
The custom ringtone industry paved the way for the app store and then vanished - AlexDragusin
https://onezero.medium.com/how-the-custom-ringtone-industry-paved-the-way-for-the-app-store-and-then-vanished-11f0d2a1e53b
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buro9
This was also the time where music had the highest value.

Consider revenue per song:

\- £0 per downloaded song via torrent

\- £0.003 per streaming song

\- £0.70 - £1 per album song on CD

\- £0.99 per song on iTunes

\- £0.99 per single song on CD

\- £1 per single song on 7"

\- £1 per 10 seconds of song in a simplified midi track... equivalent to a per
song value far higher

Lesson here if no-one saw it, the more you control the means of distribution
and playback, the higher the price you can extract from the listener.

Long-term, when the final vestiges of openly available music vanish (CDs gone,
streamed content heavily DRM'd), prices will definitely rise, or at least...
those who most control the critical parts of distribution or playback at that
time will be able extract the most revenue from the total revenue that exists.
I believe that the pressure will be on the labels and artists at this time,
and that even with technology helping to reduce the cost of recording and
releasing music it's going to be hard on them. The winners are most likely the
distributors of music across all platforms - Spotify look like a good bet.

This is the subject of a piece of work I did for the independent music labels
in the UK in early 2000s and it's still relevant.

~~~
chrisco255
Ringtones barely made a blip amidst the rapidly declining CD revenue. CD
revenue started to decline after Napster was released in 1999 and the music
industry never fully recovered. Good chart here:

[https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-
sales/](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-sales/)

~~~
goto11
There is a quite significant dip 1979-82. Anybody knows the reason?

~~~
ghaff
It was a fairly severe recession (that partly led to Reagan's election). To
other comments, it was well past the gas crisis, cassette taping had been
around for ages, and CDs were _just_ coming in (which, if anything, led to
people replacing worn vinyl with new digital media). So I'm mostly going with
recession.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Recession yes, though it was at the end of that period when Volcker moved to
quash inflation.

CDs didn't arrive in large numbers until the mid 80s.

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rcarmo
There’s another option: the Internet killed closed stores/portals (like
Vodafone Live, which I worked in/with/for).

As phones became more sophisticated, it was easier for teens to snip audio
from anywhere, convert it to whatever their phone used, and bypass ringtone
stores altogether. _Very few_ adults customized their ringtones, and usually
stuck to what shipped with the phone (or got their nephews to install a
specific one they cared).

I also blame the Marimba ringtone on the iPhone — it became a sort of status
symbol to let other people know you had an iPhone.

Plus there were dozens of utilities to take MIDI files and whatnot and turn
them into semi-proprietary formats even before the iPhone came about.

But there is a large chunk of truth in the fact that people simply outgrew
ringtones altogether, although these days video calling apps
(Whatsapp/Teams/FaceTime) all have distinctive tones.

~~~
edent
I wonder if subscription abuse also killed the market? So many scams where
people were charged huge Premium SMS fees to get a new, crappy ringtone every
week.

Oh, and the preferred capitalisation was "Vodafone live!" gotta have
exclamation mark , or the brand police will get you ;-)

~~~
rcarmo
Yeah, well, I _was_ in the brand police, but _after_ Live! And 360 I honestly
don’t care anymore.

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bfuclusion
I always considered custom ringtone stores a gross abuse of the customer. MIDI
existed YEARS earlier, so did MP3 and MOD. There's absolutely no reason why I
shouldn't have been able to load my own on the phone and just play it. Some
phones had this, most didn't.

~~~
josteink
iPhones still don’t. You’re not allowed to make your own based on music-files
or samples you have. Instead you have to buy custom ringtones in the iStore,
if whatever you had considered to use is even available to buy (most often it
is not).

It’s just amazingly stupid, and in 2020 there’s literally no excuse for such a
software shortcoming.

~~~
evgen
This is incorrect. It is fairly trivial to create a ringtone of up to thirty
seconds from any track you have in iTunes and push it to your phone. I do this
frequently and it took me less than ten seconds to find instructions for how
to do so via google.

~~~
shp0ngle
iTunes is now name Music on macOS, btw.

~~~
evgen
Since using iTunes/Music for this is apparently more than some are willing to
put up with I did a bit more research and on a Mac it is even easier than what
I suggested at first.

Step 1: create an aac-encoded file with the .m4r extension to its name

Step 2: connect phone to Mac and drag and drop .m4r file on to iPhone on
desktop

Step 3: there is no step 3

For those who want to do this without needing a Mac or PC there are apps that
will do the job as well.

