How Ringtones Dominated the Music Industry | Mic The Snare

[Music] [Laughter] get molly on your phone now if you're anything like me you might have a few questions after watching this who is this mole why does he think i'm yummy and fat why is a man laughing maniacally at said mole and most importantly how do i get molly on my phone the answer is by downloading a 30 second clip that would play every time your cell phone rang aptly titled a ringtone these days they're considered a relic of the 2000s but to my surprise and potentially yours they were a landmark achievement in music tech and music tech so come with me as we look at the history and impact of ringtones like all mythical fables the beginning of the modern ringtone is hard to pin down some may start in the 1870s when alexander graham bell invented the telephone some may go to 1902 when spanish guitarist francisco tarega composed his piece granvals some may say the ringtone only became possible with the rise of digital music files such as the mp3 in the early 1990s some may even say the ringtone was only truly born in 1997 when a swedish teenager recorded himself mimicking the sound of a motorcycle we'll get back to that trust me but for our purposes today we have to split our attention between japan and finland in the 1990s in japan communications company ntt and its offshoot dokomo had included several ringtone presets with their pagers and eventually ketai japanese shorthand for portable phones one of their phones was the digital minimo d319 by denzo not only did it come with pre-made tunes it was the first phone that allowed you to create your own ringtones truly took off in the country however in 1997 with the ketai chakumero which gave instructions on how to program your own ringtones using the phone's keypad and recognizing the popularity of the ringtone craze several japanese companies started selling their own ringtones while japan was experiencing its first ringtone boom finnish phone company nokia was seeing its own rise in the telecommunications field several of their phone models included ringtone presets including the aforementioned grand valles if that name doesn't sound familiar this will nokia the ringtone which became known as the nokia tune was soon everywhere in finland not everyone was a fan of its omnipresence though notably a young cto named vasamati pananen happened to hear it while overcoming a rough hangover as the dulcet tones of a mid-90s cellphone speaker blasted into his ear he said to himself you know what this song sucks i want to hear van halen's jump instead so he created a program called harmonium which would allow users to compose their own sound files and send them via sms he being the altruistic soul that he was put harmonium on the internet as freeware and several companies swooped in to use it by the fall of 1998 many wireless providers including major player radio lynchia were selling ringtones of their own these two stories laid the foundation for why the ringtone succeeded customization personalization and ease of access so let's take a listen at what was rocking these two countries to their cultural core yep we have to remember this was the mid to late 90s commercial cell phone technology was in its relative infancy as were the speakers and synthesizer chips that these phones used thus cell phones at this time were only capable of producing monophonic ringtones i.e one note at a time but it would only be a few short years before phones would be capable of the glory that was producing more than one note at a time and it was thanks to this man this is thomas robertson or thomas dolby you may know him best for his 1982 hit she blinded me with science [Music] outside of music he was also an entrepreneur he started the company headspace in 1993 which became beatnik in 1998. their main focus was synthesizers for mobile devices and their biggest innovation was the rich music format or rmf this format allowed midi and sound files to be combined in a fairly small file size which made it utterly perfect for mobile phones so beatnik teamed up with nokia and in 2001 the nokia 3510 was released as the first mobile phone with polyphonic ringtones within two years the majority of phones on the market could get down with polyphony [Music] just in time too as we entered the 2000s the stage had been set for ringtones to become the hot new thing on cell phones which were themselves becoming the hot new thing in tech phone carriers offered ringtone options as did aggregators like the aforementioned radio ninja zingy and perhaps the most well remembered these days yamba or jamster this also led to one of the most interesting niche positions one could have ringtone composer once the rights to license a song had been cleared which could be its own mad dash someone had to strip it down to a few or even just one musical line 99 invisible interviewed one of these ringtone composers who worked at zingy who said about the process one thing that would take a lot of my time during the day was to think how do i boil down a song with a lot of voices down to just one simple melody line you'd have to think of just that melody line and do it in such a way where it would still communicate what the song was to folks when the ringtone went off even with the growing ecosystem around ringtones there is one last major player in the ringtone game that we need to cover the latest move in the legal chess game between the recording industry and napster is in the ninth circuit court of appeals to understand why the music industry was so willing