Please Make the Music Stop
Some sites like to play music when you land on them. I’m not sure why. I suppose they want to envelop the visitor into an entire “experience” or set a mood or portray their musical point of view. (Phrase unapologetically stolen from the Food Network’s food reality show where the judges are always asking the contestants to create dishes that express their “culinary point of view”. Ha!)
In any case. When I get to your site, I am not looking for an experience. I am looking for some information to complete my task. That’s what most searchers are doing too. If you invest a lot of resources in ranking well for key phrases and then cause those searchers to flee your site while holding their heads repeating “make it stop!” over and over, well, all the ranking in the world isn’t going to help you gain customers.
I’m generally against any music at all on a site (I am listening to my own music, thank you very much, and now with yours playing, it sounds like the symphony of the dueling evil composers in hell. Just saying. Exceptions for singers and bands, although I would still prefer a large play button that enables me to start the music experience myself (what if I’m in Starbucks! Or on an airplane! Or jury duty!).
If you think I am a lone voice in a sea of music-as-an-essential-part-of-the-web-experience lovers, then please, for the sake of puppies and kittens and fluffy clouds, at least give me a pause button. Or a mute button. Because if you don’t, the easiest way for me to get the music to stop is to leave your site.
Amazingly, there are sites whose methods of adding a musical soundtrack to the web experience make most musical sites seem AWESOME. Below are two. I present them as a cautionary tale.
Lebanese Ministry of Tourism
They picked a very short song. And play it over and over and over. And then they play it some more. And I can’t find a mute or pause button anywhere.
Mercedes Garage
They restart the music every time you navigate to a different page. Seriously. And there’s no way to turn it off! I was looking for their contact information, but I had to close the site as quickly as possible and call a different garage. All because they added music to their site. Which means, by the way, they did additional work, which resulted in driving customers away.
I present this post as a public service announcement. I’m just trying to make the web a better place.
ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. It’s as if they assume that the music will somehow compel us to stay longer buy more or be more brand loyal. I get the experience thing as it is the way consumers now make buying decisions but as you say let me decide if i want the music, video, dancing animations across the screen etc. Choice, yeah that’s it, how about some choice about my “experience!”
The music is all part of the plan. It’s not just about getting people to visit your website. It’s not just about getting people to stay on your site. It’s about conversion, about driving sales, about acquiring long-term customers. You can’t stand the music–but you weren’t going to become a customer anyhow. Let me explain my reasoning.
Garages are really noisy! Before they added music, that Mercedes Garage probably had a lot of web-visitors at their site, making appointments–and ducking out of those appointments when they arrived at the garage, realized it was super-noisy, and fled without paying. Worse, potential customers with a high noise tolerance couldn’t make appointments, because all the slots were taken.
But now the noise-intolerant visitors can’t stand to stay on the web site. Just to make sure they’re exposed to enough music, we make them click through an entrance page to reach a page with actual content. Ah, they all flee the website! But that’s good, they were going to flee anyhow. Those folks who don’t mind the music will now have an easier time making appointments.
I bet the same thing is going on with Lebanon tourism. Let’s see, recent headlines “Skirmish in south Lebanon reignites tension” “Are war drums beating on Israeli-Lebanese border?”. Because news headlines always capture the total spirit of a nation, we can conclude that Lebanon is a very noisy country. They’re just making sure that they only get tourists who can handle it.
when did you get a benz?
graywolf – I don’t have a benz. I was looking for a shop to work on my MG and had seen good reviews of that place on Yelp so was going to check out the site to see if they only worked on mercedes.
Larry – ha! you are totally right. Impeccable logic.
Nothing gets me to click a browser’s back button quicker than a music auto-start.
Well except maybe the unfulfilled promise of a nude Vanessa Fox. j/k!