March 1, 2005
RING MY BELL
Two different takes on New Yorker's essay on the ringtone market, "RING MY BELL".
From Marc Perton for Engadget: "New Yorker offers up history of ringtones"
"Harmonium, the first program developed to create polyphonic ringtones, was developed by a Finnish programmer. What may be more surprising is the size of the ringtone market: a whopping $4 billion in 2004. In true New Yorker fashion, the article looks at the ringtone business, tone junkies — one guy claims to spend $10 a month on tones, mostly of Led Zep songs — and the evolution of the technology, which is poised to take the wind out of that $4 billion market, since it's getting easier to make your own ringtones.
From Mark Frauenfelder for TheFeature.com: "Polyphonic Ringtone Nostalgia"
"The latest issue of the New Yorker has a fairly lengthy article about polyphonic ringtones versus MP3 ringtones. The author, Sasha Frere-Jones argues that the polyphonic tones deliver the pure pop essence of a song, and are in some ways, superior to the actual songs they're based on.
If a song can survive being transposed from live instruments to a cell-phone microchip, it must have musically hardy DNA. Many recent hip-hop songs make terrific ringtones because they already sound like ringtones. The polyphonic and master-tone versions of “Goodies,” by Ciara, for example, are nearly identical. Ringtones, it turns out, are inherently pop: musical expression distilled to one urgent, representative hook.
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