P2P ringtones

Brad Zutaut, president of Xingtone, is quoted in The New York Times saying: "Ring tones are not going to save the music industry. People have stopped paying $15 for albums. How are they going to start paying a dollar for a 30-second piece of bing-bing-bong?"

Zutaut believes what he says as he sells software that allows users to turn digital music files they already own into ring tones for their own cellphones for free, and share with others on Xingtones. The software currently suports Sprint PCS Vision enabled phones (Samsung, Sanyo, Hatichi, LG). Will this be the next ringtone Napster?

Sometimes the ring tone is even more popular than the CD

One of the most popular songs in the country last week, "Crazy in Love" by Beyoncé Knowles and featuring Jay-Z, was not released only on compact disc and to radio stations. It was also sent to cellphone users who wanted to download it as their ring tone, according to The New York Times.

"Dance-hall reggae artist Sean Paul, who records for the Warner Music Group, recently sold more copies of a synthesized digital snippet of his song "Get Busy" than CD singles of the same song. The snippet cost $2.50, compared with about $3 for a CD single.

Some 50 to 60 percent of all cellphones in the United States can download ring tones, according to Alex Slawsby, an analyst of mobile devices at IDC Research. All major carriers offer the tones, and the market is expected to grow in part because virtually all new phones can receive them. Sometimes, an image of the artist appears on the phone as the music plays.

Cellphone users made 4.8 million purchases of ring tones in the United States in 2002, according to IDC, producing revenue of $16.6 million. The Yankee Group, another research firm, predicts that the revenue will be far higher this year, at about $50 million. Verizon Wireless, for instance, says 2.5 million of its customers are buying ring tones each month.

These numbers have not been lost on the major record labels, which earn royalties for the use of their master recordings. The labels want to push the ring-tone market toward recorded music and away from synthesized ring tones, or computerized versions of songs. When songs are synthesized, only the songwriter is paid a licensing fee".

Surveys Show Users Looking to Their Mobile Phones for Music

Consumers who use text messagin on their mobile phones represent an important market opportunity for recording companies and other segments of the music industry. This is supported by independent industry research and by recent online polls conducted with the world's largest mobile community -- approximately 10 million registered users in over 200 countries. Today's poll can be viewed at teenage portal sms.ac.

"60.2% of 35,476 SMS.ac members who responded to an August poll indicated they would be more likely to attend a concert if they received sample music, information and special offers to their mobile phones".

Loudeye Launches Sound Effects Catalog of Rich Media Ringtones

Loudeye Corp., a leading provider of services for the management, promotion and distribution of digital media, has announced a sound effects rich media ringtone catalog including more than 300 CDs and over 50,000 sounds. Sound effects include everything from human and animal noises, military effects, cartoon sounds, and sirens, to old-fashioned telephone rings.

Content in the catalog was licensed to Loudeye from New York-based
Valentino Production Music & Sound Effects Library, publisher of more than 70,000 sound effects for the TV and feature film industries, according to a company press release.

This is the second time Valentino Production has been mentioned in Ringtonia, recently with an entry entitled World famous speech excerpts from J.F.K., Nixon, Reagan, Lou Gehrig and others, as ringtones.

Nokia, Taito Teaming Up in Mobile Phone Karaoke

Nokia Corp and Taito Corp will collaborate in providing karaoke functions to mobile-phone handsets sold overseas. The Taito system enables mobile phones to receive karaoke music and display the lyrics on their screens. Words change color with the progress of the song, reports NeAsia.

Other Karaoke applications have developed around the world, Irish company Alatoo and a Japanese ringtone provider allows subscribers to 'practice' songs. This service has been widened to include images, and users can send up to four photos which can be 'watched' while the audio clip is playing. cf karaoke ringtones, in Ringtonia.com.

Cellphones join the orchestra

A German conductor is incorporating mobile phone ringtones into his orchestra's performances. Bernd Kremling, who runs the Drumming Hands orchestra in Wuerzburg, used ringtones ranging from Bach and Mozart to Old McDonald Had a Farm, according to Ananova.

Some phones are set off by the musicians but others have to be rung from backstage at the right moment to set off their sound.

For more on cell phone concerts performed around the world, check out Golan Levin's collection online, called An Information Catalogue of Mobile Phone Artworks.

Ringtone music piracy flourishes in Asia

According to Sify News, the phenomenal growth of Asia's mobile phone download industry has spawned widespread music piracy and copyright owners are waging a tough battle to claim royalties in a region sorely lacking respect for intellectual property.

Japan and Korea make the best efforts to ensure ringtone vendors tow the line, followed by Singapore and Malaysia. As for countries like Thailand and Phillipines, they are almost entirely not licensed.

