Ringtone search comes in first

Yahoo! has released its list of most searched items and Ringtones come in first in the top 10 "Tech Searches" category, followed by 2. Digital Cameras and 3. Mobile Phones.

Topping the list of all searches is the file-sharing application KaZaA, reports geek.com.

Ring In the New Year

Time has an article on ringtones in the US, giving:

- Industry figures: "Research firm IDC estimates that Americans spent more than $57 million on ring tones in 2003, up from $16 million in 2002.

- Costs of downloading a ringtone onto your cell phone: "between $1 and $2.50 each which are added to your monthly service bill".

- Where to go to browse and preview tones before you buy. The article mentions Zingy.com and other sites worth checking :ringtonejukebox.com, midiringtones.com, craze.com, Modtone for the popular silent tone from and Xingtone.com to create your own ringtone.

Company song a smash hit on the charts

The corporate song of a Japanese demolition firm, Nihon Break Kogyo, broke into 22nd place of the nation's most influential music charts, according to The Mail&Guardian Online.

"It is the first time that a "shaka", or corporate anthem, has made the charts, according to Oricon, a major Tokyo music information provider.

The tune has already been made into ringtones for mobile phones and two major Japanese karaoke song distributors are set to add it to their song books in January".

The Year in Review and What's Ahead

MERRY CHRISTMAS

I'll be offline for a few days, until Monday December 29.

Best wishes to all of you and your families.

In the meantime, here's a round-up in 10 chapters of mobile news for 2003 and a look at what's ahead in 2004:

2003: Cell Phones - for so much more than just talking

2003: The figures that counted

2003: Cell Phones' Bad Rap

2003: SMS, good for the soul

2003: Some outstanding SMS Services

2003: How people are using camera phones

2003: Best SMS and Camera phone news coverage

2003: Ringtone Medley

2003: Favorite companies

What to look out for in 2004

Alejandro Sanz ringtones on Verizonwireless

Verizon Wireless and Warner Music Group have announced an agreement that will give Verizon Wireless customers exclusive rights to download music and images from Alejandro Sanz's latest 2004 Grammy-nominated album "No Es Lo Mismo".

"A Madrid native, Sanz is the top selling artist in Spain's history with over 19 million albums sold worldwide, according to a press release published by PR Newswire.

Christmas ringtone carols

Looking for Christmas music for your cell phone?, check out MIDIRingTones's selection of standard and polyphonic ringtones. From "Jingle Bell Rock" to "Hark, The Herald Angels Sing".

2003: Ringtone Medley

For Textually 2003 - The Year in Review , here is a roundup of this year's ringtone highlights, some random stats, innovative ideas and new technologies that emerged, what's coming next and original tones that made headline news.

Random stats:

According to the Mobile Data Association, $120.7 million worth of ringtones will be sold globally in 2003, up from $69 million last year. Ringtones now account for $50 million in annual revenue according to the Yankee Group or 2 billion in revenue, according to Consulting firm Strategy Analytics. And reggae star Sean Paul's hit single "Get Busy" sold more ring tones than CD singles, some $400,000 worth. To be honest, I find it very difficult to get a handle on figures in this industry, as numbers seem to vary from survey to survey, so the above is really to be taken with a grain of salt - though they all come from reliable sources.

So numbers aside, here is textually's selection of this year's ringtone highlights:

-- Urban World Wireless and the Mobile Entertainment Forum, announced the «First «Ringtone of the Year Award», honoring Rap Artist 50 Cent of Interscope Records.

-- In what I believe to be a world first, an artist tied up with a handset manufacturer for the launch of a new album. The special edition Nokia 3300 (in black of course) came with the entire "Black Album" preloaded on a multimedia card.

-- Nominee ringtones of the MTV awards, were available on the MTVringtones.com website. From Best Song and Best Video to Best Male and Best Newcomer, there was a ringtone to match every nomination in every category.

-- Related to the above, viewers across Europe last Fall were able for the first time to download their favourite contestant's song as a ringtone during the Junior Eurovision Song Contest in Copenhagen.

-- Illusionist David Blaine - who endured starvation suspended from a crane by the River Thames in a glass box for 44 days - was flash mobbed as he entered his final week of confinment. People rang their mobile phone together at exactly 7.44 pm and then chanted "what goes up, must come down" at Blaine."

