The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

This post discusses "If you've got a show to promote and it uses some swell music, is it a better to use highly visible link that says, 'Hear our swell music'? Or does the music just start on page load (autoload) and then there's a highly visible link to turn it off?"

A highly visible "Hear our swell music" link is a good idea, again supposing that visitors are coming to your site to learn of, search for or find music. If your site is a place visitors come specifically to listen to music -- perhaps then to purchase -- then music should be autoloaded. Visitors should then be given the option to select which music is going to autoload the next time they visit.

An example of this was given in What's the best use of sound files Online? (part 2). There the suggestion was to use RIA to play small snippits of music as visitors hovered their mouse over some graphic or similar identifying screen element.

The key concept to the questions discussed in this post has nothing to do with music or sound events, however. The key concept is highly visible link. The reader who emailed me this question is probably already aware that whether you autoload some sound event or not, you must must must give visitors a choice in the environment you've invited them to navigate because -- at least with the present state of web development -- visitors are still bringing your environment into their environment.

In other words, your webpage is being viewed by someone who has several thousand other distractions competing for the attention they're giving your webpage. Those distractions are in their real environment. Your webpage exists in a virtual environment. Which of the two do you think they can control most easily? Does the child, dinner, the pet needing to go outside, the parent demanding chores be done, the phone, ..., have an on/off switch or does the computer in which your webpage's virtual environment exists?

You can create the most inviting virtual environment imaginable but if visitors can't control it, modify it, adapt it so that it integrates with their real environment, your environment gets shut off.

To review, 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.")
• "What are best practices for presenting music clips today if you're not iTunes?"
• and this post, "If you've got a show to promote and it uses some swell music, is it a better to use highly visible link that says, 'Hear our swell music'? Or does the music just start on page load (autoload) and then there's a highly visible link to turn it off?"