Moonraker was the third of three Bond films for which the theme song was performed by Shirley Bassey (following Goldfinger and Diamonds Are Forever). Frank Sinatra was originally considered for the vocals, and Kate Bush was asked, but she declined. Johnny Mathis was approached and offered the opportunity. However, Mathis—despite having started recording with Barry—was unable to complete the project, leaving producers to offer the song to Bassey just weeks before the premiere date in England. Bassey made the recordings with very short notice and as a result, she never regarded the song ‘as her own’ as she had never had the chance to perform it in full or promote it first.

The film uses two versions of the title theme song, a ballad version heard over the main titles, and a disco version over the closing titles. Confusingly, the United Artists single release labelled the tracks on the 7 inch single as “Moonraker (Main Title)” for the version used to close the film and “Moonraker (End Title)” for the track that opened the film. The song made little impact on the charts, reaching 159, partly attributed to Bassey’s failure to promote the single, given the last-minute decision to quickly record it to meet the schedule.

In 2005, Bassey sang the song for the first time outside James Bond on stage as part of a medley of her three Bond title songs. An instrumental strings version of the title theme was used in 2007 tourism commercials for the Dominican Republic.

The soundtrack of Moonraker was composed by John Barry and recorded in Paris, again, as with production, marking a turning point away from the English location at CTS Studios in London. The score also marked a turning point in John Barry’s output, abandoning the Kentonesque brass of his earlier Bond scores and instead scoring the film with slow, rich string passages – a trend which Barry would continue in the 1980s with scores such as Out of Africa and Somewhere in Time. For Moonraker, Barry uses for the first time since Diamonds Are Forever (1971), a piece of music called “007” (on track 7), and “Bond smells a rat”, the secondary Bond theme composed by Barry which was introduced in From Russia with Love during Bond’s escape with the Lektor; some classical music pieces were also included in the film. For the scene where Bond visits Drax in his chateau, Drax plays Frédéric Chopin’s Prelude no. 15 in D-flat major (op. 28), “Raindrop” on his grand piano (although he plays in the key of D major). Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka by Johann Strauss II was featured during the hovercraft scene on the Piazza San Marco in Venice, and Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet Overture” was used for the scenes in Brazil in which Jaws meets Dolly following his accident. Other passages pay homage to earlier films including Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra (op. 30), associated with 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the hunting horn playing its distinctive first three notes, Elmer Bernstein’s theme from The Magnificent Seven when Bond appears on horseback in gaucho clothing at MI6 headquarters in Brazil, and the alien-contacting theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind as the key-code for a security door as mentioned previously.

The Italian aria “Vesti la giubba” from Ruggero Leoncavallo’s opera I Pagliacci, was sung in Venice, before one of the henchmen falls to his death from a building, landing and ruining a piano, resulting in Bond to quip the often misquoted line from the film Casablanca, “Play it again, Sam”.