Singing a happy tune: why the music industry is upbeat about online sales

The global music industry, under severe pressure for the past four years, may be turning the corner. A sector wracked by falling sales, intense competition and endemic piracy has taken comfort from the first signs of recovery in recent weeks, reports the FT in an analysis of this industry.

[...] "Meanwhile, ringtones - the irritating jingles for mobile phones - are outselling CD singles in several markets including Britain and Germany, with global demand expected to generate sales of about $3.5bn this year."

Cable network launches music show with free downloads

A new cable music video show that debuted Monday allows viewers to download songs and ringtones online for free during the broadcast, reports USA today.

"Fuse Music Network's "Daily Download" show broadcasts a password that viewers can use to go on the network's Web site and download a specific song, typically the song corresponding to a video being aired or in conjunction with an in-studio performance by the artist.

The actual downloads, in MP3 format, are being provided by Blue Mountain and Tower.com, the network said.

The Web site will also offer ringtones and other multimedia."

"Ear Phones" technology

Germany's T-Mobile attempts will announce the roll out later on Monday of five new handsets equipped with "Ear Phones" technology, which enables customers to download three CD-quality tracks to their phone, according to Reuters.

The T-Mobile handsets will be available as of Monday in its markets of Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and the Czech Republic.

Song downloads will be limited to a catalog of 500 "mobile mixes," or condensed versions lasting 90- to 120-seconds.

T-Mobile, though, is promising a downloadable catalog of 250,000 full-length tracks by Christmas. It has already enlisted the help of some of the world's biggest music companies including Universal Music , Sony Music and Warner Music."

Budding DJs get mixing on mobiles

Festival-goers at Glastonbury 2004 have been getting a taste of making their own music with a new service launched by Orange, reports the BBC.

"Fireplayer allows music-lovers to pay to download a full track and mix it up on their mobiles. Users can add their own sound effects, like vocals or bass, and can save it as their unique ringtone".

Also launching on 1 July is the first mobile music download service, Music Player. It lets music-lovers download and listen to full-length tracks for £1.50, without the need for a separate player device.

Orange has done deals with music labels, Warner Music and V2, to provide 20 tracks at launch for the services. It is also finalising further deals with all the major record labels, as well as some indies, to provide more choice.

"Artists and labels are embracing mobile music more than ever," Mark Ashford, head of Orange entertainment told BBC News Online.

Orange secures Universal truetones

Orange has struck a deal with Universal Music to provide mobile users across Europe with access to 'truetones'- clips of original sound recordings that can be used as ringtones, according to e-consultancy.

"The deal with Universal Mobile, the mobile division of Universal Music International, is mooted as the first in a series of new projects between the two firms.

The countries covered by the truetone agreement include the UK, Portugal, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, France, Slovakia and Romania".

America, Get Ready for "Ringbacks"

Business Week publishes an interesting feature article on ring back tones.

"Already in use in cell-phone-crazy South Korea, Taiwan, and other Asian countries, this new wireless service could be coming to the U.S. soon, perhaps in the next year.

Ringback tones promise to give wireless users yet another way to personalize their phones beyond the already wildly popular ringtones, those tunes your phone plays when someone is calling you. In fact, ringbacks may help wireless service providers ring up even more cash than they're making now from ringtones.

That's a pretty sizable market: Last year, ringtone revenues came in at $2.3 billion worldwide, according to telecom consultancy Ovum.

And, in the U.S., more people now download ringtones based on popular songs than they download the songs themselves from the Web's many music services, says Scott Hochgesang, vice-president for business development at Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company. (!)

Indeed, according to Ovum, by 2008 mobile music content -- ringtones, ringbacks, and entire songs that could be wirelessly downloaded onto handsets -- could account for 28% of total music sales, including CDs and paid downloads.

