Jeremy: In this episode, we sit down with Clay Bassford, founder of Bespoke Sound, a sonic identity studio that’s helping hotels and resorts craft how they’re heard, not just seen. We explore what sonic branding really is, Clay’s journey from musician to entrepreneur and how the future of hospitality will engage all five senses. Well, let’s go ahead and dive in.

Dustin: Clay, thank you for joining us on the podcast today.

Clay: Yeah, happy to be here, guys.

Dustin: Very cool. Yeah, I came across your company through the ILC network and it was just super fascinating that people are doing this specifically in the way that you’re doing it, and I know that it’ll be an interesting conversation for our guests. So excited to kind of dig into it and see what we can learn.

Clay: Yeah, me too. Let’s do it.

Dustin: Cool. Well, to start it off, just for anyone unfamiliar with the term sonic branding, can you define that and why is that something that we should care about?

Clay: Yeah, Sonic branding is a pretty broad concept, and that includes a lot of different kinds of work with audio, sound and music. It can be anything from what’s often called a Sonic logo, which would be the Intel Inside jingle, if you can recall that,

All the way to speaker design acoustic treatment and the physical space. And I’d say in between those two you have music curation, which is a lot of the work that we do. There can also be brand level work that helps communicate what a brand should sound like in different scenarios. We also do that kind of work, so it’s a broad spectrum of work. Sonic branding kind of helps most effectively communicate the work that we do in the fewest words, but it can vary quite a lot depending on business’s area of expertise, whether an agency is a bunch of composers writing jingles or scoring movies or could be like in our case, a bunch of DJs and musicians concepting and curating music to fit different physical spaces. So that’s how we think about it. And so I would say the reason businesses care about sonic branding and hotels and hospitality in particular is that we are a sensory based creatures.

We experience the world through vision, hearing, smell, touch, taste, and most of the time we’re focused on what we see, maybe what we feel. Whereas what we hear has an extremely immediate and emotional impact on our experience, yet it’s very often very rarely given attention to help shape that experience. And so if we want guests in a hospitality environment to have the experience we want them to have, then we need to be thinking about all of the different sensory components that make up that experience. And so music being a way we’ve communicated since the dawn of humankind, it’s a very effective tool for giving all sorts of experiential signals to your guests that can guide them towards certain activities, make them feel certain things, show them that they’re part of the tribe, they’re welcome, they’re encouraged to hang out and buy another drink or socialize with friends or another, let’s say like a wellness environment, relax and take a deep breath and let go of the stress of the day. So there’s all sorts of things that we can leverage music and sound to do in a hospitality space. And I think fortunately, more and more brands are starting to use that to differentiate their experiences in more impactful ways. So if you care about guest experience, then you really should be caring about the music and auditory part of that experience as well.

Jeremy: Yeah, that’s a great mindset for the sensory all five senses, so to speak. And I think

This is something Dustin and I do in a lot of the exercises we do with our clients at Longitude is kind of think through the sensory experiences, and oftentimes it kind of is a default to certain music or playlists or we help ’em kind of think through some of that more from a brand personality or tone of voice perspective with the music. But you mentioned it sounds like maybe even outside of music, there’s other types of sonic branding, whether my mind goes to nature sounds or some other aspects. Have you guys done or explored work with clients where it’s not even just music, it’s other types of sounds or ambience?

Clay: Yeah, for sure. I mean, the holistic approach to sonic branding must the entirety of the auditory experience. So most of the time we’re working with music, but it could also be working with natural sounds going beyond that. It could also be considering what environmental sounds are there is music or sound, let’s call it produce, sound, even the right choice for that environment. Sometimes silence is the right choice. Then thinking about how that selection of audio is perceived in the space, is there a lot of background noise? Is there a conversation happening nearby? Do you hear traffic? Do you hear wildlife nearby? All of those things are part of the sonic branding experience. Yeah, I would say some examples that come to mind are resorts that may be out in a much quieter part of the country, and so the music selection there or the sonic branding there is a little bit more, let’s call it like humble in volume, a little more reserved. We might weave in some natural sounds that are representative of the local fauna in the area, but oftentimes we might also just give guests peace and quiet, say for breakfast, they’re getting up, they’re having their coffee, they’re enjoying the landscape. It may not be appropriate to have music playing at that time. We want to ease them into the day. So what they hear and how they hear all of that in its totality goes into the sonic branding for a project.

