalised almost everywhere else. European broadcasters work to EBU R 128: −23 LUFS integrated, with true peaks no higher than −1 dBTP. US television follows ATSC A/85 at −24 LKFS under the CALM Act, which requires ads to match the loudness of the programmes around them. Music streaming normalises playback, with Spotify's default at −14 LUFS, so an over-compressed master is simply turned down and sounds flatter. Master each delivery for its destination rather than one loud version for everything, and check the audio logo at each target, because a three-second sting is where loudness jumps are most noticeable.
Avoid soundalikes of famous tracks
Creative teams often cut a rough edit to a famous track and then ask for something like it. That brief is how brands end up in court. In the 2015 'Blurred Lines' case, a US jury found that the song infringed an older one even though, as a dissenting appeal judge later put it, the two differed in melody, harmony and rhythm; the verdict largely stood on appeal. Voices are protected too: in Midler v. Ford (1988) and Waits v. Frito-Lay (1992), US courts held that imitating a famous singer's distinctive voice in an ad was actionable. Never brief generation with an artist's name or a reference track, and have a musicologist check anything that sounds close.
Updated 25 September 2026