Bring Your Designs to Life with VistaCreate Music
Graphics and sound effects have come hand-in-hand for decades. It’s no surprise that when we hear a familiar sound, our imagination instantly adds a visual, and sometimes even brings up more details like smell and taste.
VistaCreate wanted to bring together royalty-free sound effects and professional design, and allow users to easily make high-quality visuals from scratch. Meet VistaCreate Music—a perfect addition to an already substantial media library with millions of photos and thousands of templates and design objects.
Now, let’s take a closer look at why sound is a great marketing tool and then figure out how to create stunning visuals for business or personal promotion with VistaCreate Music.
Why create graphics with sound effects
The power of motion graphics and sound effects in marketing materials is often underestimated but certainly not by behemoths like Vodafone, Sony, Nestlé, and more. Long ago they figured out that the music you choose for the TV ads will shape a certain attitude to your brand.
Nothing has changed, this still works even for the newer means of promotion—print, web, and social media. A good attitude is everything because it then evolves into brand loyalty, which is every marketer’s dream at all times.
Emotional impact
When you hear a music for the first time and you like it, it evokes a sense of discovery. This excitement stays in your head for a while. When you hear the same music for the fifth time, it has already become a strong memory.
Now, tie this concept to your business. It has a certain brand identity already, so make it even more recognizable! Enhance the existing marketing strategy with the help of sound.
Making digital marketing materials with music creates a strong connection that drives nostalgia. Music creates stories, while people associate them with your brand, remember them at least for some time, and if you’re lucky, they share these stories with friends.
Customer experience
Grocery and retail shops have music playing all day not just because their employees are bored (but it might be one of the reasons, too). Great customer experience equals great sales.
It may sound quite easy, but music is a very subjective matter and it’s not enough to just put a random playlist with the Billboard hot 100 and call it a day. Big companies experiment, conduct surveys and A/B tests to figure out what kind of music their audience prefers and what music they associate with the brand.
Then there’s NielsenIQ (formerly Nielsen)—the company which originally “fuels the media industry with the most accurate understanding of what people listen to and watch”, and then goes beyond by becoming the world’s leading retail and consumer data platform.
There’s no uniform rule that works for all businesses, when it comes to the choice of music. However, there’s an output any brand can make use of: choose music and sound effects that are noticeable enough to become a voice of your brand but won’t overshadow it.
Science and evolution
Let’s not forget about the fun aspect of music too. Good sound is a cheap and quick way of having a good time.
Back in 2001, a study by neuroscientists Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre showed that pleasurable music activates limbic and paralimbic areas of the brain, which are connected to euphoric reward responses. Those rewards come from a gush of a neurotransmitter called dopamine.
Hence, enjoyable music is not necessarily the one that is trendy or classic but the one that hits the heart (or should we say “the brain”?). But like fine art, music evolves and assimilates, so it’s categorized by genre and time frame whether we want it or not. This dynamic can significantly narrow down the choice of music that will evoke the feeling you’re aiming to evoke with its help.
For example, you need to create a campaign for the brand that sells clothes in hippie style. Techno might be trendy but would it match the brand voice that people can associate with the Woodstock era? You’d probably aim for something like the Beatles, Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, and other music relevant to the 60-70s Ken Kesey movement aesthetics.
Don’t forget that business has dynamics too, so music has to evolve together with the brand. If you have the same playlist for over a year, your customers might get bored.
Café del Mar | The case in point
This is a story of the bar that became a record label (or how music can become a powerful marketing tool).
Café del Mar was initially a bar located on the seafront of the Sant Antoni de Portmany, Ibiza. It was established in 1980 by Carlos Andrea, Ramon Guiral, and Jose Les, and designed by the architect Lluis Guell.
Source: https://cafedelmar.com/about
The place quickly became a hot topic for the “places to visit before you die” kind of content in travel and fashion magazines. First, mesmerizing Ibiza sunsets drive millions of people from all over the world to Café del Mar. Now, there are 11 Café del Mar bars globally, and 3 of them are located in Spain.
Source: https://cafedelmar.com/about
Such a huge popularity and success became possible not just thanks to sunsets but also because of music. The team behind Café del Mar was all about making the whole customer experience an enigmatic journey from the start till the end of the sunset and beyond into the night.
Source: https://cafedelmar.com/about
They also wanted it to be a true Ibiza experience, so they invited DJ José Padilla to play his sets while the sun went down. And this is how chill-out music (a.k.a chillout) was born as a fusion of ambient, house, jazz, classical, New Age, and Hispanic. A bit later chillout became a distinct music genre, and Café Del Mar gained even bigger popularity both as a bar and a record label:
Since the release of Café del Mar Volume 1 in 1994, more than 70 compilations have been produced selling over 12 million units worldwide, making Café del Mar one of the bestselling compilation series of all time, as well as the most recognizable name in chill-out music.
Café Del Mar is a perfect example of how music has not just helped to better market the bar but became the business itself. It may not be the case for every business but it certainly is inspiring. Experiments with music are worth time and investment.
VistaCreate Music | Navigating the sound library
Let’s jump from inspiring business stories straight to VistaCreate Music. Picking music for brand promotion is not an easy task and it’s better to do it wisely. First off, analyze the target audience and research what kind of music is preferred by different segments. If you want to promote your personal social media or a blog, it’s even easier.
Go to VistaCreate and pick any suitable design format. Choose the template and start designing. Edit the elements or add new, change text, colors, scale the shapes and photos just the way you want to. It’s up to you when to add free stock sounds: right when you open the canvas or when your design is complete.
Research the Explore tab of the Music section on the editing side panel. Pick a genre that matches the visual and then choose a track from thousands of available sounds. You can find non-copyrighted, royalty-free music in the VistaCreate library, and add any track to your design.
Edit sound effects—set the duration of any track by dragging the corners of the playable fragment. Then, drag the selected area and place it on the part of the track you like the most. Check how it all sounds along with the picture using the Play button. You can also make the sound fade in/out, which works great for short commercials. Loop the track if you’re making a video post or a GIF.
VistaCreate Music | Using your own sounds
You don’t have to use the music from the VistaCreate library. We made it possible to upload your own audio files too! But first, make sure you understand music licensing and have the right to use the track in your designs.
Add sound effects to increase engagement on social media. When you have a perfect sound that represents your brand, simply upload it to VistaCreate in the My Music section. It will be automatically saved, so you don’t have to upload it every time you create new Instagram Stories, TikTok Videos, and Facebook Posts.
VistaCreate Music | FAQ
What’s the preferred format for the track to be uploaded to VistaCreate?
Your audio file should be in MP3 or WAV format to be uploaded to VistaCreate.
What’s the maximum allowed size of the uploaded track?
The maximum size of an audio file should be 20 MB to be uploaded to VistaCreate.
Is there Techno and Indie Rock in VistaCreate music library?
Yes, there are thousands of tunes in the VistaCreate music library that are categorized by genre and mood. Explore 29 music categories and find the perfect tracks each time.
More to come
Like we do with animation, we now do with music, improving its interface, adding more editing features, and enhancing the performance. Stay tuned for more awesome news 😉