-- An innovative fund raising campaign was launched in the Philippines to help the cause of battered women and to raise money - by dowloading a ringtone.

-- Ringtones were offered as a gift-with-purchase in Brunei's most popular gourmet coffee café, CoffeeZone.

-- An experimental live concert was held at the annual Ars Electronica festival, in Linz, Austria where performer Tim Didymus conducted a live concert featuring music and sounds generated entirely on-the-fly from a mobile phone application.

-- The Hamburg Kunsthalle was the venue for a musical event dubbed "Wählt die Signale" (Dial the Signals), a radio concert for 144 mobile phones.

-- Mini ringtones for downloading are starting to appear on websites, not for voice calls but for incoming text messages.

-- A popular song, "Crazy in Love" by Beyoncé 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 ringtone.

-- The new Ricky Martin album made it's debut in South Korea, on cellphones, six days before the release worldwide. South Koreans were able to download cuts from the CD to their mobile phones.

-- Warner Bros, launched an opt-in Marketing campaign by SMS, in advance of the release of Madonna's new album. Subscribers received an SMS and a downloadable sound clip.

-- An generally, throughout the entire year, record labels entered deals with wireless carriers and other companies to promote their artists, selling the rights to their recordings, in the hope of driving CD sales and, down the road, direct sales of songs over mobile phones.

Here are some of the innovative ideas and new technologies that emerged this year, enabling users to download real music or listen to their cell phones in new ways:

-- Nokia came out with the 3300, it's first handset able to play "True Tones" - real music played as ringtones - containing an MP3 player, FM stereo and a digital recorder.

-- Shazam , best known for it's music recognition "tagging" technology launched two new services: «SongMail», allowing users to send a 30-second song clip to a friend's mobile, and «Tag a Trac», a service enabling users to purchase the ringtones of the track they 'tagged'.

-- Karaoke applications offered by Japanese ringtone providers, allowed mobile users to sing-along.

-- Motorola took tune technology one step further this year with the launch of «MotoMixer», a feature that lets phone users mix their own ringtones.

-- «True Tones», a new format for ringtones, enables users to use real audio clips as a ring signal, moving away from the original beeps and Midi files of older phones.

-- Xingtone.com developed software which converts MP3 files to ringtones and allows users to make their cell phone ring with any piece of real music or any voice or recorded sound.

-- Cellphone entertainment website Zingy, offered an application allowing mobile users to sing their own favorite tune then convert it into a ringtone.

-- Psiloc Real Vision is a new application which allows mobile users to assign videos to contacts that are then played when that contact rings them. Effectively giving video ringtones.

And coming up soon:

-- Mobile song-swapping technology from major music labels.

-- Ring back tones - a service which replaces the common, non-distinctive "ring ring" sound callers hear when calling someone, with music selections, celebrity voices or amusing sounds.

Some original tones that made headlines this year:

-- Award winning Retro Ringtones offered a catalogue of voice tones including great lies of history, operatic arias and robotic voices.

-- Modtones announced the launch of the silent ringtone - which made alot of noise in the press.

-- The British Library 's offered a catalogue of animal noises made in the wild.

-- The Royal Opera announced ringtones themed around particular operas and ballets.

-- "Bombs Over Baghdad" was the latest song to be embraced as a pro-war anthem.

-- Modtone's flatulence ringtone was a huge hit, downloaded by thousands as soon as it was released in May.

-- Voices of sumo wrestling stars were offered as mobile voice tones.

-- Different Sounds offered an interesting selection of sound tones; bubble, electric typewriter, fax tone, immediate car break and a personal favorite, ice cream cart coming.

Jay-Z's "black phone"

In what I believe to be a world first, an artist has tied up with a handset manufacturer for the launch of a new album.

Rap artist Jay-Z has tied up with Nokia for his new album, according to SOHH.com via Moco News.

"The special edition Nokia 3300 (black of course) will come with the entire "Black Album" preloaded on a multimedia card. The 3300 also comes equipped with wallpaper and ring tones that sound like real music and listed owners will receive weekly text messages and monthly voice messages from Jay-Z himself". How cool is that?