~~~
KONAir
Just downloading the song and selecting it in a list makes it feels like a
chore on an Android unlike a multi platform/app adventure/experience with an
iPhone.

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pjc50
> the Rokr E790 Candy Bar:

> The phone turned out to be an abject user experience failure. It had a 100
> song limit regardless of how much space you actually had left, and it was
> painfully slow at uploading songs from iTunes. Crucially, you couldn’t use
> it to buy ringtones or music remotely

I'm fairly sure that was a carrier-imposed limitation.

However much Apple's store looks like a monopoly now, we should also recognise
that Apple did a lot to fight the awfulness of anti-features imposed by
carriers on phones so they could sell the feature back to you at monopoly
prices.

And the Apple 30% cut looks reasonable compared to a traditional music
industry 70% cut ..

~~~
matsemann
I think the "carrier restrictions" of stuff mostly were a thing in the US? In
Norway I bought most of my phones even back then outright. And if one didn't,
the effect was mostly that the phone was locked to only accept sim cards from
the same operator. Didn't have much impact on features of the phone itself.

------
Daub
Another point is that very little about pre-iphone phones was customizable. I
can't even remember downloading any apps before the iPhone. Custom ring-tones
were therefore one of the few outlets for making your device your own.

~~~
djxfade
I don't know where you are located, but in Norway, the "app" market (J2ME
apps) was huge. It worked kinda like how the ringtone market worked.

~~~
Daub
I am speaking from experience as a consumer.., that the app market was very
‘thin’... difficult to navigate, hard to locate and lacking in variety. But I
also have talked at length. With someone who developed apps for phones pre-
iPhone. His was a horror story.

As I recall (details fuzzy), He had to pay a substantial fee to the carriers
in order for his app to be quality reviewed. If it failed, then he would gave
to pay again. For each phone they supported, an extra fee was required. Also
extra fees for different carriers, even if it was for a device already
approved by another carrier.

Simply... in the days when the carriers ruled the waves, there was no profit
in a healthy app dev community. In the UK, my first experience of a healthy
app eco-system came with the dawn of the Palm Pilot.

~~~
djxfade
I dont think we had such carrier restrictions in Norway. You usually just sent
an SMS with a code for which "app" you wanted, was charged on your phone bill
for it, and received an MMS with the JAR file ready to go

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jaybeeayyy
Honestly I hardly hear ring tones at all even more. Getting different styles
of vibrations for different notifications is much better. More discrete,
faster to determine the notification before you look at your phone, less
jarring...I don't mind at all.

I did buy a ring tone one from the apple store or itunes, whatever it was.
Immediately thought it was a waste of a dollar.

~~~
felbane
I've taken to just using the default ringtones available with whatever phone I
buy. I set a few important contacts to have distinctive ring/message tones,
and then forget about it. Five minutes of set-up, years of never caring about
it again.

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pmlnr
While `apt`, `yum`, etc has surely nothing to do with the appstore idea.

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ourcat
It certainly drove the development and adoption of "micropayments" at the
time.

There was also confusion around copyright issues, with some characters
seemingly thinking that "under 30 seconds" of copyrighted music was fair-game.

I also remember when you could make custom iPhone ringtones in Garageband and
easily transfer via iTunes, though that feature seems to have vanished(?).

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mrkramer
I remember how it was in Europe; they were ripping people off, it was so
expensive. Nowadays you can download YouTube or Spotify to your phone and
listen to music but back then it was crazy expensive.

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the-dude
In NL several companies have pivoted from being a SMS provider into PSPs (
payment service provider ).

They abandoned the SMS business mostly, and in this light I find the rise of
Twillio/Messagebird remarkable.

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billpg
I avoided ring-tone services entirely. There seemed to be next to no
regulation and it felt like if I just wanted to download one ring-tone I'd
find myself consenting to be charged to receive unwanted text messages for
ages with no way to stop it.

I don't know if that was a fair impression of a whole industry but I wasn't
going to risk it.

------
jwilk
Relevant XKCD:

[https://xkcd.com/2272/](https://xkcd.com/2272/)

