Sonic Marketing
My brother, Tim, called me a while ago. A colleague of his at a local radio station is leaving to follow a career in "Sonic Marketing". Apparently this is the name for those annoying little ditties that the likes of Intel insist on poisoning our minds with. He used to work on the jingles for the radio station but he's had a better idea. He's going to do it for websites. God save us all.
Tim asked what I thought about it and so I asked him when was the last time he'd been to a website that had played sound back to him. He couldn't remember, and I think my point was made. It's just not the "done thing" and is frowned upon by the web community. Am I wrong?
There may well be a gap in the market for corporate jingles on websites, but that doesn't mean the gap needs filling.
Talking of Tim (or Dr Tim as he's affectionately known at Century FM), here's a snippet of air-time (2MB, MP3) that features his very own jingle.
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I'm with you on this one Jake. There's nothing more embarrassing that forgetting I've got my laptop volume all the way up (normally from watching some DVD on it the night before), then browsing some website with one of those background MIDI files.
That really does set a good example for the staff!
Not to mention that if you're on a slower connection (dial-up while in some remote part of the country, gprs, ...) the last thing you want to do is wait for some additional KB's of music to load.
I think you're right. Normally I mute my speakers to avoid exactly these jingles or background music on websites. Let's hope that jingles on websites won't become as popular as mobile ringtone advertising in the german television. They're awful...
Woof Woof
{Link}
It is really irritating to come across a website that has sounds - especially if your computer is already playing some music from your own music library! The computer then plays both music and sounds at the same friggin time! Sounds absolutely awful!
Does anyone know how to turn off the sounds that come from website while allowing me to listen to my own music library? The only solution I've come across is to blacklist the website immediately and never visit it again.
I'd imagine it would contrave one or two of the w3c rules for accessibility ...
- imagine a blind user trying to listen to the text-to-speech application reading the content of a website and then being interrupted by the sounds from the website! :-(
- also, imagine a deaf user missing out what is being said - because no subtitles were supplied with the music! :-(
Just a matter of time before we have a FireFox/Mozilla extension designed to filter out music from a website. In the meantime, I'll have to rely on adBlock, et al.
I think most peope mute their PC's/Macs at work, to avoid this kind of crap, but I agree that when your listening to music, the interruption just makes you leave the site - fast...
This will gain popularity with the same sites that say "only works on 800x600 in IE6 on Windows" and use Flash for EVERYTHING. If i'm wrong on this one, i'll eat my hat!
It's like moving backwards to the start of the Internet when everyone had one page websites with animated gifs (usually sirens) with an embedded midi ;o)
I think the midi files are OK as long as they come with a spinning globe and some text blinking on the page. Preferably in a nice frameset and a line at the bottom that says "Last updated May 6, 1998". And 75% of the links take you to a page that says "Under Construction Check Back Soon" with an animated gif of a man in a hard hat pounding the ground with something.
@ Brian LOL!
My very first website had the Last Ninja midi running in the background... only worked in Netscape, the shame of it...
If by 'sound' we mean catchy japaese product jingle, then yeah, that would be annoying. But a nice ambient backdrop can really add some atmosphere for the right kind of setting, e.g. you're surfing explicitely FOR sound. Try these:
{Link}
{Link}
sound from websites in almost good ways. :-)
I knew a guy who had made a looootttt of money being young by creating the jinggle for the news for a big private tv station during heydey of new private cable networks (it didn't start earlier than beginning of the 90ties in Germany).
But for websites its a stupid idea, of course. And I believe that companies have reached a certain smartness level when its about taking investment decisions for web projects.
Me opening 3 tabs per minute in Mozilla going to have a constant concert of jingles.
Please not.
Grumpy Old Man.
I don't want animated wizzos or noisy distractions on websites. If something like that comes along when I'm generally surfing, I aim for the back button almost instantly.
It makes websites tacky, bloated, and annoying.
The web is for information, not for the hard sell like local commercial radio seems to be nowadays.
Three minutes of songs on a generic playlist repeated every two hours vs two minutes of noisy ads vs one minute of annoying generic DJ equals one less listener.
End rant. :)
I guess the jingles can be usefull on some websites, pay a visit to a site of a music entertainer, a site for a motion picture promotion and other various multimedia sites.
I guess this is the place where music is a must, otherwhise the site isn't *cool* ... ofcourse wouldn't like to have this on any other type of website.
bye
Even the {Link} homepage seems to be without music.