Several studies have proved that radio is a very effective channel for the advertising of products. People can be listening to the radio for entertainment, be it the latest music or favorite shows, and within these programs, many advertisements on products and services are played.
While this worked very well for many decades, radio advertising does not hold the prominent place that it once did, usurped by both television and more recently by the Internet. If audio advertising is going to continue to be used, different methods need to be employed.
Another frontier that has been conquered is streaming music on websites. When music first started becoming available on the Internet, it was only available as downloadable MP3s. A website hosting downloadable music could attract large amounts of traffic by having this ability. The more visitors a website has, the more sales it can potentially produce.
Illegal music downloads cost artists, musicians, and record companies millions of dollars in lost revenues. Among these solutions was internet music streaming. Streamed music, unlike downloadable music, does not allow files to be downloaded. It thus protects the copyright of the artists and record labels.
Here’s how you can add streaming audio to your site:
Stream Radio Programs: Put a radio program from some of the online radio stations onto your site or blog. Most free affiliate programs do offer radio content for streaming, giving you fresh audio content each time the visitor comes to your site. All that you need to do is join an internet radio station and embed their link on your blog or website.
Streaming MP3 Files Stream MP3 files by uploading them to a server and linking to them from your site. When users click the link, a media player will open and play the file. Since users can save the MP3 file be sure you have the appropriate permissions to do so to avoid legal trouble.
Create and Stream Playlists: You can also set up your music in playlists using M3U files. This is a little more complicated, but does allow for a continuous stream of music. Here’s a quick tutorial:
Save your MP3 or WMA files on your server or other location that’s accessible. Make sure the files have the proper extensions.
- Open a text editor and create a playlist by typing each file path of the tracks that are to be added. Set “http://” before the file, specify the extension of the file.
- Save with an extension .m3u to the playlist.
- Upload the .m3u file to your server or music directory.
- Paste the link to your playlist directly into your HTML. Set options to have your playlist play automatically, and other parameters which you want set, either by the visitor or by the setting of the visiting browser, for every visitor. For example, you can configure volume control or play/pause.
- This playlist content streams automatically in your site once embedded. Users can skip or replay tracks in the media player controls.
This method also enables you to increase user experience and site traffic. You may further advertise products by customizing the music played at your site; this also involves product-related recordings that may even increase product awareness.
If you do not feel like writing HTML code, you may have to resort to hiring programmers. Streaming audio can assist in drawing more visitors and selling more merchandise from your site.
