Solo guitar and piano music can also be decent choices provided you avoid songs with extremes of high and low volumes and pitch. Most phone systems come with default tracks that, coincidentally, fall squarely into these categories. If you’d like something a bit different then you can find plenty royalty-free tunes available to purchase online (they’re not all that terrible), but remember you'll need to pay for a PRS license if you want to make use of tracks by a recording artist.
Cornell's "I'm On Hold" follows some of the industry standards, particularly around frequencies and compression, which is one of the reasons he wrote it with a country-ish melody, wanting something simple but catchy, with only a single instrument and vocals. But in other ways, "I'm On Hold" totally upends the genre by breaking the cardinal rule — that hold music shouldn't call attention to itself.

The song was immediately polarizing, as far as these things go, which the company's executives,saw as a good thing; it generated buzz on Twitter, and gave people something to talk about when they got on the phone. Some people hated it, Cornell said, and others loved it so much they downloaded it. Cornell was invited to do a live performance for one company, where sales staff listened to the song all day long. It wasn't meant to fade into the background, and perhaps that's why it's lasted so long.
Forming first impressions is an important part of building strong relationships with people. Many times, the first contact between a customer and your business is on the phone. It is estimated that 70% of business callers experience some type of hold time and that time spent on hold can be the first impression of your company. This can influence whether your caller chooses to do business with you.