Stones "A Bigger Band" album ringtones

A special edition of the Stones' forthcoming album, "A Bigger Bang", considered one of the greatest rock'n'roll records of all time, is tentatively schedules for the Fall.

"The content should include extra tracks, remixes, video content, Web links and ringtones," Virgin U.S. executive VP of marketing Randy Miller says." [via Billboard]

"Customers aren't stupid" - Jobs

Apple CEO Steve Jobs doesn't believe music lovers are stupid enough to pay premium prices for mobile music downloads, reports MacWorld.

"The AlwaysOn network has published the second part of its transcript of what Jobs said during the Wall Street Journal's (WSJ) 'D: All things digital" event in May, 2005 - and this week's episode looks at Apple, the iPod and mobile phones.

Discussing mobile networks attempts to build music download services, Jobs is scathing on price, saying: "They're going to try to sell music at $2 and $3 a song for the phone. It's hard to imagine that customers are that stupid," he said.

He criticized what he expects will be a, "lousy buying experience", and points out that despite all the new features mobile networks (who dominate discussions with manufacturers) demand in their handsets, customer spending is not rising significantly.

Discussing the Motorola/Apple phone, Jobs confirms the device will not download songs across mobile networks, but will import tracks directly from a Mac or a PC.

Robbie rings the changes

Badboy rocker Robbie Williams's concerts will be broadcast live on mobile phones around the world in a deal set to revolutionise the music industry, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

"Williams, who has sold more than 50 million albums worldwide, has teamed up with international mobile phone giant, T-mobile.

Fans will be able to download exclusive Robbie Williams tracks directly to their phones - they will need the latest models - plus watch Williams as he swaggers around on stage during live concert feeds.

It is a significant upgrade from current technologies which only allow songs to be downloaded to computers first before being uploaded to phones.

The Williams deal highlights the push by mobile networks to lure customers with enriched mobile content.

"The future is music by mobile," the singer said. Hear, hear!

DisTones - unfriendly greetings assigned to callers you want to avoid

Forbes, in an article on new technologies and rudeness in America, mentions a category of ringtones I had never heard of before; DisTones, coined (I think - nothing related comes up in a Google Search) by a company which sells ring tones called Moderati. What are DisTones? "DisTones are a rather unfriendly greeting users assign to callers they want to avoid".

"Moderati claims that "nothing says 'I hate you' like a DisTone."

Some, uh, titles available: American Idiot, Shut Up, F.U. Right Back', The @$$hole Is Calling or $#!*head On The Phone which, according to Moderati, beat out new singles from Fat Joe, the Bravery and Coldplay in terms of total downloads in a single day.

On Moderati's DisTones page, they recommend something even better than a DisTone, the silent ringtone, which effectively shuts down callers by sending them to voice mail without you even having to acknowledge the call. Nice.

Mobiles becoming 'media channels'

Analysts at Informa Telecoms predict the way people pay for content will change as content providers target people directly, outside operators, reports the BBC.

"...Ringtones will be big business too, worth $11bn (£6.3bn) by 2010, but music downloads may double as ringtones. This is partly down to prices people are used to paying for music online.

On average, ringtones currently cost more than the average full-track music downloads onto a computer or digital music player.

People will shy away from having to pay for a music download online, then paying for the same track to use as a ringtone, at three times the price.

"What you will see is more use of buying a download that you can use as a ringtone, or video streaming with it rather than just the ringtone," Simon Dyson, senior analyst at Informa told the BBC News website."

VeriSign behind Crazy Frog

NBC11.com reminds us that staid old VeriSign is the company behind Crazy Frog (VeriSign acquired Jamba in 2004) and he's coming to the the States in the next two weeks.

"VeriSign is best known for verifying the legitimacy of e-commerce sites. And, as the keeper of .com and .net domain names, it connects Web browsers with the sites they're looking for some 14 billion times a day. But it's fast becoming a heavyweight in mobile entertainment, including games, sports and news updates, and, of course, lucrative ringtones.

Digital music is going mobile

For years, wireless companies have watched with envy as Apple Computer's iPod became the best-loved pocket device in America, a role filled virtually everywhere else in the world by the cell phone.

Now, they're getting ready to do something about it. News.com reports.

"Led by Verizon Wireless and Sprint Wireless, the big phone carriers are edging toward releasing their own iTunes-like music services, aimed at persuading people to download or listen to music files over new broadband wireless networks. Slated to begin selling music perhaps as early as the end of this year, these services are prompting eager looks by record labels hungry to expand the reach of digital music.