Music industry cries foul on ringtones

Just a year after their introduction in India, ringtones are currently ruling the mobile data services space. They rake in money – the biggest beneficiary being the service providers and number of downloads growing exponentially. But the music industry is not too happy with the present state of affairs, according to CIOL.

"It's only in India that the mobile service providers get the lion's share of the profits and the music industry gets a small share", says a source from the music industry. Mobile service providers in India get a sizable 60% of the revenue. For every downloaded ringtone worth Indian Rupees 7 ($ 0,15), on an average, Indian Rupees 5 ($ 0,11) goes to the service provider and the music company gets a paltry Rs 1.50 ($ 0,03). And this, just as the music industry is beleaguered by plummeting sales of music CDs and tapes.

The music industry's grouse does not end there. Copyright issues regarding ringtones is another cause of wrangling between the music companies and portals. Piracy of cassettes and CDs causes music companies a loss of up to $6 billion per year and ringtones only add to its woes.

Is the music industry's grouse justified? "Well, they have no right to complain. We provide the infrastructure to bring this service to cell phone users. They just sit back and enjoy the royalty," says Sean Dexter, MD, Spice Telecom.

NTT DoCoMo to launch ringback tones

According to Techdirt, NTT DoCoMo will be launching a ring-back tone service. The iMode Melody Call service will launch in September with 3000 available tunes.

For more on ringbacks, check out this special category in Ringtonia.com.

Sprint PCS gets name ringers

If you thought ringtones were annoying, how about a phone which calls you by your first name, saying “Amy… Amy… Amy… Oh, Amy… Pick up the phone.” According to Mobile Tracker, Sprint PCS is offering just that. They call them “name ringers”, a collection of ringtones made just for people with common names. (It only works for common names as they have to make the ringtones, it's not a voice synth).

Loudeye lands Japanese ring-tone reseller

According to Loudeye Corp, who will provide digital media services for T.O.S. Co. Ltd., a ring-tone provider in Japan, published reports indicate an average of 110 million ring-tones were downloaded each month in Japan throughout 2002. [Puget Sound Business Journal via Moco News].

Sell ringtones on your website and start generating revenue!

Something to think about, a way of generating revenue on your website by becoming a ringtone provider.

MMS3's "Ringtone Affiliate Program", provides Web Editors with mobile content to sell on their website, branded in their own domain name.

A new service called "Ringtone Abuser" sends your customers a new ringtone or an unreleased ringtone, as enticement to make new requests.

MMS3 offers 1000's of monophonic and polyphonic ringtones, over 11,000 operator logos, over 1000 picture messages, animated screensavers, group logos, secret sms, send sms service.

Ringtones quiz

Have you been paying attention? Find out by testing your knowledge of Ringtone trivia with this quiz!

Mobile media firm banks on footballers' voicemails

Incite Holdings hopes that voicemails from football stars such as the recent Spurs signing, Bobby Zamora will entice fans to subscribe to its new (((on!))) service.

The mobile media specialist provides information on football team selections and tactics as well as messages from players and coaches. Fans subscribing to the Incite service received a message from Zamora only minutes after he had signed up to the club.

Incite has signed up more than 5,000 subscribers and is aiming for a total of 1.6m across 50 brands by 2006, according to The Guardian.

Ringtones raise money for schools

Mobile technology developer iTouch has joined forces with MySchool, a South African loyalty program developed for schools, to offer ringtones, picture messages, logos and screensavers to their learners, while earning them cash at the same time.

For each download requested by a student, a portion of the fee is paid over to the learning organisation. Each school has its own ID code to make sure the money goes where it should.

Within minutes of launching the programme at the University of the Western Cape, over 1 000 minutes of calls to download ringtones had been clocked, according to ITWeb .

This is the second time I've heard of fund raising through ringtone revenues, the first being a campaign in the Philippines, to benefit a half-way house and counseling center for female victims and survivors of violence. cf Downloading ringtones to raise money .

And in in June 2001, for nationwide "Red Nose Day" in Australia, to help raise money for research into Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Australian telecommunications giant Telstra offered its clients -- not a ringtone -- but a Red Nose logo and donated US$0.95 to SIDS Australia for each logo that was downloaded.

For more on fund raising with cell phones, check out textually.org's SMS and Charities category.

Ring Tones Promise Labels Strong Revenue

Consulting firm Strategy Analytics is predicting that by the end of 2003, the worldwide market for ring tones should reap $2 billion in revenue. More exciting still is firm's prediction that those figures should almost double to about $4 billion by 2008, with the U.S. market accounting for close to 20% of that amount, reports Moco News.

