Branding your blog with written theme music

Most sites and blogs are silent! I mean no music. However, there is a minority that plays music automatically, which is really annoying. At least I feel disturbed if a site plays a long non-stop music. Finding the stop button is my instant respond. If I can’t find it within 5 seconds, most probably I will close the site from my browser. Realizing these circumstances, I still made one for my blog. Why???!!

Before I tell you the reason I made music for my blog, let’s consider the reason why most website are silent. According to Matthew Inman (Oatmeal) in his article How to Convince a Client their Site Doesn’t Need Music, Matthew points out that it is really a bad idea to include music in your site for these several reasons:

1. It’s obtrusive: Having music playing in the background can interrupt whatever is currently coming through the visitors’ speakers.

2. It cuts off when you click around: The sound will cut off every time visitors click from page to page.

3. Not all browsers and operating systems support multimedia content: There are a lot of older browsers out there on the net that might not support multimedia or will have serious issues playing it.

4. It slows things down: Having music playing will decrease the performance of the site, especially on slower machines.

5. It’s tacky and unprofessional: Play to their vanity: having background music was cool in the mid-nineties when the web was first coming together. Now it’s not, it’s considered dated and the mark of an amateur.

6. There’s a reason other sites don’t have music: The reason most sites don’t have music playing is because most sites agree that it’s a bad idea.

7. Not everyone may like your music: What some people consider ambient and pleasant, others may find to be annoying, elevator music.

8. It uses up bandwidth: This is hardly an issue nowadays, but if it’s a high traffic site having music may run the risk of putting it over its traffic limit and costing extra money.

Although Matthew is right about all of the above reasons, I still made theme music for my blog because of the following reasons:

1. I use short music instead of non-stop music: In order not to be obtrusive, the music had to be short and simple. It had to be less than 5 seconds duration. Never ever repeat it!

2. Branding your site: Written music for your site is like a logo or brand. When visitors hear it enough times, it becomes your brand. Listen to this theme music from famous TV shows:

smurfs-theme.mp3

full-house.mp3

 super-mario-brothers-super-show.mp3

You got what I mean, right?

3. Most software has intro music when it opened: What do you hear when you enter Windows XP? What do you hear when Microsoft Money is opened? Please name some program that does play intro music in the comment. Your help is much appreciated J

4. Play it at the homepage, not every page: The homepage is the where the most visitors made their entry. So just play the written music once at the homepage is already sufficient. Never play the music at other page. That would be really obtrusive. There is a smart WordPress Widget: Gmail Player that can do this perfectly.

5. It is professional if the music is made just for your site, and not available anywhere: You must play original, customized and specially written theme for your sites. Professional and serious bloggers should have their own special theme written.

6. Play it only after the whole page is loaded: This will ensure that your site loading time is as usual.

My theme music is purely piano because my site is about innovative piano playing. Reload my homepage and you will hear it. Or play it here:

[audio:http://pianologist.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/theme_music.mp3]

If you find that it is appropriate to have a customized theme music written for your sites or blog, you can engaged us to write you a special one. Our rate is fairly reasonable, $10 for a 5 seconds clip in MP3 format written specially for your site. It is a one off pay and royalty free. Start branding your site and order “theme music for site” here.

Please give me your opinion about having theme music for you site at the comment.

If you want to learn more about writing theme music, consider the below resources:

music blog,theme music, writing music, making music, music for site, blog brand