December 4, 2005
Musicians compose original works for cellphones
A new generation of songwriters sees the mobile phone as an emerging medium for artistic expression, and they are composing original material exclusively for cellphones: the ringtone for ringtone's sake. Fortune reports via Moco News.
"When you're writing a ringtone, you have about 20 seconds to convey a message of love, heartbreak, or hope—or at least come up with an infectious hook. "With ringtones, it has to be memorable," composer Disco D, O'Loughlin says. "And it's got to have a little bite to it."
Ringtones are a shockingly lucrative business, generating more than $2 billion in annual worldwide revenues for the record labels that license their tunes and the retailers and phone companies that sell the tones for about $2 a pop. Everywhere you look, non-musicians are trying to cash in on the craze.
Movie studios want to make bits of film dialogue available—instead of your phone trilling, perhaps you'd like it to have Jack Nicholson say, "Here's Johnny!" And sports figures are recording shout-outs that fans can buy in lieu of regular rings.
... It is one thing to write a killer ringtone, but then it needs to get airplay, or phone play. That's where companies like Jamster come in. Jamster, a unit of Internet services company VeriSign, formats music for distribution on mobile devices and markets the ringtones on its website and through TV ads on MTV, BET, and other music-oriented networks.
O'Loughlin, who owns a production company called Next Plateau Entertainment, has compiled about 20 original ringtones from various artists, which he's pitched to Jamster executives, who will decide which ones to license and market—and perhaps turn into hits."
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