A Brief History of Hold Music, From Early Patents to the Soundtrack of Customer-Service Purgatory
Sixty years ago, Alfred A. Levy patented his “telephone hold program system.” Little did he know a teenager’s unearthed New Age practice tape would become its enduring anthem
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Millions of people know “Opus No. 1” without knowing its name. For generations of callers trapped on hold, listening to its endlessly looping melody as time ticks by, it has become the soundtrack to life’s eternal questions: What is this? How did I get here? Or simply, Why?
Understandably, then, Tim Carleton, its creator, has a complicated relationship with his creation. He first wrote the melody around age 10, then fleshed it out in 1989 on a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer he’d bought from Gordon’s Music & Sound in Fairfield, California, with money from his 16th birthday.
A teenager’s take on New Age music, drawing inspiration from Yanni, Kitaro and Art of Noise, the instrumental was never meant for public consumption.
“‘Opus No. 1’ was really just me figuring out how to record,” says Carleton, who retired after a career in information technology at a California bank. “There are sections that make me cringe because you can hear me making mistakes. It was just a practice song.”
After recording the piece on his four-track Tascam Portastudio, Carleton shelved the tape and moved on with his life. Until one day in the late 1990s, when the telephone rang.
Darrick Deel, Carleton’s childhood friend, had been there when he recorded the piece, and he had recently taken a job at Cisco, whose phone systems served businesses around the world. On a lark, he persuaded his old friend to submit “Opus No. 1” as the company’s default hold music, or “music on hold,” as it’s known in the telecommunications industry.
“It was supposed to be an Easter egg snuck onto a phone system,” Carleton recalls. “It’s a tape of a song that was sitting in dust.”
Instead, the forgotten demo escaped into the world. What began as an inside joke became one of the most ubiquitous pieces of modern music, calming countless callers across the planet. In a world where research has shown that people prefer electrical shocks over sitting alone with their thoughts, “Opus No. 1” offered a kind of corporate comfort, a form of accidental music therapy that softened the frustration of understaffed businesses and overloaded phone lines. But that was never Carleton’s intention.
“I have no idea why the frequencies work,” he says. “I don’t have a formula for putting out another one.”
Cisco initially used the music for free, and Carleton believes the company never would have adopted it otherwise.
“I’m on a ton of phone systems around the world on a loop,” says Carleton. “That’s a hell of an advertisement.”
Eventually, “Opus No. 1” became the only music supplied on Cisco’s phone systems. Customers could license their own royalty-free music, risk copyright infringement or simply stick with Carleton’s instrumental. Many chose the last option, embedding the tune so deeply in the collective unconscious that it even appeared in a Super Bowl commercial.
“I don’t know if it’s the most-played song recording on the planet,” he says. “But I think it’s up for discussion.”
Almost everyone has heard it—often unwillingly—without knowing where it came from. In that sense, the story of “Opus No. 1” is also the story of hold music itself.
But that story stretches back more than a century before Tim Carleton was born. To understand how a teenager’s dusty New Age practice tape became the soundtrack of customer-service purgatory, you first must grasp two essential ingredients of telephone hold music: music and waiting.
Long before callers heard “Opus No. 1” while waiting on hold, music was already traveling over telephone wires. And before there was music on telephones, there was music on telegraphs.
“The telephone emerged from research on harmonic telegraphy,” says Harold D. Wallace Jr., curator in the Division of Work and Industry at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “The goal was to send more data down a single telegraph line—what we’d now call increasing bandwidth. Researchers realized they could transmit different musical tones over the same line, with each tone activating a separate receiver at the other end. That concept became known as harmonic telegraphy.”
After learning of harmonic telegraphy, Alexander Graham Bell reasoned that if musical tones could travel over a wire, why not the human voice?
Following the telephone’s triumphant public debut at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Bell and his collaborator Thomas Watson demonstrated the invention by playing music over telephone lines. Musical notes, they found, were easier for audiences to hear and recognize than speech.
But what about the waiting?
In many ways, the history of the telephone is the history of waiting.
“In the earliest days, a switchboard operator would answer and ask the caller to hold while they reached their party,” says Claude Fischer, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940. “The caller would wait while the operator connected the call. Once the right person was on the line, the operator would come back and in so many words say, ‘You can speak now. I’ve connected the wires.’”
As telephone technology evolved, so did the rituals of waiting. Callers sat in silence or listened for the hisses, cracks and pops of an open line—small assurances that the connection remained intact. Operators periodically checked in to reassure callers that the connection was still active. Some businesses even placed radios beside unattended phones, letting local broadcasts fill the dead air while customers waited. The methods changed, but the waiting did not.