Jeremy: I love it. That’s really cool. So kind of backing up a little bit, getting into Sonic branding and where you are now, and it seems like you’re even defining what that is as you build your agency and the work that you do. How did you get into Sonic branding to begin with? As I understand, you’re a musician first.

Clay: Yeah, that’s right. So I’m a musician, been making music since I was 13 years old, which is the vast majority of my life at this point, and always been a lifelong music nerd. I would hear music that I loved, I would listen to it over and over. I would look up that artist on the internet and find other artists. And so I’ve just spent a lot of my life being very curious about music. And so that sort of naturally led me to working with music in different capacities and stumbling into this line of work that I find myself in now, which is how brands express themselves through music. And I think having that musician’s perspective, at least in the work that we are doing is extremely important because we’re not only passionately connected to music, but we have that sort of honed ear for listening and for understanding pace and energy and being a little more innately connected with how music and sound can make someone feel. And then we’re able to take that and use that to help our clients find the right way to express themselves through whatever music we develop for the project.

Dustin: Yeah, that’s super important, and I think it is something that is a lot of times an afterthought in building a brand experience. And like you said, the visuals are typically on the forefront, but the power of music, the power of just the auditory experience is extremely important, like the long-term memories and how you are interacting with an experience. Totally. How have you been able to marry those together? Have you been able to think from the visual standpoint, the brand identity as well as the auditory side and how those can start to work together towards something?

Clay: Yeah, absolutely. One thing that came to mind a second ago that I think would be useful to share is an analogy around developing a visual identity and audio identity or sonic identity. And imagine if you were developing a new hotel property and you were coming up with a visual identity and you tried to illustrate that identity using Microsoft Paint, you’d be very limited by that platform and then step it up to the next level. You’re illustrating that identity, but you’re only able to use a template in Canva. It’ll look cool, but you’re not really telling your story, you’re telling an approximation of the story. Now think about if you were using InDesign to design your visual identity. It’s the same sort of concept with the work that we’re doing where a lot of our clients may be using or previous to working with us may be using Spotify and they’re just finding playlists they like on Spotify, and then they’re playing it in their space, or they’re using a commercial streaming platform where there are prepackaged playlists that are an approximation of their sound.

It’s in the ballpark, but it’s not their sound. And then the InDesign analogy would be working with us or another custom music curator and developing a sonic identity that’s made from scratch for that brand. I think most savvy hoteliers today intuitively understand the value of working with a creative agency to develop their visual identity from scratch. I think we’re now starting to get to the point where more and more hoteliers are understanding the value of working with sonic identity oriented creative agency to develop their sound from scratch too. So I think the processes and the end goals are one and the same. They’re just communicating it through different media. And then when it comes to the work that we do in practice, quite often, you’re right, we are coming in towards the end of a project, and so usually the visual identity is already established and music is the missing piece of the puzzle that ties everything together, which is great for us.

It’s awesome to be able to help bring this vision to life in a new capacity, but it means sort of reading between the lines of the other parts of the design and experience process that I’ve already been established and thinking about what sort of messaging are they communicating with this visual design? Does it feel modern and fresh and a little bit cheeky, or does it feel more reserved, more traditional, more classic? Looking for those kind of cues in the design can tell us a lot about what the sound should be, but ultimately we need to have as many conversations as possible with the client and ideally with the design team to just understand what the emotional objectives are with the experience that we’re creating for guests.

Jeremy: Yeah, you can tell a lot of thought goes into it. It’s not as simple as just putting together a Spotify playlist and push and play. And I think there’s a lot of similarities in how you guys approach and how we approach from the visual side is there’s a lot of really the foundation of the strategy and the thinking and the questions you’re asking in the discovery process lead to better outcomes. And you can tell that you guys put a lot of thought into that and it’s very valuable for hoteliers and owners. I think it’d be helpful. I’d like to hear more about just kind of a typical engagement that you have with a client from Discovery. Those early questions you’re asking to even some of the more practical things like with the launch and just setting up the technology behind it and the ongoing support and kind of what that full scope kind of looks like.

