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Sound Advice: Choosing the Right Music for Your Interactive Project
Introduction
With increasing connection speeds, the maturation of Flash and the overall growth of the online marketing industry, web designers and graphic artists are often finding themselves responsible for choosing music for their clients. While this is an exciting direction to explore as a creative, it can also quickly turn into "one-more-thing-to-do-before-my-deadline".

My company, BBM.net is a searchable database of music for websites and interactive projects. Since launching in 2001, we've worked closely with customers to help them choose and integrate the right piece of music for their Flash intro, Powerpoint presentation, homepage, online brochure, microsite…….the list goes on. And in that time we've found that designers generally get through a music-search much faster when they know the answers to the following three key questions about their project.

Contents
1. Do I Need Extra Sounds?
One designer came to us because he knew that a single music loop wouldn't be enough for his Flash site. He wanted his background music to change slightly as users browsed his portfolio and he wanted to assign melody notes to each menu item so that his audience would feel as though they were playing a musical instrument.

Almost of all of our music comes in Loop Package format, which is perfect for this kind of application. A typical BBM.net loop package features a main loop (8-15 seconds long), a breakdown loop (same loop with either the melody or drums removed) and additional short sounds that are designed to blend with the background music.

After searching our catalog, this designer settled on a piece called "Broken Wind"(#0087) as his favorite. He felt that the ambient, airy vibe of this track was the perfect way to impress users without distracting them.
2. How Do I Want My Audience to Feel About My Product?

Whenever I speak at conventions, I like to show one particular movie scene two consecutive times with only one difference between each time…..the music. You'd be amazed at how differently you feel about a character entering a room when there's spooky music playing in the background versus romantic music.

The best way to pick music from scratch is to boil your message down to one or two basic human emotions and go from there. We always recommend clients to go to our search page and do their first search by mood only. That way they can pleasantly discover that Latin music, for example, is just one of many ways to convey a feeling of "fun".

Once you've decided how your audience should feel about your product, you should keep an open mind as to what musical style will best convey that emotion; that kind of creative openness can really make your project stand out.
3. How Will I Integrate This Music Into My Site?

Any effective use of music in a website will require Flash at some level. At one end of the spectrum you have sites like the one mentioned above created entirely in Flash with music changing between scenes and rollover sounds triggered everywhere.

At the other end of the spectrum is simply embedding a .SWF into an existing html page and blending the colors so that your users never see the .,SWF, they only hear it. A good example of this can found on a splash page from an earlier version of BBM's site. On this page you'll hear a piece from our library called "The Room is Spinning" (#0037).

A great tutorial for this simple embedding method can be found here.
Creating Custom Music for Your Project

Recently I received a call from a customer service rep at an investment firm who was tasked to find music for her company's Flash intro. She had searched our online catalog and still couldn't find a piece of music that both sounded like Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, (her boss's favorite piece of music) and timed out perfectly with the animation they had already created. Clearly, something needed to be created from scratch.

While I think it's great we live in a world where companies are being empowered with these kind of decisions for the first time, I also sympathize with the individual who is suddenly wearing the shoes of an ad agency creative team. Having worked with ad agencies for years, I can tell you that the best creative directors usually don't know squat about music, but they certainly know how their audience should feel (see above) and they know the three rules about working with musicians.

3 Things You Should Know Before Hiring a Composer:
1. No Single Musician Is Right For Every Job
There are innumerable musical styles in the world, each having it's own set of nuances that makes it unique and interesting. Most professional composers I know have a deep knowledge of two, maybe three genres and pretty much wing it through everything else. Sometimes when you allow an artist you trust to stretch themselves in new directions you get amazing results.

Ask all prospective musicians for a demo of their previous work and make sure it contains something close to what your looking for. And that also goes for that friend of yours who's been tinkering around with Reason or Acid.
2. Give Yourself Options

Years ago, Madison Avenue came up with a system for getting original music that is positively brutal on the composers' egos (believe me, I know!), but great for clients. When choosing music for TV commercials, ad agencies will often create what's called a "demo fund" and pay two or three music companies a nominal fee to submit newly created music for the project. Each company is briefed on creative concept before starting. Once all the submissions are in, the agency picks a winner and pays that winner the balance of their normal fee.

Although it may seem expensive, this system simplifies things greatly for both agency and client, who usually have other things to worry about. There is absolutely no imagination or risk required of anyone to handle the music issue. Just pick choice A, B, or C and pay the bill. Done.
3. You Get What You Pay For

This is especially important for design firms to understand in a post-Napster world. Great music is not free. It requires time which costs money. It requires talent, which, as evidenced by any Kareoke contest, is still a rare commodity.

When creating custom website at BBM.net, we've found that any original soundtrack worth its salt requires a minimum of one day in the studio. Some projects are simple enough that they can be handled in a few hours, but as a rule of thumb, we've always felt that committing anything less than a day to a project kind of nullifies the whole point of original music in the first place. So a good rule of thumb to use when engaging any musician to work on your project is, "What's your day rate?".

Because of the different players in the market, the range of answers can be stunning. On one of end of the spectrum you'll find amateurs with all the latest software who are delighted to be paid at all. And on the other end you'll find industry pros who make their living doing episodic TV work and only occasionally dabble in the "interactive stuff".

We like to think of BBM.net as a hybrid. We try to maintain broadcast standards in our music, but e-commerce standards in our pricing and service.

There's an old saying about doing commercial work of any kind that goes "You can have it cheap, good, or fast……pick two". And that statement still holds water, but these days "fast" is already a given. So if you've chosen "good" as the second characteristic of your music, then do yourself a favor by applying old-fashioned decision making to new economy resources.
This article was written by Mike Bielenberg, founder and creative director for BBM.net
 
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