A rant about your music, but not an attack.

It started when I was myspace obsessive, on that site in every spare moment I had. The option to have a song play on your profile was introduced. Great, I like music, I like to share my musical interest. Not great, the song started automatically when loading the page. My problem with this comes in two parts. First, If I'm on my computer, I'm already listening to my own music. When other music starts playing on top of mine, its hugely annoying and frankly, a little rude. No one likes to be interrupted or spoken over. Second, in my opinion, the majority of the population has relatively lousy taste in music. Keep in mind, this is only and opinion I have. Myspace eventually introduced the option to not play the music until you click play. Great. Fantastic. Thanks myspace for solving that problem.

Now that I've moved on from the myspace obsession to blogging, I've started encountering this problem again, alarmingly more and more frequently. When I'm leisurely reading blogs as I listen to my music, I'm constantly being surprised with other music interrupting my own music. Most commonly, Its from a playlist.com widget. Great. I think its fine that you like music and want to share your favorite songs with your friends/readers. Perfect. I'm not presuming to tell you to stop doing so.

Here is what I think about the widget. I know nothing about playlist.com, but it appears that there is not an option to not automatically start playing music when the page loads. I find this very agitating. I really hope that if this is indeed an option, you will all take a minute to select this option for your playlist if you have one. If not, this is a plead with playlist.com to make this option available. Honestly, without that option, it almost makes me want to move along to some other blog/site without reading what you have to say.

I've been having this particular rant on my mind for a few years now. I've put off sharing it for the reason that I've been worried it would come across as an attack to anyone with music on their website, page, blog, etc. This is not my intent. I simply want to share my point of view so that you might see why some people might not like it. Let me compare it to video ads that start playing on a website you're visiting. Annoying, right?

Counter-point anyone?