Every Now and Then (Verizon Archaeology)

Right now, as you're listening to this, roughly a thousand people are waiting inside Verizon's hold music. Not on hold — inside it. Sitting in a 2-minute-54-second loop of smooth jazz that Verizon's Wireless line has been playing since at least 2018. The track is called "Every Now and Then." It was composed by Benedic Lamdin and Riaan Vosloo, released on a production music album called Cinematic Soul, and licensed — quietly, without announcement — from a catalog distributed through Ninja Tune. Verizon calls it their "standard melody." Average FiOS hold: two minutes and thirty-nine seconds. Average Wireless hold: four minutes and twenty-five seconds. 1 Someone in 2018 was on that line for thirty-five minutes straight and said it was the only hold music they'd ever heard that didn't bore them. Someone in 2025 held for ninety-five minutes and just wanted to ask about their bill. Here is what that music sounds like, extended.

This piece grew out of a specific kind of cultural detection. In December 2018, a Reddit user named sepehr_brk posted to r/verizon asking if anyone could identify the hold music — "It's the only hold music I've heard in my life that doesn't bore you after looping for 35 minutes." The community Shazamed it, traced it, and found "Every Now and Then" on a production library record buried deep in a licensing catalog. The original track — piano-led, with a violin that enters almost apologetically after a few minutes, riding over a lightly funky clean electric bass — was designed to be useful without being noticed. To exist, as NPR writer Sophie Haigney described hold music in 2019, as "camouflaged sound." 2

What's unusual about Verizon's choice is that it worked, at least for some people. A user on SoundCloud wrote: "Best hold music ever. I loved this song so much I recorded the hold music on Verizon, used Shazam to find the actual song, and then found this instrumental version." On YouTube, someone noted they'd been on hold for one hour and fifty-eight minutes and had to know what they were dancing to. Another held for forty-five minutes straight and described it as "a special kind of hell." The same two-minute-fifty-four-second loop, experienced as ecstasy and as torture, depending entirely on how long you'd been in it.

Verizon runs on Cisco/Broadsoft telephony infrastructure — the same system that gave the world "Opus Number One," the default hold music that became a cult artifact chronicled by The Atlantic and later reposted in r/ambientmusic as "meditative." But Verizon didn't use the default. Their One Talk admin documentation refers to a "standard melody from Verizon" — a separately licensed track. That track is "Every Now and Then." The FiOS tech support line, for its part, runs a different system entirely: five unidentified songs with synths and guitar solos, apparently predating the smooth jazz era altogether.

The Replicant blog ranked hold music across major carriers in 2024 and gave Verizon the most detailed musical autopsy: "Callers who are 'lucky' enough to make it a few minutes in are handsomely rewarded with a violin to complement the keys." 3 That violin — arriving late, unhurried, as if it wasn't sure it had been invited — is the thing this composition tries to honor. Not as a replica, but as a meditation on the feeling of that arrival: the moment the wait becomes, briefly, something else.

The music here is an original composition in the same genre family: F major, acoustic piano as lead, a finger-picked bass that enters quietly around the forty-five second mark, a violin counter-melody that joins just past the midpoint. It runs about three and a half minutes — long enough to fully describe the arc the original only sketches. It begins in patient stillness, builds through a gentle groove, reaches a brief moment of warmth when the violin takes the lead, then resolves back to piano alone. The loop logic is deliberately broken: this piece ends.

Joseph Lanza's Elevator Music (1994), the canonical cultural history of Muzak and easy listening, traced the genealogy of background sound back to a U.S. Army general who wanted to pipe music through electrical wires. What he was solving for was the same thing Verizon is solving for today: the unbearable blankness of waiting. In 1966, Alfred Levy filed U.S. Patent No. 3,246,082 — "Telephone Hold Program System" — and described in bureaucratic language the quiet distress of "listening to a completely unresponsive instrument." Hold music was invented to solve that. Whether it does is, apparently, still under debate.

Washington Post critic Chris Richards coined the phrase "authoritarian hold music" in 2016 4 to describe a different kind of ambient political management — but the phrase landed because it captured something true about all hold music: it has authority over you, and it knows it. You can't change the track. You can only wait, or hang up. About 978 people, by the math, are choosing to wait right now. This is what they're hearing.