Until recently, your average record company executive probably reacted to the sound of a cellphone blaring out its ring tone with the same weary resignation as the rest of us. Like reality TV or clipboard-clutching charity muggers, they were one of modern life’s petty irritants.
In 2004, however, your average record company executive is more likely to stifle a cheer every time he hears a tinny version of a chart hit bleeping from a nearby Nokia. According to some sources, the cellphone ring tone has come to save the music industry.
Three years ago personalised ring tones were given away free on websites run by amateurs, who dedicated their spare time to programming phones to play Eminem songs instead of merely ringing — a hobby that, for pointlessness, seemed to rank alongside translating the Bible into Klingon.
No one would call ring tones pointless today. Last year cellphone users spent $3-billion on them. They account for 10% of the world’s music market. Over the next 12 months more and more new phones will play ”mastertones” — not bleepy electronic facsimiles of chart hits, but the hits themselves. Unlike the current monophonic and polyphonic ring tones, their sales will generate money for record companies.
There is talk of mastertones ultimately replacing the ailing single format.
”It’s only a matter of time before someone comes up with a mastertone chart,” says Rob Wells, new media director of Universal Music UK, ”and before that starts to carry more weight than the singles chart. I absolutely, definitely, believe one hundred percent that ring tones should be included in the charts.”
Wells adds that ”the speed with which ring tones took off surprised pretty much everyone”, but with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see why they became so popular. Constantly changing your ring tone combines several pubescent obsessions at once: pop music, computer technology and playground one-upmanship.
According to Paul Reilly, technical adviser on a terrifying-sounding UK publication called The Ringtone Magazine, their appeal has spread far beyond schoolchildren.
”We started putting pages in the magazine about classic ring tones and we discovered that a lot of people’s parents, who saw the magazine lying around the house, bought them…”
One theory around the rise of the ring tone is that they are simply easier to buy. There is no need to go to a shop or access a website — simply send an SMS message and the cost is added to your phone bill.
Certainly a ring tone reduces pop songs down to their barest essentials and in doing so sorts the wheat from the chaff. It gives short shrift to bland songwriting. Unless a song has an instantly recognisable melody, it won’t work, which may explain why R&B and hip-hop, with their emphasis on sonic novelty and infectious hooklines, vastly outsell the work of Westlife or Gareth Gates in ring-tone format.
For anyone brought up on the old-fashioned notion of a single as a tangible object, something you buy, keep and pull out decades later, playing the B-side and poring over the sleeve in a fit of nostalgia, buying a new ring tone every week is a difficult concept to grasp.
There is a certain kind of fortysomething Mojo reader who will peevishly expound on how the ring tone is symptomatic of the ever-deteriorating quality of rock and pop music.
Even the people who love a song enough to pay for it in ring tone form are sick of it after two weeks.
It is fair to say that Wells has not lost much sleep worrying about whether the ever-increasing popularity of ring tones suggests that pop music has become an inherently transient medium.
”The disposability of music?” he frowns, ”I don’t know about that. The issue is that there are consumers spending considerable volumes of cash on the products. If they’re going to be spending more money on music, as opposed to spending small amounts of money and keeping the music for a long time? The more money they spend on music, the better.” — Â