Clay: Yeah, so I would imagine that our initial discovery phase is probably pretty similar to what you guys do. So what we’ll do is we’ll get together with the new client, we’ll have all of the creative stakeholders involved in a conversation myself, our head of music, and we’ll just start asking questions. We’ll start at the highest level, why does this brand exist? What is the story behind it? What are you trying to tell people? And then start to break it down into different components. So what are the different aesthetic inspirations? Who are your guests, where they come from, what are their expectations? What activities do they experience on site? What kind of moods do you want them to feel throughout their stay? How long are they staying? What’s the relationship with the local community? Do you want to have it feel very rooted or have it feel very globally cosmopolitan?

So really looking at these different touch points between the brand, the space, the guest, the community, the activities, drilling down into what each of those are, and those start to give us the raw materials to understand what music we think might be appropriate for those contexts. Then we have the environmental component as well. By that I mean the different spaces on property, because most of our work is once we’ve come up with the Sonic brand part of the project, it’s the implementation of that brand into physical spaces that makes up most of our work. So that’s looking at lobbies, restaurants, spas, pools, bars, different physical spaces, primarily common spaces that you have on property, and understanding how the experience and activity differs in those spaces and at different times of day. So we’ll map that out. We will share our concepts with the clients along with sample playlist, with kind of like a guide saying this tracks one through five or the lobby in the morning and they have these characteristics.

Then we pick up the energy midday for track five through 10 representing lunch or midday period, and they have these characteristics. And so we’ll have a kind of back and forth with the client where we refine the concepts, use the sample playlist as the sort of backbone of the work that we do. Once we have that fully fine tuned, then we use that as the foundation for all of the music that we build out for the client. At that point, we will develop tons of playlists. Project can be as little as 30 hours of music, but typically we’re at like a hundred, 200, 300 hours of music across the property. So we’re doing multiple worth of music for each zone. All of the music is segmented by time of day. And then we will concurrent with that set up the client and the software we use so that they can be ready to roll as soon as the music is ready.

Then we send the client set up instructions, get them trained on our software. Music is streaming typically by a hardware player, but we can also stream through Sonos or Smart Speaker Systems or iOS or Android apps. And then we launch the music, maybe make some initial adjustments, and then we’re typically doing updates every month, so we’re adding new music, and then we take out the oldest music as well so that the sound is staying fresh, constantly evolving with the brand, but also staying consistent with the concept that we’ve developed. So that’s our general workflow. All of that music is licensed for commercial use, and then we have some kind of complimentary services around that. So we will for a lot of our clients develop Spotify showcase playlists for them that they can share with guests within a confirmation email or on QR code on site or rival departure playlists. We have private playlists that you can only get if you visit a certain part of a property to do cool things like that. We do some live music booking and planning. We do some vinyl sourcing for listening bars. We do music supervision for digital marketing, so kind of do some fun music, audio related projects around that initial sonic branding and background music. But that’s the core component of what we do is just trying to curate really great music that feels really on brand every song, keeping that fresh for guests and staff.

Dustin: Yeah, it’s fascinating. So you’ve been doing this a while now at this point, is there a project that you’re most proud of or that you had the most fun on?

Clay: That’s like saying picking your favorite kid. Fortunately, I only have one kid right now, so that’s easy to do on that side. But on the project side, I couldn’t really say

Dustin: What was your least favorite project?

Clay: I also shouldn’t say that.

I mean, I will say, I don’t mean this as a cop answer, but one of my favorite things about my job as a music lover is that I get exposed to so many different kinds of music. We work with DJs all over the world who are experts in all sorts, genres and eras of music. And so depending on a project, we have all sorts of different requirements of musical expertise. And so just kind of getting paid to be turned on to all sorts of new kinds of music is incredible. One project that comes to mind that I will shout out, I was just talking this morning with Fergus, our head of music about this project and how fun it is, is a hospitality company in Nairobi, Kenya that we work with called Tribe. They have two hotels, they have a upscale mall, some gyms, some spas, and we’re working with them now on a paddle court concept.