MatrixM, a ringtone provider with a google-like approach

Unlike most ringtone providers who's pages are crowded with lists of the latest hits to download, MatrixM' s website stands out for it's clean-google like approach and search functions. The first level allows for a tune search by title or by artist, and on the answer page, a listing of music genres appear on the left hand side.

More than just a ringtone provider, MatrixM offers a community space to upload photos, a games section, a forum and a novel video feature, which offers a free utility to download called «mobile eye». It allows mobile users to upload a webcam link directly to the site which a cellphone can connect to for viewing.

Strange...

Though it seems fairly self explanatory to me, how to download ringtones from a website, it could be that it's not so obvious to everyone, if the comments Ringtonia gets is anything to go by.

Of the 3 wireless English blogs I edit, plus the one on SMS in French, Ringtonia is by far the blog which gets the most feedback, and many of the comments ask (demand really) that I send them a ringtone to their cell phone number.

Other comments are so obscure that I can only wonder if this blog is not some sort of mail box for illicit groups or terrorists... See for yourself:

-- want to have Ave Maria ringtone

-- hai

-- ullu

-- monkey "i want a banna" human "monkeys can't talk"

-- Tung .....

-- nhgbvyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyvhtttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttthyy
yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

-- never worry about jail or rail thankur joo dargaya wo margaya

Ringtone musicians - a success story

New technology allows for creative job opportunities and striving/starving musicians should consider this success story written up in The Express and Star. It sure beats waiting on tables until you get your lucky break.

Two partners, Iain Kerr and Jason Shaw founded a home-based venture whcih they called Melodi Ltd, creating ringtones for the UK and Australian market and since their launch in April 2002, their company has gone from strength to strength.

Both men are musicians and trained in London with mobile phone providers. As the demand grew, the company moved into offices in Lichfield, and Iain Kerr left his full-time job in local radio. Now the company has four full-time musicians.

Related stories posted previously in Ringtonia.com:

Soundonweb is another successful company, providing ringtones to the SonyEricsson assembly line. Twenty five professional musicians work on this alone. cf Behind the ringtone scene.

And Martin Plante who is Canadian, is the most famous ringtone composer, writing original ringtones for Cell Phones about.com and is touted as "the world's first ringtone artist to compose music exclusively for cell phones". cf Original Ringtones By Martin Plante.

Universal Music to allow Sprint PCS to offer ring tones

Universal Music Group signed an agreement with Sprint PCS allowing the carrier to offer downloadable ring tones to its PCS Vision customers, adding the ring tones will be clips from actual recorded songs, according to
Moco News. For more, read the company statement.

Changes of note

Victor Keegan, editor for The Guardian, has written an interesting article on how the Internet revolutionises the ways in which songs can be distributed and that the music industry must adapt or fade away.

Keagan thinks the ringtones market is particularly interesting, because it turns traditional economic theory on its head.

"People are prepared to pay more for less: up to £3.50 per download for a clip from a whole song that can now be downloaded from the web for 75p. You would think that the ringtone from a song would be given away free as an incentive to buy the whole track.

If anything, it is the other way round, and recalls another example of inversionary economics that I have never been able to understand.

Ringtones, of course, like branded T-shirts, are bought as street-savvy symbols of where we are coming from, a public display of self-identification. For that, apparently, no price is too high.

There is another reason why people pay high prices for ringtones: an existing, and painless, payment system. You download, and don't feel the cost until your monthly telephone bill, in which the download is lost among numerous other payments, comes in."

But Keegan thinks this might all come to an end, "this will have a number of interesting consequences. Firstly, the £3.50 ringtone will die a speedy digital death. No one, surely, is going to pay £3.50 for a track that they can download for 75p and then use the opening bars as a ringtone".

Ringtones can lengthen the shelf-life of a song

Another good thing about ringtones and a tidbit that should make record labels snap to attention, picked up from The Mirror:

"Ringtones can lengthen the shelf-life of a song. The Sugababes' Round Round, for instance, hasn't featured in the Top 10 since last September but is at No.4 in the ringtone chart. This week's No.1 tone - the theme from TV comedy Phoenix Nights - has never been a single".

"Premature to say ringtones will overtake CD single sales"

According to the British Phonographic Institute, which represents record labels, commenting on the widely reported prediction that sales of mobile phone ringtones could soon overtake CD singles: "It's a bit premature to say ringtones will overtake CD single sales."

Retail sales for CD singles in the UK were £ 157million last year - down from £ 189 million in 1998. Downloading a ringtone costs around £ 1 less than a CD single.

