Music scores

The musical score most commonly associated with the franchise was composed by father-and-son duo Keith and Matthew Strachan. The Strachans' score provides drama and tension, and unlike older game show musical scores, Millionaire's musical score was created to feature music playing almost throughout the entire show. The Strachans' main Millionaire theme song takes inspiration from the "Mars" movement of Gustav Holst's The Planets, and their question cues from the £2,000 to the £32,000/£50,000 level, and then from the £64,000/£75,000 level onwards, take the pitch up a semitone for each subsequent question, in order to increase tension as the contestant progressed through the game. On Game Show Network (GSN)'s Gameshow Hall of Fame special, the narrator described the Strachan tracks as "mimicking the sound of a beating heart", and stated that as the contestant works their way up the money ladder, the music is "perfectly in tune with their ever-increasing pulse".

The Strachans' Millionaire soundtrack was honoured by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers with numerous awards, the earliest of them awarded in 2000. The original music cues were given minor rearrangements for the U.S. version's clock format in 2008; for example, the question cues were synced to the "ticking" sounds of the game clock. Even later, the Strachan score was removed from the U.S. version altogether for the introduction of the shuffle format in 2010, in favour of a new musical score with cues written by Jeff Lippencott and Mark T. Williams, co-founders of the Los Angeles-based company Ah2 Music.