Your event has a name and a look.

Does it have a sound?

If your event has a name, a logo and a colour palette, it should have a theme. Not a track somebody picked the week before, but a piece of music written for it that comes back every year the way the logo does.

There's a deck for every one of these. Twenty pages on the lockup, the gradient, the type, how the key art crops on a forty foot LED. A motion package. A stage design signed off six months out.

Then, somewhere near the back, a line that says music TBC.

A recurring brand event is a brand. It has a name, an audience that comes back, and content that outlives the room.

Everything visual gets commissioned. Audio is usually the last decision made, and the only one taken from a library.

Library music is licensed, not owned, and most catalogues are non-exclusive. The same cue can play at a competitor's event the week after yours.

Performance licences are the organiser's problem. Blanket cover runs $500 to $5,000 a year, per event $100 to $2,000, and the livestream needs separate sync rights.

Ipsos found creative using sonic brand cues was 8.53 times more likely to land in the top third for brand attention. Audio appeared in only 8% of the ads they studied.

Look at how these things are named. Genius World '26. Dreamforce. Ignite. Sapphire. The apostrophe and the year are doing something specific: they're telling you there'll be a '27.

That's the whole argument. A one-off gets music. A property that recurs, with an audience that returns and a hashtag people remember, is in the market for an identity.

Everything that makes sonic branding work is already true of it. Repetition over time. A consistent context. The same thing in the same moment, year after year, until they expect it.

And the show is not where it ends. The sizzle goes out in the run-up. The recap lands the week after. The general session sits on YouTube for four years, watched by people who were never in the room. Most of your audience experiences the event as video, long after the lights come up.

The name gets workshopped. The logo gets designed. The palette, the key art, the motion package, the stage build, the sizzle, all of it commissioned, briefed properly, signed off by people whose job it is. Then music, chosen late, from a library, usually by whoever is editing the video at the time. Nobody decided that. There's just no line in the budget for it, and no one in the room whose job it is to care. Which is why the audio ends up being the only part of a heavily art-directed brand experience that anyone could have bought.

Non-exclusive deals let a library place the same piece on several productions at once. That's the point of the model and it's why library music is affordable. It also means the track under your CEO's walk-on might already be under a competitor's product film, a regional bank's recruitment video and somebody's real estate reel. Nobody in the room will notice. That isn't the problem. The problem is what you were trying to buy. A theme becomes yours through repetition. The audience hears it on the show open, again under the transitions, again on the walk-on, and by the close they've tied a specific run of notes to a specific company. Do it again next year and it starts to mean something. Music that belongs to everyone can't do that, however good the track is.

In the US, performance rights sit with four organisations. ASCAP, founded 1914. BMI, 1939. SESAC, 1930. GMR, 2000. Different songs sit with different ones, so a compliant event usually needs cover across more than one. The organiser carries it. Not the house DJ, not the band, not your AV supplier. If music plays at your event, it's your licence. Private doesn't mean exempt. An invitation-only corporate event is still a public performance in law. The recording is a separate question. Your performance licence covers the room. It doesn't cover the livestream, the highlights cut, or the version sitting on YouTube for the next four years. That needs sync rights, and the recording almost always outlives the event by miles. Commissioning doesn't make licensing disappear. It makes it one conversation at the start, instead of three conversations with three rights holders after the fact.

Pull up the running order and be honest about where attention actually is. On a main stage it lands in four or five places: the show open, the walk-on, whatever gets revealed, and the close.

Ninety seconds for the show open. Twelve seconds for a walk-on that lands on the step rather than three paces after it. Stingers and transitions. Something suspended and quiet under the reveal. Full weight for the close.

This is the same job we do for broadcast. When we reimagined the Sky Sports Ryder Cup titles the brief wasn't a piece of music, it was a theme that had to survive being cut to length, stripped back under a voiceover and rebuilt at full weight for the open. The Premier League sonic identity works the same way, one musical core carrying the anthem, the sub brand variations and the short form cuwo.

An event is that problem compressed into three days. And then repeated next year, which is the part that makes it worth writing rather than licensing. The second edition costs you an arrangement, not a commission.

Commission the sound when you commission the key art, not after the video's cut. It's the same decision at the same point in the process, and the reason it usually happens late is that nobody moved it earlier.

Practically, music has to be written, then reviewed by people who are simultaneously signing off a stage design, then mixed to whatever your audio team is running on the day. We've written about how long a sonic branding project takes and how to brief a music and sound company. Both apply, with the schedule squeezed.

Should our annual event have its own sonic identity, or use the company's?

If the event has its own name and visual identity, it should have its own theme, built as an arrangement of the company's sonic identity where one exists. Same relationship the event logo has to the corporate logo.

What if we don't have a company sonic identity yet?

The event is a good place to start. It's a contained brief with a fixed deadline, and what comes out of it can be extended into a full sonic identity afterwards rather than thrown away.

Can we just play a Spotify playlist at our event?

No. Consumer streaming is licensed for personal use and explicitly excludes commercial and public performance. You need cover from the performing rights organisations regardless of how the audio reaches the speakers.

What does an event theme actually include?

Usually one theme plus arrangements: show open, walk-on and walk-off, transitions and stingers, a bed for the reveal, and a full version for the close. Delivered as stems and mixes at whatever specification your audio team needs.

Does it have to be rewritten every year?

No, and it shouldn't be. The theme returns and gets re-arranged for the new edition, the same way the key art changes while the logo stays put. That's most of the financial argument for writing one.

If your event has a name and a look and you want it to have a sound, speak to the team and let's get in the studio.