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In the 1930s, early office rotary phones known as key sets began incorporating dedicated hold buttons—notably, the 1931 Western Electric Models E4 and 205. The feature became increasingly common as the century progressed.
It was into this world of hold buttons, static hisses and endless waiting that Alfred Levy, credited as the father of hold music, made his entrance.
According to industry folklore, the phenomenon of hold music began with a wiring mishap. A radio station next door to Alfred Levy’s factory supposedly bled into his company’s telephone system after an exposed wire touched a metal girder, turning the building into a receiver that transmitted music to callers placed on hold. Levy, an entrepreneur, then capitalized on his happy accident.
Regardless of whether the story is apocryphal, what is certain is that Alfred Levy of 5 Manning Road in Glen Cove, New York, filed patent 3,246,082 for a “telephone hold program system” on March 26, 1962. Four years later, on April 12, 1966—60 years ago this year—the patent was granted.
The language of Levy’s patent touched on workaday observations: Listening to a “completely unresponsive instrument” was “tedious.” Too often, callers abandoned their calls, creating “annoyance and a waste of time and money.” His solution was to connect callers placed on hold to “program material”—music, for example—to “pacify” them, “while away the idle time” and reassure them they had not been disconnected or forgotten.
It worked. In late 1968, Levy sold his patent, garnering newspaper coverage across the country.
“Allstate Investment Corp. has announced it has contracted to acquire a patent for a telephone hold program system for an undisclosed amount of Allstate stock,” reported the News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, on November 24, 1968. “The new system for the first time would enable a caller placed on hold to listen to music, hear news, stock market information, advertisements or other special messages while waiting for his party to pick up the phone. It would end for many callers the irritating wait in dead silence.”
Dead silence may have disappeared, but a new annoyance was now taking its place. The age of hold music had begun.
In the years after Levy’s patent, hold music evolved alongside the technology that delivered it. Each new generation of equipment changed not only what callers heard but also how businesses managed the experience of waiting.
In the earliest days of hold music, many businesses simply connected a radio to their phone system.
“Although technically simple, the practice raised significant copyright concerns,” says Tim Brown, vice president and chief technology officer at Easy On Hold, which provides streaming music for company phone systems. “A radio station’s license to broadcast music does not ordinarily grant a business the right to retransmit that programming to callers on hold. Businesses required appropriate authorization for the music they transmitted, an obligation that was frequently overlooked.”
The earliest music-on-hold players relied on endless-loop cassette cartridges. Over time, the tapes stretched, warped and disintegrated, producing ominous, warbling audio that, combined with many telephone networks’ tinny sound quality, made for something that sounded like disturbing experimental sound art.
Levy never stopped refining the technology. On April 12, 1983, his original patent expired. Three years later, he and collaborator Jon D. Paul received patent 4,577,067 for a “remotely controlled telephone hold program system.”
As the decades passed, early hold-music devices gave way to equipment that copied audio from cassettes and CDs into internal memory. Manufacturers experimented with floppy disks, proprietary memory cards and, eventually, flash storage. But while the hardware improved, the content did not. Many systems stored only a few minutes of music and announcements before looping back to the beginning.
Updating those announcements required time and effort, so businesses tended to rely on generic evergreen messages: “Thank you for holding.” “We appreciate your business.” “Someone will be with you shortly.” Combined with tepid hold music, they became the familiar refrain of the on-hold netherworld, repeated so often that words and sounds and time eventually lost all meaning.
Today, some believe artificial intelligence chatbots will finally make hold music obsolete, replacing it with automatic waiting agents, conversational voice bots and other technologies designed to eliminate queues. Brown isn’t so sure. He argues that bots have their limitations and that the real problem has never been the music itself.
“Brand managers are not engaged with the telephony team,” says Brown. “It’s the contact center techs who often make the call, not only in the choice of hold music but also in the entire call flow architecture. Hold music, of course, is not the problem. Hold music is just an obvious and easy scapegoat in a story about how customer experience has failed to evolve.”
But hasn’t hold music always been the scapegoat? More than a looping melody, it has become the soundtrack of modern bureaucracy, an audible reminder that our time has value, just not always to the company keeping us waiting.
And yet, through it all, one song persists. Over three decades since a teenage Tim Carleton recorded “Opus No. 1” on a home four-track recorder, it remains one of the most famous songs that nobody ever chose to hear. It still plays for callers to Australia’s Centrelink government program, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and countless insurance companies and medical providers. It has also found new life on memetic mediums like TikTok, where algorithms continue to foist the tune on listeners who never asked to hear it.
Whether evolving technology finally silences Carleton’s creation remains to be seen.
Until then: “Hold, please. Someone will be with you shortly.”
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