Why Putting Music On Your Website is Not a Good Idea
«
back to all articles
We often hear requests to place music on a website, as background music. It's usually the business owners favourite tune, or one they think suits their business and/or website. We ALWAYS try to persuade them against it, and here's why.
1. Music is Highly Subjective.
Let's say you put the Phil Collins song "In The Air Tonight" on your website. It will only enhance the experience of using your website for people who happen to like that song. But you are turning away those potential customers who happen to despise the song. It doesn't make them a bad person if they don't like your favourite tune, but it WILL make them dislike your website, which might be a great website in all other respects.
2. It's Repetitive
If you have plenty of good informative content on your website, visitors are going to want to browse around reading it all. Now the Phil Collins song is just over 5 minutes long, which is quite long by usual standards, but if somebody is on your site for 10 minutes they're going to hear it twice. If it's a different song at the more average 3 minute duration they're going to hear it 3 times. That's if they don't choose to switch it off, which most people will, which is A) an irritating thing to have to do, and B) makes it pointless putting it on in the first place.
3. It Destroys Performance
A reasonably well compressed version of the song is going to be around 7 Mb. Adding the Flash player with the controls will push it up a bit more, and when a visitor loads that page, the whole thing needs to be downloaded onto his/her computer one way or another. Whether it's streamed or pre-loaded it's going to affect the speed at which the rest of your page loads.
4. Search Engines Hate It.
If the music is to be played continuously between different pages then there's only 2 ways to do it. First way is to put the whole website in frames with the player in it's own frame, and the second way is to build the whole website in Flash. Search Engines hate framed websites almost, but not quite, as much as Flash sites. It's difficult to build a framed website which will perform well in the search engines, especially when trying to prevent users landing on a page which isn't, but should be, framed. And the search engine crawlers ignore Flash content all together, so the search engine will know your website is there but it wont be able to tell the world what it's about.
5. It Invades The Users Experience
Many people, including me, often listen to music whilst browsing the internet. As soon as they land on your page with the music, and the music starts playing, they're suddenly listening to a cacophony of clashing sounds and scrambling around looking for the OFF switch on your website. You've probably ruined the song they were listening to, and once again irritated somebody who might have been interested in what you had to offer.. Even if they love Phil Collins.
6. Performing Rights Licence
Unless your favourite song is royalty free, you will need to pay a licence fee to play it on your website AND show that you have obtained the appropriate authority, where necessary, to copy the song from it's original format to the compressed mp3 you are uploading.
Conclusion
Don't put music on your website. It's difficult to imagine any circumstances under which music on a corporate website might be a good idea.
This article was written by Paul Clarke and is copyright Web Equip Ltd. If you want to use it please contact us. Please don't run the risk of using it without contacting us.
