‘Everyone knows the Centrelink song’: how we learned to love – and remix – hold music

Triple J once played it for eight hours straight. DJs have remixed it, dancers have performed to it, and many of us, have sat, frustrated, listening to it.

Slowly the Centrelink hold music has seeped into the cultural zeitgeist and is now the backdrop for works of art and viral TikToks.

Influencer and comedian Lyanna Kea’s 2024 TikTok of her busting out moves to the tune collected 91,000 likes and 2,297 comments – one person said they were a dance teacher who made their own routine while on hold, another said they were a staff member who had felt the wrath of frustrated callers.

“Everybody knows the Centrelink song,” Kea says. “Everybody knows what it’s like to be on that hold for 14 hours before somebody puts you on only to hang up on you.

“And that’s deep in everybody’s psyche.”

In 1989, a then 16-year-old American, Tim Carleton, created the song, which was recorded by his friend Darrick Deel. Deel went on to work for Cisco, which is the number one supplier of corporate phones in the world, and used the tune.

It went global.

Opus No 1 is known globally for its place on the digital technology conglomerate Cisco’s hold playlist – and its part as the ambient backdrop for a 2023 Bud Light commercial. It has 2,288,086 plays and counting on Spotify.

In 2018 Centrelink changed its tunes from a more classical selection that included Frédéric Chopin’s Waltz #3 in A Minor to have the synth melody of Opus No.1 on the playlist.

“I thought that this was just the Centrelink song,” Kea said. “But it turns out that even people in Switzerland and Poland and like every other country have heard this song before.”

While Australians aren’t alone, they are inspired. In 2023 artist Jonathan Homsey created a work for the Fringe festival where part of the audience stood in the Melbourne City Baths while a dancer performed a routine and the song reverberated across the pool.

Lockdown acted as the muse.

“I just wanted this communal experience to bring people back to that moment,” Homsey said. “I wasn’t the only one who was on hold while in the bathroom, on hold while brushing their teeth.

“The music is the sound of purgatory.

“I went through multiple lockdowns. The work [was] in cycles. So every 10 minutes I went back to dancing to the song as kind of a metaphor of, oh, here I am again.”

Director at Music On Hold Australia, Jenny Crosby, said the winning formula of a good hold song is: a decent beat, consistent volume and can’t arouse too much emotion.

Playing the radio, for instance, can upset listeners if they hear news they don’t like.

“Honestly, if it was in the world of music generally, hold music would be very boring,” she said.

Twenty years ago Crosby, who has a large government customer base, set the ATO up with five songs from an album called Seaspray.

She says the fact callers still hear them, decades later, shows they were a good pick.

“But generally the clients forget what they’ve got on hold half the time,” Crosby said.

“And most big companies, when they put people on hold again, really don’t know what people are listening to.”

Services Australia would not comment on record.

Professor in social sciences at Melbourne University Lauren Rosewarne says the best thing Centrelink could do is stay away from the hold music’s hold on the zeitgeist.

“As is something we’ve witnessed countless times before with corporations once they’re made fun of on social media, they try and get in on the joke,” she said.

“Once that happens though, I imagine the humorous TikToks would promptly die off.”

Rosewarne said the Centrelink song has got traction online because so many of us have experienced listening to the “monotonous and completely unrelenting” tune.

“Rather than just reliving the awful experience though, it’s mocked and a sense of solidarity is created by the many people who recognise this situation,” she said.

So is it good? Kea laughs.

“If a banger is defined as something that raises your blood pressure, then yeah, I define it as a banger.”.