Fine-tuning your ring is the latest thing

By Tom Beer
Newsday

KATHY WILLENS / AP You make the call: Customizing your cellphone's ringtone has become a huge business.

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Landon has joined the army of consumers spending $300 million a year, according to one market study, to download customized "ringtones" for their phones.

For one thing, it's a way to integrate favorite music, whether it be novelties like the "Pink Panther" theme or pop hits like Usher and Alicia Keys' "My Boo," into their everyday lives.

For wireless companies, it represents big money — the next step in a technological evolution that has transformed the mobile phone into a personalized multipurpose gadget for talking to friends, surfing the Web, sending e-mail, snapping photos and listening to tunes. And for the music labels, it could mean a lifesaving foothold in the digital download market during financially troubled times.

	PHIL MUCCI Country singer Lee Ann Womack has "Stand Up" by rapper Ludacris as her ringtone.

The industry takes this very seriously, so much so that Billboard magazine now tracks the nation's Top 20 ringtones, alongside its well-established charts for album sales and radio play.

Big business

Most ringtones come as "MIDI" files: brief, synthesized versions of songs created especially for the cellphone market. At $1.99 to $2.49 a pop, ringtones are more costly than downloading the original recordings from a service like iTunes or Napster. They're also, believe it or not, more popular: According to Billboard, in its first week tracking sales last month, the No. 1 ringtone, "My Boo," sold 97,000 units, whereas the No. 1 downloaded song, U2's "Vertigo," sold only 30,000.

That surprised Billboard's editors, said Geoff Mayfield, the magazine's director of charts. "With the download you get the whole song, the full dynamics and vocals, and you can play it as often as you want. With the ringtone you get 15, maybe 20, seconds of a synthesizer approximating your song. And yet the No. 1 ringtone outsold the No. 1 download by more than 3-to-1. Considering the economics of it, and the value proposition, we were just stunned that it was so big."

Explore the ringtones market, says Mayfield, and you'll quickly find that "it's a hip-hop world." Rappers Snoop Dogg, Lil' Flip, Chingy and Petey Pablo dominate the Top 10.

Hip-hop artists have been the most aggressive in marketing themselves with ringtones. Eminem offers a free ringtone of his single "Just Lose It" for consumers who purchase the double-disc collector's edition of his new album, "Encore." Sir Mix-A-Lot has signed an agreement with Versaly Entertainment to produce ringtones for the youth market, to be made available by most U.S. carriers.

Ludacris, Kanye West and The Game joined forces to produce an original ringtone, "Anthem," for Boost Mobile (a division of Nextel); the song is featured in Boost's TV ads, and proceeds from its sales have raised more than $20,000 for youth organizations.

Also popular are TV and movie themes: "Sex and the City," "The Godfather" and "John Carpenter's Halloween." Latin music, both rock and salsa, is a growing market. You can even get your fix of Bollywood hits from India.

Just getting started

Celebrity ringtones Singer Lee Ann Womack: "Stand Up," Ludacris. R&B singer Alicia Keys: "Let's Get It On," Marvin Gaye Pianist Kenny Melman (Kiki & Herb ): "Losing Your Affection," The Future Bible Heroes Newsday

For all the buzz about custom ringtones within the music and wireless industries, the trend is in its infancy as a mass-culture phenomenon. According to a survey of cellphone users conducted by market-research group NPD, only 14 percent of those who had phones with the capability to download ringtones had done so — still a long way from market saturation.

But as NPD's director of industry analysis, Ross Rubin, observes, "Improvements in technology are allowing manufacturers to enable these capabilities in more affordable phones. So today, even the free phones that you get from carriers will offer polyphonic ringtones," which produce harmonies rather than single-note melodies. "Now on higher-end phones we're starting to see ringtones that are actual samples of the song. Different carriers have different names for them, but they're called things like 'true' ringtones."

Beyond such innovations, last month Sony BMG announced a deal with Verizon Wireless to make its music catalog available for "ringback tones," actual song samples that callers will hear while they wait for the ringback-tone subscriber to answer his or her phone. Other labels and wireless companies have struck similar deals.

Here the United States is following the lead of Asia, where consumers have wholeheartedly embraced wireless communication.

"It's ... been all the rave in South Korea, where millions of people have subscribed to ringback tones," explains Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG's global digital group. "We see enormous potential and a great dynamic in the mobile market, and some of the markets in Southeast Asia are really showing the way."

If Hesse sounds breathless, it's because his company and others stand to make millions making music an integral part of consumers' daily lives in an entirely new way.

Getting personal

"The ringtone business is really a revival of the singles market to us," Hesse says. "People buy an individual song, and they use it for what we call personalization. They use it as an expression of their personal preference. It says a lot about you what ringtone you choose."

And there's no high-tech gadget better suited to individual self-expression than the cellphone. "The telephone always was an extremely personal instrument," says Paul Levinson, author of "Cellphone: The Story of the World's Most Mobile Medium and How It Has Transformed Everything!"

"What the cellphone has done, because it has taken the phone out of the home or office, is that it's personalized the phone much more, since now every person has one. ... It really has become an appendage."

Levinson sees that dovetailing powerfully with music. "One of the things that popular music has been doing for at least 100 years has been personal identification," he says. "In the '50s, people carried their transistor radios with them, and the kind of music that was heard on the radio in effect announced to the rest of the world what kind of person they were, whether they were listening to show tunes or rock 'n' roll."

Personalized ringtones, as it happens, are just the kind of purchases consumers are willing to make these days, says Juliet B. Schor, author of "Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture."

"We have this trend toward customization because the technology allows it, and the culture is very much into individualization," Schorr explains. "The idea of consumption as identity is absolutely central to contemporary consumer behavior.

"Of course, it is just another bandwagon phenomenon," she continues. "Everyone else has ringtones, so you feel you need to get ringtones. ... The latest thing becomes the must-have."

That may be so, but no one watching the market thinks they will be going out of fashion anytime soon. Sony BMG's Hesse says that while digital sales (which include ordinary downloads as well as ringtones and ringback tones) now account for 2 percent of the company's global sales, he anticipates that figure to increase to 4 percent next year and 10 percent by 2007.

Billboard's Mayfield is similarly optimistic: "We see the cellphone as becoming a meaningful player, a vehicle by which music is marketed and even delivered. Ringtones are just the first step."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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