"Radio Colette" Ringtone

Trend sending boutique Colette, located on fashionable rue St Honoré, where Parisians and foreigners in-the-know go cool hunting - for an Pucci iPod case, Dinh Van's handcuff bracelets, a Daft Punk collector box or order their very own custom «Be a Bag» - can now buy a mobile card with an exclusive ringtone called "Radio Colette", in mono or polyphonic version, as well as 2 wallpaper color images of Colette's trademark Caperino and Peperone dogs for downloading as cell phone screen wallpaper.

The company behind this innovative idea is one of my favorites, Parisian based SeeMySMS, led by Alexandra de Waresquiel, who single handedly is raising the quality level of mobile content thanks to various projects with contemporary artists, authors and fashion designers.

Downloading animal-noise ringtones for a good cause

Vodafone Live! supports the world's oldest conservation group, Fauna and Fora International (FFI) with wildlive.

Users can download animal-noise ringtones, wildlife and landscape pictures and enter competitions, receive news alerts and create mobile communities.

All revenues generated by people using the services will be donated by Vodafone to FFI. [Mobile Today]

Latino ringtones on AT&T Wireless

Faith West, and Wireless Latin Entertainment announced today that they will provide AT&T Wireless customers with Latin mobile entertainment content. The new ringtones and graphics can be purchased through a downloadable application dubbed "Latin Garage." [Yahoo PR News]

"According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) shipments of Latin music CDs increased 1.7 percent in the first six months of 2003 despite most all other genres reporting decreases."

AT&T Wireless Rings Up Loudeye For Digital Music

In 2004, AT&T Wireless plans to roll out an online music store that functions on all mMode-capable phones, according to Wireless Week.

"Users will be able to make music purchases, including ringtones and full-length songs, directly from their wireless handsets. The service will be powered by Loudeye's newly introduced digital music solutions, including the Digital Music Store and iRadio".

Disney ringtones

Music as ringtones from Disney's animated features such as Lion King, Jungle Book, Finding Nemo are now available on Disney Mobile for Samsung phones. And character voice ringtones are coming soon. Just wonderful.

Verizon Wireless Calls Out Holiday Tunes

Verizon Wireless is offering subscribers holiday ringtones on their Get It Now-enabled phones, according to WirelessWeek.

As an added bonus, the service sports a personalization feature that enables users to assign a holiday tune to each of their family members and friends.

Santa's Mobile

Mobile users in a festive mood, can chose from a large selection of Christmas music ringtones for their cell phone on Santa'sMobile.co.uk. Available to UK, Australia and Ireland mobile subscribers.

Sanyo offers a bone-rattling innovation

Talking on the phone even in crowded, noisy places will be made easy thanks to Sanyo's new TS41 handset that sends vibrations through the human skull to relay sound, according to USA Today via Techdirt.

"It works as a regular cell phone when the folding handset is opened, but users can also use it when it is closed by putting it next to their faces. The tiny vibrations from the phone travel through bones in the face to the ear — even if the phone isn't placed next to the ear. "The voice sounds clear even if you're wearing earplugs".

Waiting for the Phone to Bark 

Wired has an article on the Ringtone market in the US and some of the services that let cell-phone customers create just about any kind of ring tone they want. Services provided by companies such as Xingtones - allowing subscribers to download ring tones to their mobile phones by using their carriers' wireless Web capabilities, Modtones - which sells MIDI versions of popular songs through several operators, and wireless carrier Sprint, who's ringtone offer is limited to what they or their partners make available.

"Ring tones are a growing business for cell-phone providers. According to Seamus McAteer, principal analyst at Zelos Group, sales of ring tones will top $1.5 billion worldwide in 2003, and nearly $100 million in the United States". (In my files I have a different figures from The Mobile Data Association, predicting $ 120.7 million worth of ringtones will be sold in 2003, up from $ 69 million in 2002.)

Trendy ringtone promotion at Coffeezone

Ringtones as a gift-with-purchase. Brunei's most popular gourmet coffee café, CoffeeZone, is offering their trendy customers, a ringtone or logo download card, according to BruneiDirect.com.

