Submitting Audio Sitemaps?

[Ubique]

There are a number of pages on our website where Bands upload their latest tracks so visitors can listen to them. It occurred to me that maybe I am missing a trick and should submit an audio-sitemap.xml to Google.

However I can't seem to find any articles about it on Google Help, but know that video and image sitemaps are used. Does anyone know if audio sitemaps can be submitted and if they are of SEO value?

Website: http://goo.gl/CN0e5

[irvingw]

well video sitemaps help you rank for google video searches, and image sitemaps help you get indexed for google image searches. but for audio you have google play which is a paid mp3 model. so you can't search Google for mp3 files right? What information would be included in the sitemap?

[Ubique]

You can search Google for .mp3s and download them fairly easily.

Perhaps rich snippets might be the way to go for each Band profile page.... or I could just include them in sitemap.xls, but not sure if there would be a SERPs upside or not - even though we know search engines seem to love multimedia these days.

[irvingw]

I know you can download mp3s easily, but to get to them you need to visit URLs, and Google also acts upon DMCA claims and removed results from the index when a complaint is made.

It's not like you're optimizing a file like a PDF, your files are streaming right? and you're trying to get the user to visit the URL correct?

[Ubique]

Yes, that's correct - the music files are streaming and I would like to get the user to visit a given URL. That's why I was wondering about an audio sitemap initially, but can see the issues with it.