The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

This post discusses "What are best practices for presenting music clips today if you're not iTunes?"

This is the whole key to best practices for presenting music clips if you're not iTunes and once again, it goes back to knowing your audience before you design a site. Does your audience expect music will be playing when the page autoloads? Then better give it to them. Does your audience expect to find music they want to listen to or purchase? Then best let them decide which music should autoload on their next visit. This can be done with a "customize" option on the page, something so common nowadays on so many sites. Best practices for using this type of option to promote branding and return visits can be found in Reading Virtual Minds, Chapter 7 "Experience versus Expectation".

You can get visitors to select music for autoloading using the RIA technique I described (and which Coremetrics folks told me is already being done by their clients) in What's the best use of sound files Online? (part 2).

If the question is "How do I design a webpage to best present music clips online?" send an email to NextStage's Dr. Cindy LaChapelle and we'll see what we can do to answer that for you.

Just a note that so far this arc has covered:

• "Is it good practice to autoload a sound file?"
• "Is there a difference between autoloading music versus other kinds of sounds?"
• "Do people respond favorably to '...those terrifying floating and talking heads that are supposed to pass for inventive advertising'?"
• "Do people respond favorably to those video ads that start talking to you on page load? ("Nothing makes me flee a page faster.")