Record labels and carriers are looking for creative ways to keep the lucrative ringtone party alive. But a handful of startups have taken a cue from music group REM, asking, “Why don’t we give it away?”
Ringtones for years have been the most popular type of content on carrier decks, of course, and third parties are hoping to keep the cash cow alive with new offerings. Sony BMG last week introduced “ringles,” a pricey offering that bundles a ringtone with an old-fashioned CD featuring a couple of related tracks. And Apple Inc. recently added a ringtone offering, allowing iTunes users to spend an additional $1 to turn a snippet of a song purchased through the popular storefront into a ringtone for its iPhone.
Circling the tune
For a few Web sites, though, the mobile music clips are chum in the water for content-hungry consumers. Newcomers such as Myxertones. com and Mobicious.com are hoping to drive traffic with technology that allows users to upload tunes from their own libraries, cut a 20-second clip and send it to their phones to be used as a ringtone.
Mobicious launched an alpha site in May that serves as a kind of mobile content aggregator with a social networking component. The company claims to offer a catalog of 200,000 posting users’ content reviews and redirecting consumers to online retailers to complete transactions.
The idea, said co-founder and Vice President of Marketing David Chang, is to help users find what they’re looking for, and connect them with reliable vendors.
“We’re very much like a search engine,” said Chang. “There’s just more and more content (available). But when we looked around, we saw there just wasn’t a place where consumers could go to get everything for mobile.”
And providing a place where users can make their own ringtones gives Mobicious a way to dangle premium offerings.
“The model is in place. Everything we’re doing now going forward is to encourage more traffic,” Chang said. “Once (users) make their own ringtones, we look at that music and show related content.”
Straight to the people
Myxer takes a different tack, using both user-generated and premium content to build a virtual community centered around mobile goodies. The company claims 2.5 million members and also serves as a kind of mobile music label where artists can hawk their ringtones and mobile images directly to consumers.
Other make-your-own ringtone sites such as Send-Song, iBrickr and iFuntastic increasingly are drawing attention among tech-savvy music lovers. And the spotlight is shining brighter on the startups in the wake of the newest version of iTunes, which prevents users from using their own tunes as ringtones for the iPhone.
Some early adopters have been making customized ringtones for years, of course. XingTone Inc., a California-based developer, markets a $20 software offering that creates ringtones from existing CDs and MP3 libraries. And numerous Web sites offer step-by-step instructions on how to create snippets from existing libraries and transfer them to your phone.
Choppy waters
Mobicious and Myxer offer surprisingly simple user interfaces in contrast to most other methods. But the companies must deal with numerous technical headaches, many of which are provided by carriers themselves-or, more accurately, by a single carrier. Myxer’s company blog teems with updates addressing problems the service has with Verizon Wireless handsets; Mobicious continues to deal with similar setbacks in dealing with subscribers from the nation’s No. 2 operator.
“Verizon is really difficult to work with,” said Chang. “Content is packaged (on its network) as an MMS, sending the entire message in one envelope. And Verizon has turned off a bunch of features on some phones. But what we’re doing is making sure we (address), like, 80% of the market.”
Verizon Wireless has gained a reputation for keeping many third-party vendors at bay, of course, and spokesman Jeffrey Nelson made no apologies for the carrier’s policies.
“There are companies out there that offer these kinds of things, but we don’t necessarily allow that stuff through our network,” Nelson said. “We have great ringtones we offer our customers, they are of great quality. A lot of the off-net content providers are not.”
And what of the argument that the carrier is simply protecting its ringtone revenues? “We’re in business to make money,” Nelson responded.
Many such obstacles might be cleared eventually, of course-users are certain to become more adept at finding and acquiring content away from carrier decks, and will likely force operators to destroy the garden walls. And while the traditional ringtone business may be dying, it remains a remarkably lucrative space: Broadcast Music Inc. predicts the U.S. market will ratchet down this year for the first time, falling $50 million but still ringing up $550 million in revenues.
As the mobile social networking buzz becomes deafening, though, many more sites are sure to offer services that allow users to create their own mobile music clips. While there will likely always be a place for premium ringtones and voicetones from exclusive distributors, the music is fading at the ringtone party.
“If you look at the wallpaper business, it’s big today, but there’s so much great digital media out there you don’t need to pay for,” said Chang. “How long will people pay $2 for video of a dancing cat?”
