Mobile media company Zingy is expected to announce deals this week to bring exclusive mobile content from hip-hop artist Kanye West and late pop singer Aaliyah to wireless phones.
West will provide screensavers, wallpaper, voicemail greetings, and voice ring tones and ringbacks for Zingy. The Aaliyah content will include wallpaper as well as a ring tone of a previously unreleased version of “Ave Maria,” recorded when the singer was in her early teens.
The moves underscore what may be a coming trend: Establishing direct relationships between content providers and recording artists that circumvent record labels. Zingy’s announcements come on the heels of the launch of BlingTones, the self-proclaimed “world’s first wireless record label.” BlingTones has signed several hip-hop artists and producers who’ll create original ring tones, including Rockwilder, Denuan Porter and Q-Tip.
“Artists at this point-given what’s happened in the music business-are looking for ways to sort of augment their music sales with interesting and new revenue streams,” said Andy Volanakis, Zingy’s chief operations officer. “A lot of them are keeping a larger share of the pie.”
While traditional labels will continue to control most of the music from the artists they’ve signed, some contracts don’t specifically include content such as 30-second ringtones that are created exclusively for mobile use. And just as musicians generally aren’t bound to their labels when they venture into other realms-for instance, acting in a movie-non-musical applications like voice ringtones would seem to fall outside the rights of a traditional music contract.
“A vast majority (of artists) do, in fact, have the rights to provide non-music voice recordings,” Volanakis said, particularly established stars who have more negotiating leverage.
So while they’ll still depend on record labels for much of their musical offerings, content providers who seek direct relationships with recording artists must strike a delicate balance.
“The record labels are valuable partners for Zingy; we absolutely respect them,” said Volanakis. “But we have found a great deal of success with this, and we have been able to walk the line” between labels, artists and carriers.
Zingy has inked similar deals with Snoop Dogg, D12 and 50 Cent, and expects to announce yet another agreement later this week.
Under terms of the Aaliyah agreement, a percentage of the proceeds will go to the Aaliyah Memorial Fund, a nonprofit organization supporting Alzheimer’s, AIDS and breast cancer research. The singer was 22 years old when she died in a plane crash in the Bahamas three years ago.
Zingy worked out the deal for Aaliyah’s content through her mother, Volanakis said.
