Explainer Video Music
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Light, friendly background music for animated explainer and how-it-works videos, built to make a product or concept feel simple, approachable and cheerful without ever pulling focus from the narration. The signature sound is bouncy and whimsical: plucked ukulele or acoustic guitar, whistling, glockenspiel, handclaps, soft shakers and a chirpy mid-tempo bounce, kept low and looping under a voiceover. Arrangements are minimal and endlessly repeatable, mixed clean and quiet, and the mood is optimistic, playful and reassuring. It became the near-universal audio signature of startup and SaaS marketing videos in the 2010s.
History
Explainer-video music emerged with the animated-explainer marketing boom of the late 2000s and 2010s, when startups and software companies adopted short whiteboard and motion-graphics videos to pitch products, creating huge demand for cheap, upbeat, non-distracting beds. Stock marketplaces like AudioJungle and free catalogues from Kevin MacLeod and Benjamin Tissot (Bensound) supplied the ukulele-and-whistle archetype that became inseparable from the format, so pervasive it turned into an internet in-joke. As explainer video spread from tech into every industry, the cheerful corporate-whimsy cue became one of the most recognisable functional-music sounds of the decade.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Bensound and Incompetech catalogue documentation
- stock-music industry reporting on explainer-video marketing
- Epidemic Sound platform histories