The planned wireless services could ultimately be the biggest threat to Apple's dominance of the digital music business since the iTunes online music store opened in 2003.

All the major cell phone companies have now announced cell phones that will store and play music, largely supporting either MP3 files or Microsoft's Windows Media format.

...Music as spotlighted as one of the key growth areas for phones".

Tiger Wood ringtones. "Let your caddy answer this one"

File under fun.

Tiger Woods' fans can download a series of original ringtones from his Website, such as:

"This is Tiger Woods. Let your caddy answer this one."

"Hey this is Tiger Woods, I can hear your phone ringing all the way from the fairway".

[via Startribune]

5280 Mobile To Bring Reality TV Stars To Mobile Phones

According to Reality TV Magazine, 5280 Mobile will produce and distribute custom ringtones, wallpapers, and videos featuring today's hottest reality TV stars from Survivor, Real World, The Apprentice, The Bachelor, and many more."

Cell-Phone Rappers Spit Grime

The success of a U.K. music genre known as grime, championed by the likes of Dizzee Rascal, has made rapping to mobile phones a popular pastime for a lot of British young people.

On the street, cell phones enable impromptu rapping, or "spitting," over music played through speaker phones.

If MCs or rappers want to try out their "bars," or rhymes, they can "flow" over beats played over the speaker phone.

Instrumental music is downloaded from sites like Rewind and transferred to the phone via Bluetooth or infrared.

... 'Hype' or 'hyping it' means over-excitement, said producer Joelle Reefer. "This is when a group of guys 'jam' around a phone." The music can be shared via Bluetooth "very quickly" and for free, music producer Joelle Reefer said.

Friends hang out outside, "spitting in groups around the streets".

[via Wired]

U.K. mobile-phone operators have been falling over themselves to sell music services on mobile phones, sponsoring numerous music festivals and selling services like track downloads, streaming music or videos.

But people in this scene use their phones in ways the industry can't cash in on.

... these days, pirate radio MCs tell listeners to rack up "missed calls" if they like a song, by calling the station's cell phone and letting it ring just once.

It's a good way to see if the listeners like the tune," said Purple, a pirate radio MC. "Text messages sometimes take a long time to get to us. Sometimes a message asking for a rewind will arrive six or seven tracks down the line. A missed call is quickest."

And nobody pays for the call."

In photo aboe, Sparx (left) and Lady Toxic (right) spit their bars over music coming from Sparx's Nokia 6230. Lady Toxic says she sometimes plays music quietly via her Nokia's speaker phone to practice her rhymes late at night when the rest of the house is sleeping. Photo: Elizabeth Biddlecombe - Wired.

Twenty questions about the iTunes phone

With the launch of the iTunes phone perhaps just hours away, questions abound: [via iPod Garage]

1. Will the iTunes phone come with earbuds?

2. Will you be able to use your uploaded songs as ringtones?

3. How many songs will the device hold?

4. Does the music pause when the phone rings?

...

The possible answers to several of these questions can be found in this week's broadcast of iPod Garage Radio.

According to an article in RedHerring, Motorola is expected to debut its first iTunes phone at an event dubbed MOTONOW on Monday evening, reports Mobile Tracker.

Ringtone ads face stiff controls

Rules on ringtone ads are being beefed up following a deluge of complaints to watchdog that regulates premium rate phone services in the UK. The BBC reports.

"The new rules were draw up by the UK's mobile phone operators to determine how premium rate subscription services are marketed by content providers.

The deadline for complying with them is 30 August.

The rules go as far as to dictate font sizes and how prices should be displayed in TV adverts.

In recent months, many people have mistakenly run up large bills by inadvertently subscribing to ringtone and text services when they thought they were just buying one tune".

Ringing phone hallucinations, a consquence of cell phone addiction?

Ringing phone hallucinations, a consequence of cell phone addiction? I'm not sure how seriously this can be taken.

According to Digital Lab, a South Korean consumer research outfit, the number of people seemingly addicted to mobile phones is ever increasing. and one of the symptoms was that they hallucinated that their mobile phones were ringing. [via Telecoms Korea]

T-Mobile launches Street gigs

London and Birmingham is to have a series of a series of street gigs this summer organised by T-mobile with the invites going out by SMS only a couple of hours beforehand.

The text and picture message invitations are being sent only 90 minutes before the acts play with details of the secret gig location. Wannabee gig goers can also sign-up online to register their interest at www.t-mobile.co.uk/street.

The whole event, including set up and take down, will last just two hours, demonstrating the ‘blink-and-you'll-miss-it' nature of Street Gigs.

