A client of mine wants to build a site that has ongoing background music playing — I know back in the day the solution would either be to build an all-Flash site or a frames-based site so that the music would continue playing wherever the user would go within the site. But all-Flash is not going to be practical in this case and using frames I feel is such an outdated and disadvantageous-to-SEO thing to do.

Anybody have any ideas that could resolve this issue?

I was thinking that maybe the music plays on the homepage by default, and there is a link to open up the music player in a new window. Music stops playing when the new window opens, and does not play be default on any other page in the site.

Yes the only practical way is to open a player up in a new window/popup. Ideally you would not start any audio when the site first opens but leave it as a choice for the visitor.

bluedreamer - 22 May 2008 02:45 PM

Ideally you would not start any audio when the site first opens but leave it as a choice for the visitor.

I have to echo bluedreamer here.  My ‘day gig’ is in with a non-profit arts org, and I am in the process of gathering marketing info on the people coming in for our next season…I find myself getting more and more irritated with music starting as soon as the page loads, as you find a lot with musicians who had sites designed circa 1999 by flash only devs….Consequently, I’ve always done my best to talk people out of that…(100% success rate so far…yay!)

ok…..    </rant>

Sorry, but just an opinion….so please take it for what it’s worth because I know it does work well for a lot of people!! 

I am interested to hear what you do with it, so please keep us posted! 

-greg

When I have clients that want music playing on there site, I give them a big fat, “NO! Its not 1997 anymore”. 

We did a Flash game for the band Pendulum recently, and one of the first requests we had back from the client (Warner Music) was to stop it from autoplaying the song in the background and make it the users choice to turn it on.

http://www.wimpyplayer.com/ has some decent options if they absolutely must have music.  But definitely don’t have it play by default.

Michael Boyink - 23 May 2008 09:10 AM

http://www.wimpyplayer.com/ has some decent options if they absolutely must have music.  But definitely don’t have it play by default.

I second that, WimpyPlayer is a lovely bit of stuff!

@OP - If you want to see it in action with optional “popup, listen and surf” have a look at

@bluedreamer

Very nice!

-ga

I suppose you could load the content via Ajax or using a a slider. That way they can have their ceaseless music without interruption and visitors can still access the content (even with one finger in their ear).

I had someone ask for that too (incessant music) about a year ago, and I spend months ducking their calls.  They had other ideas that were equally as fabulous.