In his role building Cisco’s first version of IP phones, he was aware of Cisco’s need for a piece of music to use as the default hold music for the new system. Cut to several years later, and their high school composition has become the hold music for the world’s most popular phone systems with over 65 million IP phones sold.
Ultimately, your choice of hold music isn’t going to make customers happy if they’re being kept waiting for more than a few minutes, or endlessly passed from one team to another. There are plenty of technologies available to make the inbound call experience faster and more enjoyable although these will vary between different call centre solutions. If you’re not sure what tools you have available to optimise your inbound experience, your call centre software or systems provider will be happy to help.

And if you write something that doesn’t impress your coworkers or earn accolades, that’s fine. It’s called the writing process, and it’s why most writers prefer their seclusion. All writers are embarrassed by their first drafts.
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.