And so when we first started working together, Fergus, our head of music connected with a local music incubator that’s like a record store, record label, music production studio in Nairobi. And their mission is to kind lift up the music community and give people access to music making facilities, and they become a really important part of the local scene. And so when we started this project, we connected with them and asked them for guidance, what are the cool new artists that you guys are interested in, and who should we include in the playlist for this project? And they sent us tons of suggestions. And so that I think is representative of our best projects in that there’s a specific vibe need that a client has, and then we get to dig really deep and find cool music that makes that space unique, but also helps elevate the experience of that space to a level that’s just not comparable through any other methodology. So for me, that’s just the best kind of win-win.

Jeremy: Love it. Very cool. Yeah. I’m curious how you and your team and those that you work with sharpen your skills and stay. You mentioned a minute ago kind of just stay on top of music and new artists and how as someone who’s creating these sonic branding and just from a professional standpoint, how do you stay ahead of the curve and ahead of trends and just sharpen your skills on a daily basis?

Clay: We try to make sure to allocate time for listening in our weekly practice. And so I try to listen to new music or music that’s interesting, try to find things that would be surprising and listen to that on a regular basis. Just again, it’s a passion, so it’s very fun to do, but also keeps us on our toes. I think, and you guys could probably relate to this, as a creative agency, it’s really easy to get focused on the business side and growing the business, but the creativity is the thing that makes your business special. So being able to encourage that balance where everyone on the team is continuing to hone their creativity is super important. We have a vinyl record stipend for work trips, so if someone’s traveling for work, they’re allowed to go out and buy a record or two on the company as part of their research around the project.

So I think having little things like that built in as helpful. We have a tunes channel on our company Slack, and all of our curators will throw in songs in there that they’ve come across that they like. And every quarter or so we’ll take those songs and we’ll put them in our bespoke world Spotify playlist, which you can find on our Spotify profile if you’re curious. And then beyond that, twist My Arm. I’ll go out to a cool restaurant or go see some shows and see what’s going on and try to experience stuff in person. I think that’s the majority of what we do. I would say lastly, connecting with tuned in people like yourselves who are also aesthetically minded and asking what you’re up to, what you’re interested in seeing what you’re working on is a really helpful way for us to stay up to speed on trends and thinking about experiential design.

Dustin: I think that what you’re describing is much more thoughtful than a lot of people have given it in the past. So I think it’s really inspiring just the level of intentionality around this.

Clay: Appreciate that.

Dustin: Yeah, I think a lot of independence just doing their own Spotify duration. What advice would you give them just to try to help them level up or think a bit bigger about how they’re doing that?

Clay: Yeah. My very first piece of advice would be don’t play music in your business on Spotify or other publicly available or consumer grade streaming platforms. You need to license music for commercial use to play it in a business. And fines can easily be $25,000 or more per infraction. So it’s really not worthwhile to do that. There are all sorts of platforms out there today that are set up to license music for commercial use. If you’re using Spotify, you can use something like soundtrack your brand. I think they were initially invested in by Spotify, so there’s a very tight integration there. One we use a lot is called Sound Machine. All of these work pretty similarly. You can import a Spotify playlist and then have it set up for business use. That’s if you want to go the DIY route, that would be my very first piece of advice.

Otherwise, I would say to get better results, it will take a little bit more work, but if you can just block a little bit of time to do a creative exercise and think about, set some more intention for the use of music in this space so you can think about when do your guests seem like they’re really enjoying themselves most? What are the conditions that have led to that as a certain time of day? What’s the energy feel like? And then think about that, how that varies throughout the day. Then you can start to think about how the music should vary throughout the day. And then I would say another thing is to update music regularly. I would say the number one issue from a listening standpoint that businesses encounter that I’ve seen is that they’ve been using the same playlist for a couple years, and the staff knows every single song by heart.

It can lead to a real depletion and morale and just overall team enthusiasm. So updating playlists or just rotating out playlists. The final factor there is consistency. I would say the second most common issue is having playlists that are just all over the place because they’re songs that a manager loved or a bartender loved, or even the owner loved. And just because one person loves all of these songs doesn’t mean that they’re all appropriate for that space and that environment. So finding a balance between freshness and variety and consistency, it takes a little bit of work to get into it, but if you’re interested in music, just digging around and finding some playlists that resonate with you, spend 20 minutes looking around, you can look up record labels you like. You can look up radio stations you like. You can look up artists you like. All of those are likely to have playlists on Spotify or whatever your platform of choice is. Dig around, find those, mix ’em together, and you’ll be better than 75% of the people who are doing it themselves. So that would be my advice. If it all seems like way too much and you’d rather spend your time working on other projects that you’re supposed to be working on, chat with me, we’re happy to help. But otherwise, I’d say that’s the way to do it. Nice.