Customers will be able to choose from some 60 ringtones from latest hip hop R 'n' B hits such as 50 cent's "In da club" or Ashanti's "Rock with u" ringtones, as well as Malay and Chinese ringtones.

Tuning in to T-Mobile

Nearly 70% of T-MobileUK downloads this year were ringtones, highlighting the strong consumer demand for personalised services. Their newly launchedCaller Tunes service should take this even further. [Mobile Today]

T-MobileUK has become the first European network to adopt Caller Tunes – music that plays over the phone to callers when they are trying to contact the handset. They launched December 4

Celcom introduces 'Mobile Karaoke'

Celcom Malaysia, the country's largest mobile phone operator, has introduced a new entertainment service dubbed the Mobile Karaoke for its subscribers with GPRS-enabled handsets, according to The Edge.

Subscribers with the latest Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson handsets can now download full-length songs with synchronised lyrics displayed on the screens of their phones. Very cool.

Other Karaoke applications have developed around the world:

-- SingTel's new Mobile Karaoke service offers the operator's post-paid mobile subscribers full-length songs for download. These come with synchronized lyrics to prompt users singing along". cf The latest in mobile content--karaoke.

-- In August it was reported that Nokia and Taito would collaborate in providing karaoke functions to cell phones. cf Nokia, Taito Teaming Up in Mobile Phone Karaoke.

-- Irish technology company Alatto has developed a new java application called air.karaoke, that will let users download songs and lyrics, to create mobile karaoke machines. cf previous post in Ringtonia

-- Japanese ringtone providers allow 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.

Chaku-uta

Justin Hall for TheFeature.com, has a very interesting article describing the success of KDDI Japan's Chaku-uta MP3 ringtone service, enabling users to download real music to their mobile phones, then set the music up as a ringtone. 20,000 to 30,000 songs are downloaded daily from the KDDI site and the number of users with chaku-uta capable phones is now around 100,000.

"A number of large record labels in Japan set up Label Mobile, an umbrella company to sell digital rights to their music catalogs. Label Mobile has been an integral partner for KDDI's chaku-uta, coordinating rights to songs and providing Chaku-uta for downloading. According to Maede, Label Music approved this innovative service only after KDDI guaranteed technological protection from the spread of mobile file sharing. KDDI has encoded the downloaded music files to prevent sharing of music between handsets, and so far their system hasn't been cracked.

But the concept is catching on; KDDI is seeing some fresh "Chaku-uta" competition. Last week, Vodaphone Japan launched a competitor service, and DoCoMo plans to launch something similar early next year.

And interesting, Justin Hall points out that

"Ringtones have been fabulously popular for users and a great windfall for carriers and mobile entrepreneurs alike.

Acquiring the rights to a melody is easier than acquiring the rights to tracks on a CD. According to analysts with Music Media Watch, record labels are glad to see chaku-uta type technology return control of hit music to their star-making machines. Soon, we should see (and hear) MP3 ringtones appear alongside major media campaigns promoting musicians. It's a brilliant scheme for disseminating hits - ask people to pay for the privilege of playing your song in cafes, in their bedrooms and boardrooms."

Personalised ringtone? You won't get more up close and personal than this

An entertaining article by Peter York for the Independant.

"Ringtones, like amusing email addresses, are part of the expanding envelope of freedom, choice and self-expression that makes the modern world so different and appealing. James Brown, the inventor of Loaded magazine, once said that classical ringtones had done more for music than a dozen new concert halls."

Ringtone revenues 2003

The Mobile Data Association predict £ 70m ($ 120.7 million) worth of ringtones will be sold in 2003, up from £ 40m ($ 69 million) in 2002, according to the BBC.

Tone This: Real (MP3) Music For Your Phone

Xingtone and MyPhoneFiles have competition with ToneThis, a small startup based in Los Angeles founded by 3 students with time on their hands, who have just launched a service that allows customers to wirelessly transfer music, sound effects and voice from their desktop computers onto their cellphones.

Users can create their own cellphone content from their personal music collections, instead of choosing from a library of songs provided by the cellphone company.

Instead of charging per download, the service offers unlimited use for a one-time fee of $14.95.

