When you’re first building a website, you usually want to make it an experience for your user. You want it to be awe-inspiring, enveloping, amazing. You want the user to browse your site for hours, enjoying every moment.

How do you achieve that encompassing web experience, you ask?

Definitely NOT by having music autoplay as soon as the user loads your page, the same song looping forever, un-mute-able, un-pause-able.

Why is This an Issue?

Autoplaying music might be a great addition to webpages, except for the following three truths about Internet users.

Users generally…

• Have their own music going while they surf
• Have more than one tab open at any given time
• Want to be able to customize their web experience, i.e., with pause buttons, links to change font size, etc.

Autoplaying music, with no pause/stop buttons visible anywhere on the page, thus offends users on three levels. Not only is there mysterious music playing, usually at an ungodly volume, clashing with the music you’ve got going, but you’ve got to hunt through all your tabs to find and eradicate the source of the annoying sound. And when you finally find the maddening site, you can’t pause the music, stop it, or even lower the volume–it’s just THERE.

The only cure for autoplaying music is to leave the site entirely, and most users will be all too happy to click that Close button. Thus, autoplaying music loses your visitors almost as soon as they hit your page–not what you want, as a designer and developer!

Are There Any Ways to Gently Incorporate Music into Your Webpage?

There is a trusted way to make music on a webpage infinitely more bearable–make sure you have a visible audio player (complete with pause, volume, and stop buttons), and make sure the music doesn’t autostart when the user loads the page.

Draw attention to this little audio module with special formatting, and leave it at that. Your users will find it and use it if they so choose–all you have to do is leave the choice up to them. That, my friends, will make your visitors so much happier than an uncontrollable loop of tinny music drilling its way into their brains.