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Audio: You are in a maze of twisty little ringtones, all alike
Tue, 14 Jun 2005

I never quite understood the whole ringtone marketplace, but heres my take on it. Until relatively recently, cellphones were limited to rudimentary audio reproduction - beeps, whistles and essentially FM tone generation. I'm not sure if it was done in software or hardware, but you could play short MIDI tunes in place of built-in ringtones, which was terrible cool. (MIDI is the preferred notation and sequencing protocol that musicians use, so songs are available in MIDI format all over the place.) Cool stuff and people downloaded them like mad .. via SMS or MMS or phone-email or infra-red beaming or any number of methods, and thus an industry was born. With each ringtone selling for $1.99 to $4.99 for 'premium tunes', this was big business -- especially when most of the ringtones were reproductions of commercial music and totally unlicensed -- which soon attracted the long tentacles of the RIAA. At the same time as all this happened, the 'mp3' and mobile-audio phenomena grew up and ultimately created iTMS -- Apple's iTunes music store. Here (and in similar joints like allofmp3.com and the other copy cats) a real mp3 recording could be had for a fraction of the ringtone cost .. $1USD per song on iTMS and more or less elsewhere. This is for a real recording folks, and not some cheesie FM-tone MIDI knockoff made by a 13 year old in his basement. My take -- my question -- is how did these two things occur separately and end up with such radicly different pricing schemes? Who would pay three or four times the amount for a lower quality tune?

Millions of people, obviously :)

Naturally, the inferior ringtone format should be cheaper or perhaps the same price as the mp3 format file, and really since modern phones can play mp3s you should be able to associate an mp3 recording to a ringer anyway. So I've always assumed that mp3s would kill ringtones sooner or later, but I never thought far enough ahead because of course the real meat is in legislation and licensing. The music industry is slowly losing its iron grip over music through brick and mortor stores as digital media takes more and more over, and while kicking and screaming the industry is slowly realizing this is a great thing for everyone (the audience and the performers and the middle-men too.) Music is becoming cheaper and people are buying more genres (old and new alike!), but without physical media being the constraining force anymore, DRM ('Digital Rights Management', where 'rights' refers to the rights of the company and not the consumer) is coming, and thats okay (I guess.) So thats okay, eventually the channels will sort themselves out and you'll be able to buy music fully online and your device will play that music if it was purchased legitimately (and refuse to play copies or backups I'm sure, even if you're legally allowed as we are in Canada.) Well and good. So the last gotcha is licensing...

Whats interesting here is the devices and operating systems in them (though we don't think of a phone having an operating system, it does!) are fully featured and let you play mp3s and such for ringtones. However, when a carrier gets a phone, they can alter it as they see fit to suit their business model and target customer of course. This is why so many phones in the US won't permit the bluetooth network system to transfer files back and forth with a computer. Naturally they blame this on mp3 piracy, but we all know its because the telco's want to soak the consumer for bandwidth costs -- $$$ per kilobit of data transferred. Of course, the RIAA would just love if the average mp3 could be raised to $3 or $4 instead of a buck a shot, but without that happening anytime soon, the telcos neatly create a ringtone marketplace by making data difficult to move. Who wants to wait half an hour to transfer an mp3 to their phone when they can nab a new crappy quality ringtone in seconds?

Myself, I just don't go near DRM'd media for now; ie: I can legitimately buy plain mp3s right now, and thats good .. high quality and unemcumbered so I can back them up as I see fit, or play them in any device I want. No way would I buy a tune (even at so low as $1 a shot) at iTMS since they come with Apple's protection on them (required by the RIAA so they can sell songs at all I'm sure) so you can't play the audio just anywhere. As I mentioned in another posting, I expect a lot of anger once people realize that this massive collection of music they've bought for their iPod isn't transferrable to a competing (perhaps cheaper?) mp3 player product.

But in the future DRM will be a fact of life, so I hope they get it right. We're all good people who want the artists to be paid, so we have to protect the audio from being freely mass distributed when the artist doesn't want it done that way. But the companies making the policy tend to be over radical and blind to their customer, so I hope they'll remember us this time -- that when we buy a mp3 file we'd better be able to use it in other devices on the road or in the same house, and be able to back it up arbitrarily if they're not going to keep a copy for us etc. A casette or CD can be copied now, and can play in any CD player around for instance. Would you still pay $10USD for an album if it only works in your current iPod or have these purchases intrinsicly less value when you know that the they will not be usable in 5 years, 10 years or some amount of time? Perhaps we'll end up with two tier pricing where a harshly encumbered tune will be cheap and stops working when you lose your current player, and a less encumbered verison will cost more but be transferrable to other devices or be supported for a longer period of time? I could go with that perhaps, since I listen to mp3s on multiple PCs, my laptop, my phone and my mp3 player.. whatever is handy at the time.

I'm drifting off track here again, but thats my take on ringtones -- I don't know why they charge so much for rudimentary ringtimes when we can get the real thing for a fraction of the price.

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