Traditional cellphone ringtones known as “Polyphonic ringtones” are not capable of playing voice or music and sound very computer-like / robotic. ToneThis targets next generation cellphones that support “PureVoice ringtones” that allow music, sound effects and voice to be a cellphone ringtone.

Related articles:

P2P ringtones

Napster-Like services popping up for the downloading of cell phone content

Real music as a ringtone

TunA Lets Users Fish for Music

The future of on-the-go peer-to-peer music sharing is already starting to groove in Ireland, according to Wired.

"Media Lab Europe, research partner to MIT Media Lab, is testing tunA, a software application that employs Wi-Fi to locate nearby users, peek at their music playlist and wirelessly jack into their audio stream. Pronounced like the fish and signifying music "tunes" and "ad hoc" file sharing, tunA is being designed for wireless PDAs, cell phones and even its own hardware device.

TunA alleviates the alienation of using a Walkman, and it makes it more of a social experience. You can listen to your music and still open yourself up to people around you," said research fellow Arianna Bassoli, who masterminded the project late last year after researching the way young people in Dublin interact -- or don't -- in public spaces."

Fashion signature cell phone

From MTV News. "Russell Simmons and Motorola are teaming up to release the limited-edition Phat Farm II Signature Motorola i7333 mobile phone, a chrome-colored flip phone branded with the Phat Farm logo. (cf company press release).

It will feature ring tones of such hits as Sean Paul's Get Busy, 50 Cent's - In Da Club and Missy Elliott's One Minute Man. The phones will be released in time for Christmas and will retail for $399.

Ring back tones launch in the UK December 4

T-Mobile has become the first network in Europe to let people choose the sound a caller hears while they wait for their call to be answered, reports the BBC. It is variously called "ring-tone replacement" or a "ring-back tone service", but T-Mobile have decided to name it "Caller Tunes".

"The service, which launched on 4 December, works in the same way as the one in South Korea - called COLORing - which BBC News Online reported on last week.

Launched 15 months ago there, COLORing has made SK Telecom $100 million (£59 million), with 35% of subscribers using it.

Through a licensing deal with Universal Music, T-Mobile are able to offer 100 chart hits, from boy band Busted to Gloria Gaynor".

On this T-Mobile page, you can listen to a demo.

Interesting, you hear music, but also the usual ring-ring sound in the background. Does anyone know if this is the case with South Korea's COLORing as well?

The Sound of Silence

Modtones has announced the launch of the silent ringtone. The new download allows calls from selected caller IDs to be directed to voicemail without indicating the incoming call, thereby blocking it. [Company Press Release]

"We had customers writing us and asking for blank ringtones. At first we were puzzled but then we realized it is the ultimate caller ID tone," said Carolynne Schloeder, president of Faith West/Modtones. "We heard the call for silence, and we gave it to them. People are finding surprising ways to use content on the most personal device they own. Mobile culture is evolving more rapidly than the underlying technology."

I had heard of a silent ringtone once before, from a UK dot-store company run by artists, Thomson & Craighead, they also offer morse code ringtones, a CD to teach birds to sing ringtones and a set of three "harmonically related tones" designed for parents with one child and made with complementary simultaneous playback in mind. Inspired from Prokoviev's «Peter and the Wolf». cf Original RingTones .

Their store is probalby one of the most original places on the Internet.

Polythonic Ringtones Hit Next Level

Oki Electric Industry announced that it has developed a new PCM (Pulse Code Modulation)-based sound generator. The new chip, ML2864, doubles the number of polyphonies, from 32 to 64.

The company intends to introduce the chip to China, Europe, US, Korea and Japan in March 2004, according to 3G.

Shazam mobile music service adds five new countries

Shazam has signed deals with mobile network operators and media owners in Switzerland, Greece, Poland, New Zealand and Australia in the past several months, according to Telecom Paper via Moco News.

"The company currently has 10 international contracts covering a potential audience of over 450 million mobile phone users.

Shazam's service allows mobile phone users to get music tracks 'tagged' or identified, while on the go with their mobile. They can download the ringtone or buy CDs from their Tag List on the Website. The Songmail service allows customers to send music clips to friends' mobile phones.

Over 2 million tracks have been tagged in the UK alone, said Shazam."