Every business that answers a phone puts people on hold, and most have never listened to what those callers hear. Usually it is dead silence, which makes people think they have been cut off and hang up; a repeating beep; or a radio station picked up off a tuner in the back office, complete with someone else’s advertising.
The radio is the expensive one. Broadcast radio and consumer streaming services are licensed for personal listening. Playing either down a phone line to a caller is a commercial performance you do not hold the rights for. Businesses run this setup for years without realizing, because the phone system was configured once by whoever installed it.
What On-Hold Audio Does
A caller on hold is already listening and cannot do anything else. They found you, called, and chose to wait.
That time can answer questions your staff would otherwise field live:
- Opening hours, and which departments keep different ones
- Where to park, and which entrance to use
- Services the caller may not know you offer
- The current promotion, and how long it runs
- Whether they can do this online instead of holding
What We Produce
On-hold audio is a program, not a single file. It uses the same voice talent and the same scheduling as our overhead messaging service.
- Branded greeting — the first thing a caller hears after the transfer, in a voice that matches the rest of your business
- Licensed music — properly licensed for this use, so there is no exposure and no third-party advertising
- Spoken messages, spaced out — far enough apart that a caller is not hearing the same message repeatedly
- Seasonal and promotional updates — swapped out when the promotion changes, not months later
- Department-specific programs — a service department and a sales department do not need the same script
The music is licensed through the same arrangement as our background music service. One licensing arrangement covers the building and the phone line.
The Format Question
This is where most on-hold projects stall. Phone systems are particular. A hosted VoIP platform, an on-premise PBX, and an older analog system with a physical on-hold player all want different things — file format, sample rate, bit depth, mono versus stereo, sometimes a specific loudness target.
Tell us what you run and we produce the audio in the format that system accepts, ready to load. If you are not sure what you run, your phone provider or IT contact will know.
Where the Phone Is a Primary Channel
On-hold audio matters most where the phone is how customers reach you.
- Auto dealerships — service scheduling runs on the phone, and a caller holding for a service advisor is exactly who should hear about maintenance intervals and current service offers
- Dental and medical practices — appointment booking, recalls and insurance questions all arrive by phone, and the hold time is the right place to answer the ones the front desk repeats every day
- Salons and spas — bookings, package pricing and gift cards, for a caller who is deciding what to book while they hold
- Restaurants — reservations, private events and catering inquiries, plus opening hours during the seasons when they change
What the Research Says About Waiting
The evidence on hold audio is thinner than the evidence on background music, and it is mixed.
The most directly relevant study put real members of the public on hold after they called a number from a newspaper advertisement. Reported in the British Journal of Psychology, it found that callers stayed on the line longer when the audio was something they liked and that fit their expectations of the organization they had called.
Human-factors researchers studying call-center hold queues found two practical things: letting callers choose the type of hold music raised their satisfaction with the wait, and a longer, more informative hold announcement produced more accurate estimates of how long they had waited, while a short announcement left callers significantly overestimating it.
A controlled study in Environment and Behavior found that people waited the shortest time in silence and longer whenever music was playing — but the complexity of the music made no difference, so this is not evidence that a particular playlist performs better. And a Journal of Business Research study found that how much people liked the music shaped both their mood and their sense of how long they had waited, yet only mood predicted how they rated the experience overall. Liking the audio mattered. Feeling that time went quickly did not.
There is one nearby result from a different setting: in a physical waiting room, not on a phone line, a field experiment with 117 patients found that instrumental background music significantly reduced anxiety — and that layering an ambient scent on top of it canceled the effect. We include it because the direction is consistent. A waiting room is not a phone queue.
None of this supports a figure for reduced call abandonment, and we will not quote you one. It supports the part you control: audio the caller does not mind, and an announcement that tells them something.
Writing It So People Listen
Keep the messages short and the music underneath continuous, so the transitions do not jolt. A caller who has been holding for two minutes should not have heard the same forty-second loop three times.
We write the script with you, record it, mix it over the music, and hand it over in the right format. When the promotion changes, we produce the replacement.
Why Magnolias Media
We have been supplying commercial audio since 2003. On-hold audio uses the same voice talent, the same scheduling and the same licensing coverage as the rest of what we do.
To hear what your callers currently hear, put yourself on hold from an outside line and listen to the whole loop. Tell us what you found and we will fix it.