[via 160characters.org]

'Free' ringtones cost Europe dear

A common loophole on ringtone websites means many people are downloading popular tunes without paying a penny, research shows, reports the BBC.

"Ringtone sellers could be losing more than 50m euros (£34.7m or $60m) a year through the loophole, said security firm QPass.

QPass predicts that losses will grow as people look to download ever more types of data to their hi-tech handsets."

According to The Register, "out of 100 "leading" download sites, the preview files could be downloaded and used as ringtones at one-third of them. Two-thirds of the sites offered preview files between 15 and 30 seconds long, "the perfect length for a ringtone".

In some cases, the sites didn't have the the rights to distribute artists' ringtones, while others are ringtone specialists which are "inadvertently giving away their products for free", Qpass says.

The trouble is that many sites want customers to have the chance to listen to a ringtone before they buy. However, "this is the mobile and cyber-equivalent of test-driving a car and then not having to give it back to the garage," said Steve Shivers, a senior veep at Qpass. "When the trial is as good as the actual product, why should consumers spend money buying it? It's so simple to shoplift ringtones that even a 12 year old child could do it."

Mobilkom Austria launches video ring-tones

Mobilkom Austria's A1 brand has launched a video ring-tone service, the first operator in the country to do so, reports DMeurope.

"Video ring-tones use brief video sequences taken from original music videos to announce incoming calls. A1 customers can access the service via the Vodafone Live portal or A1's own 'Handystyling' website.

Customers can choose from some 150 different clips to download. The selection ranges from current hits to animations, and will be regularly expanded."

Yamaha Wireless Offers Layered Ringtones

Moco News reports that the Wireless Content Department of Yamaha Corporation of America is offering mobile ringtones using “hybrid content that layers live recordings over polyphonic MIDI, and other developments” which it claims improves the quality of ringtones.

OK. Most days this ringtone business is way over my head anyway.

Hi-tech fish make their own music

A ground-breaking hi-tech art project that generates music using fish and digital locators has opened its doors as BBC World Service Go Digital producer Colin Grant reports.

"An unusual exhibition invites electronically tagged fresh-water fish to conduct their very own mood music.

The exhibition called The Lake demonstrates how increasingly artists are collaborating with the makers of ground-breaking technologies to explore a brave new world of digital art.

Sixteen fish from the lake - an equal number of tench, rudd, goldfish and carp - have been volunteered for the exhibition. Under anaesthesia they are slit open and miniature bio-acoustic tags are inserted into their bodies.

The fish are then stitched up, woken up and returned to the lake where they emit a tiny acoustic signal every two seconds.

Within the lake are a number of hydrophones (underwater microphones) which pick up the emissions from the fish tags and feed that information into a laptop hidden nearby that works out the co-ordinates of each fish."

Download Music From the Radio onto your Cell Phone

Music On Command has just implemented new software for downloading songs to your mobile phone from a radio station, called: MOC Mobile.

MOC Mobile allows users to SMS and have songs delivered to their mobile unit for download directly to their mobile device through our server network.

Music On Command has setup a demo site for users to see what the future brings for mobile downloading, at www.musiconcommand.com.

According to a press release:

"We are the first to launch our beta site in the mobile phone technology industry for downloading songs directly to the phone. We are the only provider with patent pending technologies to provide real time radio play for download as you hear it, through your computer and/or your handheld phone".

Birds mimic ring tones

Birds have learnt to imitate the ring tones of the omnipresent mobile phones, say German ornithologists, backing up a Danish gentleman's similar claim a few years ago (in 2001, the sparrows in his garden were chirping the Nokia classic tone).

"The birds have an uncanny ability to mimic these ring tones. This has picked up in tandem with the boom in mobile phone ownership," Richard Schneider of the NABU bird conservation centre near the university city of Tuebingen here said.

Jackdaws, starlings and jays were the best mimics, Schneider said adding that even practiced birdwatchers were being fooled by the birds.

One reason for the phenomenon was that these birds were increasingly common in the urban environment, even the relatively shy jay, he said. "There is food and an increasing amount of green space in modern cities."

The birds were simply adapting to their environment in imitating human sounds in what he termed an "evolutionary playground". [via Hindustan Times]

Related:

-- Mockingbird sings ringtones - Some breeds really know how to strut their stuff. Males dance, posture, bluff and sings note from ringtones or doorbells - all part of an elaborate routine to convince females of male prowess.

Dog Whistle Tones

As I discovered The Online Guide to Whistling Records website thanks to a post on Papel Continuo, I realized this was something I'd not covered before in Ringtonia, where to find (human) whistle ringtones.