[...] Ringbacks have already proved a success elsewhere. Korea's No. 1 wireless provider, SK Telecom (SKM ), was first to launch ringback tones in April, 2002. It now has more than 8 million ringback users out of its 30 million total subscribers, and SK is generating more than $9 million in revenue per month from the service. That's still small potatoes for SK, which has $7.25 billion in revenues, but it says ringback adoption is skyrocketing.

Another Korean operator, Globe Telecom, has reported that 100,000 people signed up for its ringback service during the week of its launch in April, 2004. No wonder a Sprint PCS spokesperson says: "We are certainly watching this."

Cost doesn't seem to be slowing ringbacks in Asia, where carriers have been able to charge users $2 to $5 a month for a subscription to the service, plus, say, $1 per each new ringback soundtrack. U.S. carriers will likely follow a similar model, says Yankee Group's Zawel. Such fees should push the worldwide market for ringbacks from $148 million last year to $2.4 billion by 2008, according to Ovum".

SMS Music Maker

Film And Music Entertainment, Inc. announced that it has completed a deal to co-launch SMS Music Maker.

European based SMS will provide music downloading capabilities for independent artists and labels to their young consumers in the United Kingdom and Europe which will provide income streams to independent artists and labels, according to a company press release.

Group 2000 Navajo Ring Back Tone solution

Group2000.nl, a provider and integrator of Telco solutions, has just announced it's new Solution for Ring Back Tones, according to a company press release.

The Group 2000 Navajo Ring Back Tone solution enables telecom operators to implement this service in their network in a cost-effective way, reusing the available network and content management infrastructure as much as possible.

Key Features

-- Adding/removing ring back tones to a personal content base
-- (De)activate a ring back tone for specific telephone numbers, time-of-day and call state
-- Direct service (de)activation
-- Upload of personal ring back tones
-- Flexible billing models and interfaces
-- Custom functionality possible

Surround Sound on your mobile

QUALCOMM and QSound Labs have licensed technology to integrate audio enhancers into mobile chips enhancing the quality of streaming audio, music playback, ringtones and online gaming services.

Now, wireless consumers can experience cinema-like, surround-sound effects on their cell phones - objects in 3D games will seem to whiz by them, and music services will have rich, professional equipment-quality sound." [ Press Release ]

Rolling Stone Ringtones

Dwango, a leading developer and distributor of entertainment content and applications for mobile phones, today announced the launch of Rolling Stone Ringtones.

The Rolling Stone Ringtones service, which also provides access to current music reviews from Rolling Stone magazine, is now available through AT&T Wireless, Cingular and Nextel across a variety of wireless handsets.

Dwango is licensed to offer the Rolling Stone Ringtones service through a partnership with RealNetworks and Wenner Media, publisher of Rolling Stone.

Presidential Candidates Ringtones!

Engadget is featuring Presidential candidates ringtones.

"Show your support for the candidate you love (or hate) by having them endorse your incoming phone call with these ringtones. Each ringtone is the candidate saying their name and that they “approve this message”.

”I'm John Kerry and I approve this message”.

”I'm George W. Bush and I approve this message”.

”I'm Ralph Nader, running for president and I approve this mess”.

Connecting Music and Mobiles

To help signal the connection between music and mobiles, a novel idea of inviting the audience to send text messages to kids has been devised - not by the the record company, but by mobile operator 02, reports The Guardian.

"Saturday night at a secret location in east London and the sweetheart of the music press, the feisty MC Shystie, is on a stage in the subterranean Tardis Studio in the fashionable quarter of Clerkenwell.

Shystie reads the texts from a screen on the stage and uses the suggestions to help improvise her act. Her rapid-fire raps echo the rat-a-tat-tat tapping of text messages from the packed dance floor.

The Shystie campaign typifies the newer, subtler type of mobile marketing campaign aimed at Britain's youth. The 300-strong audience gained entry by text message and each is now added to the operators' mailing lists".

I have two phones," says Shystie "One for business and one for my friends. I store my lyrics in my Nokia. If I'm on tour or sitting around waiting and lyrics come into my head, I just tap them into my phone, save them and when I go home, I incorporate them into my actual songs."

