Playing Music In An Email

Yes, I know. It sounds utterly impossible, and to the best of my knowledge, it is. However I have a client who really wants to see it happen. In the spirit of pushing the boundarie

Solution 1:

A tiny minority case

Upload the music to youtube, link it in your email and send it to a gmail account. Gmail should automatically pick it up and you should be able to play it from right within your email account.

http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/iland/2010/02/video-in-gmail-design-tests-and.html

Also, Outlook 2003 used to allow background music in email. As far as I know, this feature was removed in 2007

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/add-sound-to-an-e-mail-message-HA001118232.aspx

Solution 2:

Explain to him that each email client is different --not every email client is able to play sound and you can probably offer to build an email client [for a staggering sum] which plays music. ;)

He will agree.

Let alone music, even the display capabilities of the email clients are vastly different. There is an interesting comparison in the link below.

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/

YouTube embedding would only work with Gmail and a few webmail providers. Flash is a no go specially when it comes to mass email.

Being able to say no for something which is not possible in reality is a virtue.

If you are using any hacks such as the ones suggested to play music, be honest to the client and explain him that it is possible only for a small number of users that you have control over.

Solution 3:

You could use a small flash file in a html email.

other methods can be found here