AI and Sonic Branding

You’re looking for a sonic identity. You know your options: you could spend some money on a sonic branding company to create a collaborative, holistic sound for your brand, or you could save the cash and try your hand at doing it yourself with a generative AI tool.

You decide to go with AI. It’s cheap, it’s fast, and it works round the clock. You get to work, generating track after track in an instant. It’s remarkable, as though the heavens opened up and dropped a data-scraping angel into your lap. However, despite the polished, technically sound music this ministering spirit continues to spit out, you can’t ignore this nagging sensation that something about these compositions is a bit misaligned.

You’ve arrived at the crux of the AI-vs-human conversation. AI’s influence has permeated every industry imaginable, and talk of its potential impact, both positive and negative, has largely dominated the cultural zeitgeist. Sonic branding, functioning as a unique outpost for the intersection between technology and music, has the potential to use AI as a positive force of efficiency. The fundamental truth, however, is that sonic branding generated exclusively by AI falls short in many capacities, and presents a potential set of practical complications to the compositions themselves.

AI certainly has its place in sonic branding; it excels in quick turnarounds with little financial investment needed. A company could easily prompt a generative AI tool to deliver a technically proficient upbeat corporate track well suited to specific branding needs. However, AI lacks the emotional nuance unique to human composers needed to create work that is memorable, resonant, and energetically precise. In this context AI’s prospective benefit lies in its ability to assist in creative inspiration, offering a means to cut costs and improve efficiency for brands looking for faster turnaround or a more economical product. Fundamentally, however, creative inspiration is nothing more than conceptual without the input of human composers.
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This concept is not conjecture, it’s understood by industry giants themselves. According to Chad Cook, President of Creative and Marketing for Stephan Arnold Music:

“When you consider the additional elements to commercial-ready music such as performance, emotional timing, production quality, mixing and mastering, AI seems best positioned as a creative tool to inspire and speed up the ideation phase, as opposed to delivering the finished piece.” — Forbes

The case for human creativity transcends the scope of emotional nuance. The longevity of a sonic identity itself relies on enduring strategic collaboration between composers and brands. Brand alignment is achieved through conversation and lasting relationships between those who make the music and those who sell the product. This is most acutely evidenced by one of AI’s most overt shortfalls: its lack of cultural fluency.

For regional brands, such as those in the Gulf, it is fundamentally important to create sonic branding that references the music of the region and feels both contemporary and authentic. Generative AI tools can only create music based on the material it was trained on. At present, the libraries used to train AI are predominantly made up of Western music systems, as this is what commercially available training material happens to be made up of. As a result, AI tends to produce music that references a small sect of traditional regional instruments and music. Without a widespread and considered reference point, these tracks tend to come across as forced or superficial. For brands with substantial regional presence, this creates an unavoidable issue. Human composers that are familiar with the traditions of regional music, however, are capable of creating sonic work that incorporates the desired cultural sounds in a way that is subtle, present, and functional.

Generative AI’s training system presents another issue: copyright infringement and claims. At present, AI is at risk of producing music that closely resembles other tracks available in its training data. This could lead to various copyright issues, including infringement of third party copyright or potential lawsuits. In a study by McKinsey on The State of AI in 2025, they found that:

“Respondents from AI high performers, who say their organizations have deployed twice as many AI use cases as others have, are more likely than others to report negative consequences — particularly related to intellectual property infringement and regulatory compliance.” — McKinsey

Moreover, AI generated music is not protected by copyright in most nations. In the UK in particular:

“AI generated lyrics and compositions… with no human author or with insufficient human contribution in the work are not protected by copyright under UK law, as originality is tied to human authorship.” — PRS

Ultimately, you’re not all that surprised by these deficiencies. The throughline of every conversation in the AI-sphere is that no company is yet to codify the essence of human creativity. You’re traipsing in the middle ground, knowing that AI has the potential to work well in tandem with human composers in the sonic branding industry, that it can support studios as a tool for generating creative inspiration, but not in isolation. In the spirit of brand alignment, emotional nuance, and safety, humans are still an indispensable part of this industry.