You’ve probably heard them on the train, in your favorite café or while waiting in line. From the silence or the city noise, Madonna or U2 or a digital-sounding series of beeps (cleverly made to sound like a Beatles track) alerts you that someone in the immediate area has a call. Yes, those dollar digital tunes on everyone’s mobile phones are much bigger than you think.

The Era of Personalization

It used to be the case that all mobile phones looked and sounded alike – hulking chunks of black or gray plastic that beeped or blared to alert you of an incoming call. Then they started getting smaller and companies like Nokia began churning out their units in more than one cutesy color. As personalization became cheaper and more manufacturers entered the field, it became harder to find another mobile phone with exactly the same configuration as yours. Then the personalization movement stepped up the pace with the addition of customizable sounds. The personalized tunes helped mobile phone users to distinguish their ringing phone from others (eliminating the mad scramble when one rings in a crowd) and to let their mobile phones further reflect their own personality. Those ringtones that you hear (or endure) daily are a result of years of technological development, and they’re big business.

A Quick Buck

Mobile phone ringtones are cheap – that’s practically a standard nowadays. People looking for quick, inexpensive entertainment can simply type in a keyword and send it to an access number before a short jingle arrives on their mobile phone. Because it almost never costs more than a couple of dollars, it doesn’t hurt the monthly budget and users can download a lot of songs before they actually rack up a considerable bill. If you consider all the mobile users in the country, though, all those downloads eventually add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for the phone company.

It has to be noted that the cellular company doesn’t bag all that cash. Companies like Sprint and T-Mobile send the files to their subscribers from a provider, who in turn gets the license for the music from the copyright holders. That’s because the music industry noticed that millions of dollars were being generated from the digital tunes (many of which are adapted from actual copyrighted content) and that they weren’t getting a cent of it. Nowadays, providers have to acquire permission from copyright holders and then turn over part of the revenue to them as royalty. The content downloaded by subscribers is still considered copyrighted material and, according to the music industry, falls under the same category as the music that consumers purchase on CDs. Although the copyrighted content issue was the subject of a big debate several years ago, the big providers and cellular companies decided to go along with the demands of the copyright holders.

A Song for a Song

As the capacity to send data over a cellular network grew, so did the size of the mobile tunes that were made available to consumers, all without raising the ultra-low rates that made them popular across the entire consumer spectrum. Actual MP3 tones can now be had for less than $5 and monophonic tones can be downloaded for as low as 99 cents. The low prices allow subscribers to create their own collection of digital music both for entertainment and for distinguishing their ringing phone in a crowd. Although it might not be as full-featured as an iPod, you’ve got to admit that those 15-second ditties and 30-second choruses have certainly revolutionized how we use our mobile phones today.

Expansion into other Industries

We have seen the cell phone ringtone market expand into diverse markets having nothing to do with ringtones. A site about teaching English I would have thought to be an unlikely candidate to be promoting ringtones. Guess again. They have dedicated a full-blown one page site all about ringtones for their English teachers.

Influence of the iPod

The next test in this booming market will be the influence of the iPhone. Here we have a multi-million dollar ringtone industry that could potentionally be wiped out due to the fact that iPhone users can upload freely songs from their PC to their iPhone and nominate these songs to double as ringtones.