With the pandemic raging into its third year, independent musical artists are still among the small business owners hit hardest; not only have live performances disappeared, streaming service algorithms are designed to hype artists with built in fan bases and higher play counts, putting up-and-coming self-employed musicians at a further disadvantage. By turning a decades-old, forever-overlooked audio space into a new-media platform, The On-Hold Music Show found an innovative way to get self-employed artists paid, and bring them a massive influx of new listeners.

Our company mission is that we are “100% dedicated to the success of small businesses”, so to ensure that we walk the walk, our in-house creative team is on a mission to reimagine every aspect of our company operations in order to directly support small businesses.

Something as banal and as easy-to-overlook as the music we use while our customers wait “on-hold” to speak with a support specialist, became the perfect opportunity to support self-employed musicians — one of over a thousand different types of small businesses that we count as customers — especially as these independent artists continued to be hit hard by loss of revenue, and inability to connect with and attract new listeners.

We created the world’s first On Hold Music Show; a live radio-style audio experience that played exclusively while our customers were waiting “on hold” to talk to a customer support specialist. Instead of paying a large corporation to license generic -- often annoying and repetitive -- commonly used “on-hold music”, we partnered with an independent music house to license tracks from real self-employed artists; getting them a massive payday and exposing their music to hundreds of thousands of new listeners while we were at it.

In this decades-old, universally-despised space, known for robotic repetition, we injected a welcome breath of humanity via original tracks and real voice overs from amazing independent artists. Not only did we give eardrums everywhere a much deserved break, we got to pay musicians for their original art and we turned our captive audience into real listeners for the musicians via follow up emails, Spotify callouts,

A lot of companies talk about helping small businesses, but our entire mission is to help entrepreneurs thrive. And since we don't have Google or Amazon’s checkbook, we have to get creative in how we can not only use our company resources to directly help small businesses, but to show them how committed we are to them.

We’ve done everything from switching our new hire merch vendor from a giant corporation like swag.com to a local boutique printer, to switching our in-office coffee bean sourcer to a small family-owned roaster.

When we realized how much money we were paying each month to a corporate music licensing company for generic on-hold “Muzak“ for our customer support line, we knew this was another opportunity to redirect money from a corporate entity, directly into the pockets of our small business owner customers.

We created the world’s first On Hold Music Show; a live-radio-style audio experience that played exclusively while our customers were waiting “on hold” during a customer support call. Instead of paying a large corporation to license generic -- often annoying and repetitive -- “on-hold music”, we partnered with an independent music house to license tracks from self-employed artists; getting them a massive payday and exposing their music to hundreds of thousands of new listeners.

We worked with each artist to record a short introduction about themselves, their song, and their inspiration as a musician; giving the audio experience a nostalgic radio show feel and a welcome breath of humanity in this otherwise incredibly robotic audio space. Our host of The On-Hold Music Show guided the listener from song to song, inviting listeners to find each artist, and keep listening after the call with tons of CTA’s scattered throughout the show.

The On Hold Music Show was implemented into our Zendesk call system in February 2022, exposing dozens of independent artists to our 300,000+ daily active users and getting each of them a much needed payday as we were able to pay them for their original songs. Throughout the show, we not only featured the full names of each artist, but included their Instagram/Spotify handles, and invited listeners to find the artists using music discovery apps like Shazam and even followed up with direct links to each musician’s library in our post-support call email.

The project was an instant success, and we were quickly forced to create a separate 1-800 number where customers could call back to be put directly on-hold and keep listening to our on-hold music.