ON HOLD MUSIC FOR CALL CENTERS & BUSINESS

It is common for many big and small businesses to use Royalty-Free music and ringtones in their company’s telephone, switches or call centers.

Before showing you the best places to get on-hold music that your business or call center can use, let’s dive into the differences between the music licenses so you can get a better understanding of your actual needs:

What’s the main difference between copyrighted music and royalty-free music?

Well, the difference is in:

While, for example, in order to use a song by Madonna or Coldplay in a waiting tone any company has to get permission from the author or label and pay a certain amount of money -usually high- to the main P.R.O. (Performing Rights Organization), which is an agency that ensures songwriters and publishers are paid for the use of their music by collecting royalties on behalf of the rights owner.

Instead, to be able to use a Royalty-Free song you simply have to pay the very affordable price of a single license.

Therefore, the use of Royalty-Free tunes allows companies to save the costs of the annual fees and to also save the time to contact and negotiate with the copyrights holder or P.R.O. in their country,

Buy royalty-free ringback tones

If you want to acquire a royalty-free song to use as hold on tone on the phone of your business, we have several options available:

Once purchased the license and downloaded the song -or songs- you can install them yourself on the business phone or ask your telephone company to help you in the process.

But what type of license do I need?

The type of license you need to use for a switchboard is the so-called Music Broadcast (1 Million) in Audiojungle, at a cost of $19.

To do this, once you have registered on the page and chosen a song, click on the license type and choose the second one, as you just saw in the image.

Or, if you want a platform similar to Audiojungle, offering individual licenses for each song and sound effect, you can access Premium Beat.

Buy a Tailored On Hold Tone

If we have some budget, this is by far the best option.

Not only they will create for us just a melody to wait, but also nice on hold messages, out of hours messaging, call menu options and voicemail. They also take care of every part of the process for you, from creation to installation.

When adding a custom message to the background music, be aware to align them properly to target your customers, as explained in depth in this other article.

My company is a startup or is newly established and we have no budget for on hold tones

In that scenario, it is also possible to get free music without copyrights on websites like Free Music Archive or Incompetech.

The only problem?

Usually, these songs have a specific creative commons license which serves only for non-commercial use.

If they are available for commercial use, you will have to attribute its author, and that means to put his/her name somewhere and it will not be very professional from your side.

A viable alternative could then be to make your own original songs with any software or make your own cover of a song that has more than 90 years old, as by law they are no longer under copyright.

If you need more information about it, we recommend you to read our articles about music streaming for business and background music for waiting rooms.