June 29, 2007
Hanging up on ringtones
One of the many anomalies of the mobile music market is that, while a full track bought directly from a network will cost between £1 and £1.50, a 20- second snippet from the same original can be priced at up to three times as much. Globally, this has created a multi-billion-pound business.
The Guardian reports.
"... Realtones generate royalties for record labels (though monophonic and polyphonic tones, or those from animated amphibians, do not), creating an unexpected silver lining for the music business which is stuck in a generally rather black digital cloud.
But if the iPhone and the majority of next-generation handsets is anything to go by, the future of mobile entertainment lies in "sideloading" - transferring existing content, such as music, from a PC, as opposed to the more lucrative (for operators) process of purchasing products over the air.
"I think the ringtone business is in peril now because the operators have allowed into the market mobile phones which can sideload MP3s and use them as ringtones," says Andrew Bud, executive chairman of mBlox and vice-chairman of the Mobile Entertainment Forum.
With nobody able to explain convincingly just why consumers continue to pay a premium for a novelty product, the ringtone industry is something of a gravity-defying act anyway. One analyst goes so far as to describe ringtones as "digital jewellery", with most concluding that their value is a combination of personalisation and convenience.
... Anecdotally, record labels agree. Last year, Rob Wells of Universal Music Group International claimed that the UK ringtone market was in terminal decline."
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/ringtonia/archives/2007/06/016457.htm