I was in a chat forum the other day and one of the members was complaining because she’d updgraded her tumblr theme but it broke her playlist. Which, you know this is the reason I use tumblr without ever going into people’s actual tumblr blogs. I let them load on my dashboard instead. Sure, I miss the fancier designs some people have on their tumblr blogs, but it also allows me to escape the music playlists that seem to infect tumblr.
Now, there are many reasons you don’t want to include music on a web site, whether it’s tumblr or another site. Music takes longer to load and can slow down your site. That might discourage people but even the delay probably won’t discourage them as much as the actual music will. See, music tends to be a very personal choice and there is no way of knowing if your choice will match that of your viewer. But even if you go for a neutral choice or tell me that your music perfectly matches the theme of the site, have you considered that I might not be viewing your site in a location where I’m free to play music?
I’ve worked in corporate environments with everyone in tiny cubes. There is nothing blocking sound from traveling from one cube to another. So, if I hit a site that plays music, my coworkers know I’m browsing web sites. Actually, we had a couple of corporate sites that did that and my coworkers could tell me exactly which sites I was working on just by the sounds when I opened them. To stop annoying them, I had to turn off my sound, which meant I could review videos or other site elements that were supposed to work. So, then I had to use headphones to review content.
If I hit a site that played music when I had the sound on and I hadn’t plugged the headphones in, my most likely action was to panic close the browser the moment I heard the first bit of sound. I didn’t know what a random site I was supposed to review was going to broadcast to everyone around me and I didn’t want to take the risk. I still hate websites with music because of that.