Mike Short, chairman of the Mobile Data Association, said: "We know that six to eight million mobile phone users have downloaded a ringtone but some people have done it many times. That still leaves around 42 million users who haven't downloaded a ringtone yet, which offers huge potential", reports The Mirror

Cherie Blair ringtone?

You may have seen it on the news, Cherie Blair stepping in for her husband who was asked to sing in front of a class of school children in Beijing last month. Rumors flew that her impromptu rendition of The Beatles' "When I'm 64" had been remixed and was the latest hit in nights clubs. According to this article in the BBC, one club at least has definitely played it on the dance floor.

So what's next? a Cherie Blair ringtone of course. If anyone hear's of one, please let me know.

Trivia: The origin of the "Nokia Ringtone"

Here's some trivia from the same article in The Guardian as previous post entitled Ringtones: The new currency of cool.

For those of us without a musical ear and who have not recognized the score, the famous and generally considered annoying Nokia ringtone is actually a 13 note rendering of Francisco Tarrega's masterpiece, Gran Vals. Tarrega was a 19th-century Spanish musician considered by aficionados to be the father of the modern classical guitar.

Ringtones: The new currency of cool

An interesting commentary in The Guardian on yesterday's headlines on how ringtones sales are expected to overtake sales of CD singles by next year.

"For technological historian Jon Agar, the fact that ringtones have become such a fad both in the playground and at the watercooler - and a constantly updated tune, among some teenagers, the new currency of cool - shows, once again, how it is the users of technology who call the shots. "Like fashion in clothes, it's another way of expressing individuality, and this time, expressing it to anyone within earshot," he points out. "In that sense it communicates better than fashionable clothes, which might take a trained eye to spot."

This brings to mind an interesting entry a while ago by Techdirt, on Psychologist Graham Wilson's theory that your choice of a ringtone is more revealing about yourself than you think ... cf What Your Ringtone Says About You.

Phone tones 'to beat CD singles'

Mobile phone ringtone sales are set to overtake CD singles, according to new figures - providing a much-needed "shot in the arm" for the music industry.

The sales of ringtones - which are more profitable to record companies than singles - are expected to rise 60% this year, said the Mobile Data Association (MDA).

An estimated £70m ($ 112m) of ringtones will be sold in 2003 - up from £40m ($ 64m) in 2002, according to the BBC.

Cell phone music plans have labels listening

Dick Wingate is president of BPOD Network Inc., and he's trying to talk the labels into selling downloadable songs for what he thinks will be the next hot platform — cell phones, according to Sunspot.

Wingate expects a deal with a major mobile phone company that would offer downloadable songs within two months, potentially reaching millions of customers in more than 30 states. The downloads would be made available through DotPhoto Inc, a digital media software company and sell to cell phone users for about $2 apiece.

classic text-message voting to song downloads important part of revenue of Pop Idol licensing

Pop Idol has plunged into the licensing and merchandising market with the same raw enthusiasm as one of the show's aspiring stars, according to The Guardian, with nearly 30% of its revenue comes from the merchandising and licensing of its show brands. The Idol brand will be the biggest TV licensed brand this Christmas," says Simon Spaulding, CEO of Fremantle Media Licensing Worldwide.

Amongst the merchanding offered, everything from makeup (including a hair gel), and a full range of clothing, to a songbook, a PlayStation 2 game, an electronic dance mat, a karaoke interactive recording studio and even a perfume). There will also be a whole swathe of interactive services using mobile phones, from classic text-message voting to song downloads.

World famous speech excerpts from J.F.K., Nixon, Reagan, Lou Gehrig and others, as ringtones

Versaly Entertainment, a wireless new media company focused on creating, publishing and distributing broad-based entertainment to mobile phones, announced today it has signed an agreement with Valentino Production Music, Inc., a publisher of over 70,000 sound effects for the TV and Feature Film industries. Versaly will produce, sell and distribute hundreds of their sound effects for use as mobile phone ringtones.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “When you hear most any sound other than a human voice on television, radio, in the movies or theatre, there's a good chance that it was developed in the Valentino Studios.” Drawing from 70 years of Valentino Movie experience, Versaly will bring to market the most popular sound effects including:

-- Humorous “human noises”;
-- Domestic, zoo and exotic animal sounds;
-- Familiar household, background, environmental and office sounds;
-- Laughter, audience applause and crowd cheers;
-- Airplane, boat, car and other vehicle and machinery sounds; and
-- World famous speech excerpts from J.F.K., Nixon, Reagan, Lou Gehrig and others.

Versaly will distribute Valentino ringtones through the ForFones website and other co-branded web-to-phone sites, such as C/net.com. Additionally, these ringtones will be offered through Versaly's 40+ wireless carrier relationships in the USA and around the world.