How to get custom on-hold music for your phone line

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Default hold music is forgettable by design, which is exactly the problem. It's a few seconds of someone's attention, repeated across every call that waits, and it currently sounds like nothing about your business specifically. Over hundreds or thousands of calls a year, that's a real, if small, missed opportunity to reinforce what your business actually sounds like rather than defaulting to the same generic loop every other business on the same phone system uses.

Your options

• Your phone system's default. Free, already there, and completely generic.
• ElevenLabs Eleven Music. Generate a short, on-brand track built to loop as hold music. Try ElevenLabs Eleven Music for a track that actually sounds like your business.

Step by step

1. Check what your phone system actually accepts first. Most business phone systems and VoIP providers specify an exact file format (commonly WAV or MP3), and sometimes a specific sample rate or bit depth, before they'll accept an uploaded hold-music file. Check your provider's own upload requirements before generating anything, so you're not stuck converting a file afterward, which is a five-minute check against your actual account dashboard or provider documentation, not a guess.
2. Decide on mood and length. Calm and unobtrusive almost always beats anything energetic or attention-grabbing for hold music specifically, since the goal is to reduce the perceived wait, not entertain.
3. Generate the track in Eleven Music, which currently outputs MP3; confirm your phone system accepts that format directly or budget a quick conversion step if it needs WAV specifically.
4. Upload it to your phone system and call in to test it yourself. Listen on an actual phone call, not just played back at your desk, since call audio quality compresses differently than a direct file playback.
5. Keep it a reasonable length and let your system loop it, rather than generating one very long track, since most hold-music setups are designed to loop a shorter clip anyway. Seamless looping is explained inmaking a background audio loop.

Writing a prompt that gets you usable hold music

Hold music has a narrower, more specific brief than most background music: it needs to be pleasant without being distracting, loop cleanly, and not build toward anything, since a caller might hear any random few seconds of it. A prompt like "calm, light instrumental, steady tempo throughout, no dramatic builds or drops, suitable for phone hold music, loopable" gives the generator a much clearer target than "relaxing music." Naming "no dramatic builds or drops" specifically matters, since a track with musical dynamics that work well in a video can feel jarring when a caller hears a random slice of it mid-build, with no visual context to explain why the music is suddenly swelling. Hold music is heard in fragments, not start to finish, which is exactly why a flat, steady texture outperforms a track with an interesting musical arc here, even though the same arc would be a strength in a video.

A second worked example, if you want something slightly more on-brand than purely generic: "warm, simple piano melody, unhurried, light and airy, nothing melancholy, steady throughout, suitable for a dental office's phone hold music." Naming the specific business context (a dental office, in this case) nudges the tone toward something appropriately calm and reassuring rather than, say, upbeat retail energy that wouldn't fit a healthcare setting. A jingle follows a similar process: seegetting a jingle for your business.

Combining music with a recorded message, if you want one

Many hold experiences interleave music with a short spoken message, hours, a promotion, an apology for the wait, rather than running music alone. If you want that, you have two separate pieces to produce: the music track covered here, and a short voice message, which is a text-to-speech job rather than a music one. Keep them as separate files that your phone system or VoIP provider interleaves according to its own settings, rather than trying to generate one combined audio file with both music and speech baked in together, since most phone systems expect to manage that interleaving themselves and give you more control over timing and frequency that way. Writing and generating that message is covered ingetting a professional voicemail greeting and hold message.

Worth knowing if you use a call-queueing system specifically: per ElevenLabs' own changelog, call queueing with custom hold audio was added as a feature in September 2026. If your phone system already has queue-specific hold-audio handling, check what it expects before assuming a single generated loop covers both a simple hold scenario and a multi-caller queue, since queue systems sometimes have their own specific requirements around message timing and queue-position announcements that a plain hold-music loop doesn't need to account for.

What I'd actually tell you

Resist making hold music too interesting. The instinct is to make something that reflects your brand's personality strongly, but someone on hold is already slightly annoyed; calm, pleasant and unobtrusive serves them better than a track that demands attention. Save the bold branding for your actual marketing content.

The other thing worth getting right: test the full loop, not just the first 20 or 30 seconds. A track that sounds fine at the start can have an awkward seam or an unexpected shift right at the loop point, and the only way to catch that reliably is listening through a full cycle, or two, back to back, the same way you'd check any other looping audio. A caller who happens to be on hold right when the loop restarts badly notices it far more than you'd expect from a single listen-through at your desk.

Is this covered under the commercial license?

Verified directly on ElevenLabs' current Music Terms: hold music for your own business phone line is ordinary non-broadcast commercial use, covered under the standard commercial license on Starter ($6/month) and above, with no attribution required. This isn't the TV, radio or film carve-out that needs Enterprise; a phone hold loop is squarely the kind of everyday business use the standard license is built for. For video projects, seewhere to get background music without license fees.

How to check your phone system's actual requirements before you generate anything

This is the step most people skip, and it's the one that saves you the most rework. Before generating a single track, find your phone system or VoIP provider's documentation (search "[provider name] hold music upload" or check their admin dashboard's upload page directly) and note three things: the accepted file format, any file size or duration limit, and whether there's a specific sample rate or bit depth requirement. Some systems are genuinely flexible and accept almost anything; others are specific about needing, say, a mono WAV file at a particular sample rate, and will reject or badly compress anything else on upload. Five minutes checking this upfront avoids generating a track, discovering it's the wrong format, and having to convert or regenerate.

If your system does require a specific format Eleven Music doesn't output directly, a free audio converter (several exist as simple web tools or desktop apps) handles the conversion in under a minute once you know exactly what format you need to land on.

When to skip this

If your phone system has strict, unusual format requirements that generated audio can't directly satisfy, you may need an extra conversion step with basic audio editing software; that's a minor hurdle, not a reason to abandon the approach, but worth knowing about before you generate the final version.

It's also worth sticking with a simple default or stock hold track if your call volume is low enough that hold time is rarely more than a few seconds. The branding value of custom hold music scales with how often and how long people actually sit on hold; for a business where calls get answered almost immediately, the investment of time in generating and testing something custom matters a lot less than for a business where callers routinely wait a minute or more.

How I'd approach this

If you're building out a phone system, an AI receptionist, or a broader customer communication setup and want the hold music, voice prompts and call flow designed together as one coherent experience rather than assembled piecemeal, that's the kind of project I build end to end. A caller's experience is shaped by the greeting, the hold audio, any queue announcements and the eventual handoff to a person or an AI agent together, and designing those as one connected flow, rather than each piece sourced or generated separately by whoever happened to be setting it up, is what actually makes a phone system feel considered rather than assembled from parts. Get in touch if that's what you're setting up.