Hold music was born in the early 1960s, a few years after the first transatlantic phone cable was laid, between Newfoundland and Scotland. This is true even on non-hold calls it's why phone companies transmit something called a "comfort tone" over phone lines, a barely audible synthetic noise that signals a connection is still there. (Cornell makes this plea specifically at the end of his song.) Silence is believed to be a death knell for phone calls - people will simply think the line is dead and hang up. It's not really meant to be loved or even listened to - it's meant to communicate something specific: Don't hang up. If it is a genre, hold music, it's fair to say, is a troubled one with few hits. "That self-awareness came from wanting to experiment with this genre of hold music, that I'm not even really sure is a thing," Cornell said. He wrote and recorded it in one night, in 2012, as a voice note on his phone - and thus, this self-aware hold song was born, and lives on, seven years later. "I just wanted to write a pleasant melody designed to be heard over the phone." With encouragement from Walker, Cornell started messing around with the lyrics. "Then I just came to it one day," he says. Cornell was one of the co-founders of UberConference, and in addition to being a designer, is a singer and guitar player who had always found songwriting frustrating. It's the only song Alex Cornell has ever written. It's selected by nine out of ten call organizers, and plays over a million times per month, says Craig Walker, CEO of Dialpad, owner of UberConference. The music builds as time goes on, culminating in a spoken verse that begins: "Well, let me tell you all a story / about a man who was on hold all day." This unusually self-aware song is the default music for a conference call service called UberConference, where "I'm On Hold" plays on a loop for anyone who calls in early, on almost every call that doesn't start exactly when it's scheduled to (or doesn't ever start at all). Depending how long it takes for someone else to join the call, you could be listening for awhile. It's a panoptic experience, being on hold while listening to someone singing about being on hold. But then, a few bars in, a turn: "Yes I'm waiting on this conference call, all alone.
"Well, I've been sitting here all day," the song begins, sort of croony, with a vaguely country affect - the kind of opening that leads you to expect there is, somewhere, an ex-lover who probably isn't coming back. Someone is late for the conference call, so the music starts. Hold music has a paradoxical purpose: Keep folks on the line, but don't draw their attention.
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