Let's get this straight!

This is an attempt to make sense of ringtone terminology. It's really quite confusing as different words are being used to describe the same thing, particularly with regard to real music played on cell phones. This post has been updated several times thanks to feedback from major players in this industry. The problem remains though, coming up with a single term for real music, i.e. clipped music from studio recordings, played on cell phones.

REAL MUSIC

-- MP3 Ringtones: users can download MP3 files (music or sound) from their computer onto their cellphone after installing special software. There is a copyright issue here.

-- Mastertones, Ringtone Masters, Truetones, Realtones, Music tones, , Real Ringtones and Musitones: all describe real music clipped from studio recordings, requiring a license from the record label.

If you really want to get to the bottom of this and understand who speaks what, take this: Sony calls them "Mastertones", V2 calls them "Realtones", Silva Screen Records calls them "Real Ringtones", Warner Music calls them "Ringtone Masters" (thanks Nick!), Cingular calls them "Music Tones" and Musiwave calls them "Musitones" (Thanks Charley!).

-- Ear Phones technology, provided in Germany's T-Mobile handsets - enables customers to download three CD-quality tracks to their phone.

-- Covers and Soundalikes: are steadily becoming their own catagory in the ringtones industry, mainly due to the fact that they do NOT require any license from the record labels, according to Chad Brazelton, Digital Content Manager at Sound Choice.

Brazelton writes "Covers and sound-alikes DO NOT require any license from the record labels, but they do from the music publishers, just as the record labels must license their versions from the publishers. But no fee of any sort is owed to the record labels as they do not have the rights to the cover version.  This is completely legitimate we (Sound Choice) have been doing this for 20 years now. We do not have to pay the record labels because we are the record company, using our own artists and not the traditional record labels artists". 

-- Hifi Ringtones: terminology used by hifi-ringtones.co.uk and Sagem to describe what is essentially a group name for all real music ringtones (ie. MP3, wav, smaf)

-- Chaku-uta: a successful MP3 ringtone service offered by KDDI Japan and approved by music labels.

SINGLE TERMINOLOGY SUGGESTIONS Have your say!

In article a couple of weeks ago, Eric Lin for TheFeature.com, suggested this industry adopt "Ringtunes" for real music. Sounds good to me. Anyone want to go with that?

Wesley Anderson, Product Manager - Eckoh Technologies - is suggesting the industry adopt the term "Truephonic" for real music. Anderson writes "I think consumers have been educated (especially in the UK market) to know the difference between monophonic and polyphonic tones. So I think the word Truephonic nicely illustrates to the customer that the real music is 'better' and has evolved past both mono and poly tones."

SOUNDS

-- Sound tones, Special Effects and Sound FX: play sounds of everyday life, from sound effects to funny noises.

-- Animal tones and Wildlife Sound Byte Ringtones: play animal noises. The latter comes from The British Library.

VOICES

-- Voice tones, Speechtones and Ringtalkers: play celebrity or comedy voices.

Just for the record, the terms "Special Effects" for sounds around us and "Speechtones" for human voices come from Proximus and "Ringtalkers", customized talking ringtones & sound clips comes from Verizon Wireless.

Slightly off the record, but a personal favorite, “name ringers”, a collection of ringtones made just for people with common names (Amy… Amy… Amy… Oh, Amy… Pick up the phone)

BACK TO BASICS

-- monophonic ringtones: play one note at a time with the melody of the song.

-- polyphonic ringtones: play several notes simultaneously, so the ringtone has a much richer sound.

Orange in music-on-mobiles move

Orange customers will soon be able to download full-length music to mobile phones via the company's Music Player service, reports MacWorld UK.

"The service will be provided by Chaoticom, a provider of mobile music-download solutions, and will be exclusive to Orange for 12 months. It launches on July 1, and allows users to download full-length tracks from a constantly updated list of the latest tunes and listen to them without the need for any extra devices, says the company".

