By Mauro Colavecchi, Co-Founder of Synchromusic
For years, the conversation around AI in brand music swung between two extremes: excitement about speed, and fear of replacement. In 2026, that debate is over. The market has found its equilibrium, and it has a clear name: the hybrid model.
As LBB Online recently put it, the industry is entering the era of Modular Sonic Systems, where “the human spirit creates the core track, and the machine simply scales it.” Stephen Arnold Music’s State of Sonic 2026 report confirms it: AI is now a production assistant, not a composer. This isn’t a progressive concession. It’s the operational reality for anyone making music for global brands.
But inside this new equilibrium, something more interesting than a division of labour is emerging: a new category of perceived value.
The analogy brands understand: Made in Italy
When a consumer sees “Made in Italy” on a shoe, a bottle of wine or a sofa, a precise set of associations fires: craftsmanship, time invested, the human hand, tradition, a quality that doesn’t replicate at industrial scale.
That label doesn’t just describe an origin – it describes a method and implies a scale. And that’s exactly why it commands a premium.
The same process is starting to happen with music.
In a world where generating a track “in the style of cinematic indie pop” costs a few cents and thirty seconds, declaring that a piece was composed, played and recorded by real musicians becomes a statement of value, not a technical detail. This isn’t nostalgia marketing. It’s the same dynamic that makes a mechanical watch worth ten times a quartz one that keeps better time.
For brands investing in sonic identity, the question is no longer just “how does it sound?”. It’s: who do we want our brand to be in the eyes of our audience? A brand positioning itself as premium, authentic, detail-obsessed cannot afford to build its sonic identity entirely on synthetic output. That would be the equivalent of printing “handcrafted” on a mass-produced bag.
+Read more: "What Is a Sonic Identity and Why Every Brand Needs One"
What AI can’t do yet (and maybe never will)
There’s a second, more underrated layer. The hardest part of composing music for brands isn’t writing the notes. It’s everything that happens before.
A good brand track is born from a process that crosses several rooms: brand strategy, creative direction, marketing, product, sometimes legal. Each of these functions brings different constraints, sensitivities, ambitions and anxieties. The job of the composer – or of the music house – is to translate that tangle of often contradictory inputs into a musical direction that works inside the campaign, holds up over time, and doesn’t get killed in final approval.
This work of interpretive translation isn’t automatable, because it’s not just creative – it’s relational. It requires reading who’s talking, who actually matters in the room, where the real brief sits underneath the written one, which words to use with a VP of Marketing thinking in KPIs and which with a Creative Director thinking in mood. AI can accelerate the generation of variants once the direction is clear. But the phase in which the direction becomes clear is still, and will probably long remain, deeply human.
What this means in practice – for buyers and for makers
For CMOs and brand managers: it’s worth asking where on the declared “human-made vs AI-assisted” spectrum your sonic identity sits, and whether that position is coherent with the rest of your positioning. A premium brand using raw AI for its sonic identity is sending a signal it probably doesn’t want to send.
For music supervisors and creative directors: Transparency about the production process is becoming as relevant as the final result. Knowing who composed a track, with which tools, under what conditions, is entering selection conversations. Not as an ideological filter, but as useful context.
For those making music for brands: Declaring the human contribution isn’t a defence against AI. It’s a category assertion. Exactly like an Italian fashion house doesn’t claim “Made in Italy” to attack Chinese manufacturing, but to position itself in a different segment entirely.
The Synchromusic perspective
At Synchromusic we work with brands like BMW, LEGO, Disney+, HBO, Google and Samsung.
In each of these projects, the most decisive part of our work happened in the first week — before a single instrument was played: understanding what the brand actually wanted to say, and translating it into a musical direction.
From there, the quality of the instruments, the experience of the musicians, the precision of the mix, all matter enormously. But the value starts long before the first note.
AI will be increasingly part of our workflows, and that’s fine. But what we sell is still, and remains, human work done well. It’s our version of Made in Italy.
+Read more: "AI Stole My Client’s Song — Then Its Version Went Viral."
Mauro Colavecchi is co-founder of Synchromusic, a boutique music house based in London with presence in Los Angeles and Rome, producing original music and sonic identity for brands including BMW, LEGO, Disney+, HBO, Google and Samsung.