Jeremy: That’s great. Yeah, I mean, you can tell, like Dustin said earlier, the intentionality behind what you guys do. Obviously your agency and the work you’re doing is on the cutting edge of this sonic branding and just how it’s evolving and impacting the hospitality space. But I’d like to ask as we are closing here, just your thoughts on the future of music and sonic branding in the hospitality space, things that you’re excited about, whether it’s different technologies or different ways that you’re thinking creatively of how it can impact the space in different ways. Just any thoughts for the future that excite you and where you guys are headed?

Clay: Yeah. I think experience, guest experience, experiential design is congealing or deepening industry-wide, but at the fastest rate, from what I can tell in the kind of independent boutique lifestyle segment, what I mean by that is the market is getting more and more crowded, and it’s becoming more challenging to clearly differentiate a brand from competition. And in my mind, the most effective way to do that is by having a differentiated experience that guests can actually feel tangibly. And that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s only physical. It could be within the digital marketing part of the experience too, but I do think leaning deeper into making a very cohesive experience is one of the most powerful ways to do that. So we are excited to be a part of that movement. I would say related to that too, the hot topic of the last couple years, and I think we’ll be for a while as ai people are talking about how they can leverage AI to do this and do that, I have my own thoughts about music production with ai.

I don’t think it will lobe too much in the sonic branding background music part of the world for a while. But I think more importantly, from a guest centric point of view, taste is one of the most valuable things we can offer to create a differentiated, holistic, powerful experience for guests, both as a brand and as ourselves as creative agencies. Our discernment and our taste make all the difference in creating a impactful, authentic experience. And so when we’re working with actual DJs, actual musicians, and putting all of this intentionality behind the music and sound that we choose to work with, I really think that guests feel it at the end of the day. And those experiences that we’ve all had where we go to a space and the vibe is just locked in, and then we realize, oh, that song’s good. Oh, that song’s good. Oh, this glass of wine tastes a little bit better. That’s what we’re all striving for. And I think there’s no shortcut to intentionality and taste. You can either invest in it with your energy and enthusiasm or not, but that’s really where we’re leaning into is just trying to help our clients develop their taste and share their vision with their guests a little bit more directly.

Dustin: Yeah, I mean, that’s something that is going to be hard for computers to reproduce in the same way for a very long time. I agree. And yeah, just the human touch, especially in the hospitality industry, it’s just something that is going to be really hard to replace. So just super love what you’re doing, the mindset that you’re bringing, just the kind of fellow creative power of being brought to the hospitality industry. I think it’s really exciting and cool. And I know that we, we’ve overlapped on some projects where we’ve been able to do the visual, and then I heard later that you were able to do the sonic side, which I think is just really cool. So yeah, let’s do it together next time. Yeah, for sure. For sure. How can people find out more about you guys?

Clay: Yeah, we’ve just got a brand spanking, a new website, Bespoke Sound, B-E-S-P-O-K-E-S-O-U-N d.co. You can check us out there. Check us out on Spotify. If you search for Bespoke Sound. Those are the best places. We’re on all the social platforms, but I think our work is the best place to experience what we’re doing. So check us out there.

Dustin: Awesome. We will, and we’ll look forward to keeping in touch and watching what you guys do. It’s very inspiring.

Clay: Yeah, thank you guys. Always happy to chat and love talking about this stuff, so hope it’s interesting for your listeners.

Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. Thanks, Clay.

Clay: Thank you guys. Appreciate it.

Jeremy: I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of the Future Hospitality Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s topic and episode, please leave us a review. If you’d like to learn more about Longitude, you can visit longitudebranding.com to see our portfolio of design work, read our insights blog, and learn more about our team. You can also find us on Instagram and Facebook by searching for Longitude Branding.

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