If done some scouting for you. Click on these links to sample a Human dog whistle tone, a bird whistle tone, a slow whistle and of course the "The Whistle Song" or "My Whistle ringtone" which as everyone knows, are not really whistles at all.

Samsung MP3 players to adopt SKT, KTF DRM

Samsung Electronics announced a deal with SK Telecom and KTF to bring their Digital Rights Management(DRM) to its MP3 player, yepp.

The deal allows Samsung to support music download service provided by the two mobile carriers.

SKT and KTF customers can listen to music they purchased from the mobile carriers not only on their MP3 phone but also on yepp, without paying any additional costs. [via Telecoms Korea]

"Cult-duct" in South Korea

LG Telecom provides music download services at convenience stores including Familymart and GS25.

Users can download ring tones and games as well as digital music with their handset or MP3 player.

LGT said, “The service will give rise to“Cul-duct” that combines the words, “culture” and “product”. We will make Music On service easy- to- get for not only LGT subscribers but also for people listening to music with MP3 players."

[via Telecoms Korea]

Music event claims world record

A music festival in Surrey is claiming to have set a new world record for the biggest ever "air guitar ensemble" (air guitar is the act of pretending to play guitar,)

More than 4,000 people by the main stage at Guilfest 2005, in Guildford, played air guitar to Sweet Child O' Mine by Guns n' Roses on Sunday.

Festival organisers said they were waiting for confirmation from the Guinness Book of Records".

Hmmm... Can we expect an air guitar ringtone? I'm still searching. Will keep you posted.

Singer launches career on eBay

This is something new for the music industry. [via BBC]

"A young Indian singer has managed to raise enough money to release his debut album by selling shares in his future royalties on the internet site eBay.

Shayan, who writes his own songs and plays piano, took five years to get his debut album Deliverance recorded and released, financing the whole project by selling shares in himself on the auction website.

"I kind of understood how the industry worked in terms of the royalties scheme, so I put up an auction as an individual saying that if you invest £3,000 in me, I'll give you a quarter percent of my life's earnings in music.

"Who would have thought that in a week's time, I would have got three people to invest £9,000."

A Cellphone, a Movie Lobby and a Message

This summer, moviegoers walking through theater lobbies in three cities might have felt a sudden vibration in their cellphones, the work of a nearby Bluetooth promotional kiosk, reports The New York Times.

"Last month, 20th Century Fox signed a deal with Loews Cineplex Entertainment to distribute movie trailers, ring tones and pictures through kiosks in three Loews theaters, in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The promotional material can be picked up by anyone with a cellphone equipped to handle Bluetooth, a form of short-range wireless transmission.

Downloading a full-length movie trailer from the kiosk takes about 30 seconds, and there is no fee from the phone's service provider. One ring tone offered is an emphatic voice from the movie "Kingdom of Heaven" that declares, "Protect the stones!"

Moviegoers can also download cellphone screen "wallpaper" of Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." (Mr. Pitt has been downloaded more often.)"

... The Fox promotion is limited by the number of Bluetooth-compatible phones, which, according to industry analysts, account for 10 to 15 percent of the market. The Gartner Group, a research firm, predicts that by 2008, 60 percent of all cellphones will be Bluetooth-enabled".

Mufti bans Qur'anic ringtones

Egypt's grand mufti, Ali Gomaa, has deemed the use of Qur'anic verses as cellphone ringtones as insulting to Islam, Egyptian newspapers reported on Sunday, according to News24.com.

"Such a use is unacceptable because it trivialises the Holy Book," the cleric, the highest Egyptian authority on Islamic law, told students in Alexandria.

"Therefore it is haram", or prohibited by Islam, he added.

Egyptian newspapers carry scores of advertisements offering downloadable ringing tones ranging from Qur'anic verses to jokes and the latest Arab pop songs. "

Make your child's voice your cell-phone ring tone

When was the last time you heard a child's voice saying ``Daddy, it's me. Pick up the phone,'' as a ring tone?

Xingtone is making it easy to create your own ring tone -- anything from something you've recorded into a microphone to your favorite 20-second clip of a tune in your personal MP3 collection.

Xingtone software -- available for both the Mac and the PC -- allows users to tap into their personal music collection, isolate the section of the song they want as the ring tone, preview it and send it to the phone.

The phone receives a text message with a link to the ring tone file and downloads it into the phone itself. Yes, that means the user needs a phone that is capable of connecting to the Internet -- which most of today's phones are equipped to do."

For now, the software is sold in retail stores or as a download from www .xingtone.com with individual licenses.

[via Mercury News]