"A number of industry watchers are suggesting that the mobile-phone market could be a threat to the iPod's dominance of the MP3 market. "It won't be long before the storage capabilities of cell phones make it practical to hold a personal jukebox worth of songs on a phone," said Eric Hellweg in a report in Technology Review."

Glastonbury Festival ringtunes

Rafat Ali for Moco News reports on The Guardian UK, tying up with EMI, to offer song downloads as well as ringtunes from the Glastonbury Festival, held June 25th though 27th.

The tracks available are from EMI artists, past and present, who have performed or will be performing at the Glastonbury festival.

Rafat is rightly outraged at what EMI will be charging. £ 4 for a ringtune ! ($ 7.28) whereby a song download is only 99 ($ 1.80).

Happy Forecasting

Global ringtone sales will total around $3.5 billion this year, it is estimated, compared with just $232.5 million last year for global singles sales, down 18.7 per cent, the Financial Times notes. In 2003, the value of the UK singles market dwindled 30 per cent to $156.million (£85.2 million). [The Register]

Universal to revive dead CD single format

Universal Music's UK wing is to bring the 8cm CD back from the dead later this month, in a desperate bid to revive the singles market, reports The Register.

"The 'new' format will be called Pocket CD, but is essentially the compact CD developed in the mid-1980s as the format for CD singles.

Each Pocket CD will contain three tracks and - for the first time - codes that will allow buyers to download ringtone versions of the songs.

Mobile phone ringtones are seen as the basis for an increasingly lucrative music market, and that has already grown beyond that of CD singles.

Hifi Ringtones.co.uk to distribute real music ringtones

Sony Music Entertainment and V2 Music recently made agreements with Hifi Ringtones.co.uk to distribute real music ringtones, according to a company press release.

These agreements will make available Sony Music & V2 Music ringtones that are extracted from the original recordings of songs, rather than simple tones or 'Sound Alike' Tones.

"As the capability of each new handset grows, Sony Music are now about to offer consumers the quality of ringtone that they really want." said Peter Leggatt General Manager, Business Development, Sony Music Entertainment UK
"Working with Hifi-Ringtones.co.uk allows us to deliver excerpts from the
master recordings, that means the original music as the ringtone. This is a
great leap forward and benefits our artists whose music will be legitimately
available through the mobile channel"

Caller Ring back tones launch in India

Indian BPL Mobile, has announced the launch of a Caller Ring Back Tone service in Mumbai, according to News Today.

"For the first time in India, BPL Mobile subscribers (both prepaid and post-paid) can assign the ring back tone in the form of a normal ring tone, a celebrity voice, music clips, sound effects, jokes, news, personal voice or combination of these".

Orange music download service set to be hit

In UK, Orange users can now download music straight to their mobile phones and remix real tracks to make unique ringtones following the launch of two new music services from the network, reports Moco News.

"The music download service, Music Player, allows full tracks to be selected, previewed and then downloaded over the air, while the other new Orange music service, Fire Player, enables users to download real music files with component tracks separated so they can be remixed by the user and saved as True Tone ringtones."

Ringtone Middlemen For IPO?

An eye catching headline from PaidContent.org. Rafat Ali writes:

"I'm being slightly sensationalist with this healdline, but it is fun to think about...if Chinese ringtone and mobile content companies can have IPOs, why can't U.S. vendors like Ztango go public.

That's not my suggestion, that's this story's line. Ztango's CEO Vern Poyner said his firm, which is private, was profitable last year and expects to make money in 2004 as well.

But then, will these middlemen survive as biggies like Sony and other labels come in, either with their own units or through acquisitions? InfoSpace (which own Moviso) CEO Jim Voelker said that the music industry, looking for any money it can find these days, is more than happy to license songs to several ring tone providers."

Finland: Ring back tones by Yomi

Finnish Yomi will start to offer ring back tones to mobile phone subscribers, according to eFinland.

The authorities require the traditional tone to be audible alongside the music. Director Antero Mustonen of Yomi expects the regulations to become looser when the service becomes more common.

EMI to trial mobile service letting users share music

EMI will this summer become the first record label to launch a trial of mobile 'super-distribution', enabling consumers to forward tracks to other users legally, according to New Media Zero via Moco News

"The trial, with an unnamed major European mobile operator, will be the first serious attempt by the music industry to cash in on the viral potential of mobile.

Consumers will be able to send songs to their friends, who will be able to preview the track a set number of times to decide if they wish to buy it. A digital rights management (DRM) wrapper will cause the track to expire if not purchased within a set timeframe.

'EMI is committed to spreading the concept of super-distribution,' he said, 'allowing the peer-to-peer spreading of content legally."

Snappy Ringers On Increase

"We've seen a growth of about 60 percent over the last year and that's pretty dramatic," Frank Merriman, of Cingular Wireless, said of music ringtones. [ NBC5 ]

"It's a dramatic increase. Experts report $4 billion in ringtone sales worldwide last year. The average price to download is $2 a ring. Parker calculates that around two billion tones were sold.

Web sites make it easy to do: pick from the long list of tunes and pay up.

Music companies have every reason to make it easy. They now get up to 50 percent of the proceeds of sampled music, compared to only about 20 percent for polyphonic tunes that imitate songs."

NBA star team ringtone

NBA Detroit Pistons fans will have the opportunity to download the “Goin' to Work” song into their portable phones and use it as their ringtone on ringingphone.com, according to a company press release.

Mobile music streaming service

A new service called StreamMan has commercially launched today with TeliaSonera in Finland and will be launched across Europe with major mobile operators in the near future.

Developped by End2End in partnership with Sony Network Services, StreamMan enables end-users to enjoy a large portfolio of songs from both major and independent record labels, as well as access dynamic news content, artist information, and community features such as messaging and music exchange. More in company press release

Joi Ito at Nokia Connection 2004

Maybe five to ten years from now, in this device, you will have every single song, that's available in the world. Your problem is not gonna be how to get the song. The problem will be: Which song do you want to hear?"

Joi Ito, in his closing remarks, as guest speaking at Nokia's annual press event, Nokia Connection 2004. [ via All about Mobile Life ]

Casting call for ringtone commercial

Actors, karaoke singers, models, musicians 16 - 25 are encouraged to submit headshots or photos (3 pix are the maximum allowed) and resumes for consideration.

Primetones is searching for musical, theatrical and/or modeling talent to appear in an upcoming TV Commercial featuring Snip "n Send, the new easy as 1-2-3 real Ringtone creator.

More details in Press release / Related post on Snip "n Send.

Shazam Success Story

An interesting article on the success story of Shazam - the company that can identify any music track via a mobile phone - by the UK Times Online.

The entire article is interesting, but this caught my eye:

"With 750,000 users in Britain, Shazam is starting to become a good indicator of future hits. Before Panjabi-Mc, a British Asian artist, was on the radio or in the shops, for instance, he was being played as a dance track in clubs and was Shazam's No1 request for weeks. He later went on to top the official charts. It is little surprise that the music industry closely watches Shazam's weekly chart of pre-release tracks.

New services, such as ringtones, are being added, and Shazam is working with record labels to promote new releases.

Last September, Sting became the first artist to promote an album through a new Shazam service, Mass Songmail. Fans rang to hear a clip of his single, Send Your Love, and to enter a competition. More promotions are planned with the Ministry of Sound and other labels. “We do everything first in the UK,” said Roest. “It is a test-bed and showcase for all our other partners.”

Ringing off the hook

The Boston Globe doesn't care for ring back tones. Some people just don't get it.

"The Cell phone will soon sport another feature nobody needs: the customized "ring back." That's the sound a caller hears after dialing a number. What US callers hear is ringing, but in Asia they can hear tunes, sound effects, or jokes. This is considered progress, and the multimillion-dollar overseas marketing success has US companies considering it here."