to jump onto ringtones it's worth remembering where it was in the late 90s and early 2000s napster and limewire had decimated the perceived worth of recorded music allowing anyone to download whatever music they wanted for free so going into the new millennium the industry needed to find new ways to monetize music and they found ringtones the music industry's adoption of the ringtone went hand in hand with the pop music of the 2000s artists like usher little john 3 6 mafia the yin yang twins and others made rap specifically crunk a dominant force in 2000's pop culture most importantly crunk music translated pretty well when it had to be cut down to a polyphonic or even monophonic ringtone in addition there was 50 cent the black ips florida t-pain all of whom made music that worked well as ringtones to help track the growth of the market billboard even started charts specifically for ringtones beginning in 2004. as the 2000s progressed we even started to see pop music that was engineered to work as ringtones this niche genre was best known as ringtone rap and its leading figure was arguably you wait no sorry i i didn't say that right [Music] soulja boy came around during the latter half of the 2000s and his success was in large part due to his ability to make songs intended for ringtones but while he was able to cross over and become a figure in mainstream pop other ringtone rap artists could not and fade it out quickly apologies to all the young jock fans out there now monophony polyphony all neat and also rad but there's one more kind of ringtone that i haven't mentioned this kind of ringtone could go by several different names master tones ring tunes real tones so on so forth in practice they were the actual sound file of a piece of music usually an mp3 or aac compressed and played through a phone speaker by the way the typical frequency range for a cell phone speaker in the 2000s was between 300 and 3000 hertz do you hear my voice right now how weird it sounds that's what people were clamoring for on their flip phones back in the day so these were the three main kinds of ringtones that were on the market by the 2000s or so and it's here where the floodgates for ringtones truly burst with record labels phone carriers and digital aggregators at the helm ringtones were everywhere you would know from the amount of commercials that played advertising them finally we had reached the dream of having quagmire from family guy on our phone not only that but the sonic quality of the true tone meant that other genres that weren't rap had a seat at the table a table where 10 different ringtones were going off at once and one of them was william hung's she bangs for the consumer the big draw for ringtones was customization not only could you have your own ringtone but phones eventually had the ability to assign different ringtones to different colors at its peak in 2007 the worldwide ringtone industry brought in 1.1 billion dollars adjusted for inflation that's 1.25 billion in 2020. that's summer tentpole movie money that's lion king 2019 money that hurts now most of that revenue could be chalked up to just ringtones being a popular thing at the time but i also want to highlight how much people were paying for them some of you may still remember but for those of you who don't i want you to guess how much a ringtone cost in its heyday for context a digital download of a full song off of say itunes was 99 cents for most of the 2000s a ringtone again is a 30-second clip of a full-length song with that in mind a ringtone's cost ranged from two to four dollars even though they brought in the big bucks true tones also brought in complications to the ringtone ecosystem you see with monophonic and polyphonic ringtones those were recreations of songs thus the revenue for one of them was split in order of percentage between the aggregator phone carrier billing company and publisher the true tone however was a different beast since it was effectively sampling the song itself the record labels would also get a piece of the pie and they would often go for the biggest slice they could the music industry's attempts to suck whatever life there was in the ringtone market is partly why ringtone sales started to decline after 2007 but there's one last aspect of the ringtone craze we should touch on before we talk about its downfall you see these digital aggregators tried to find other ways to make money aside from ringtones for most you could get not only ringtones but wallpapers games love tests dating services etc in jamster's case they did that as well but they also stumbled upon a brilliant way to get around the record labels they realized they could just make their own characters who had their own songs and market them primarily to children which means which means finally we get to talk about [Music] look at this genuinely perfect specimen look at this towering figure of sheer musical genius look at this stupid-ass frog there is so much we could cover when it comes to crazy frog his berlin era his time in hawaii his live-aid performance but it's best we start at the beginning back in 1997 a swedish teen named daniel malmodoll recorded himself imitating the sound of a two-speed moped and posted it on his website the clip garnered him some viral attention in his home country but it was taken to another level when animator eric vernquist stumbled upon the clip and made a short animation from it that clip was the annoying thing eventually the two connected and after a generated more buzz in europe they sold the character to yama jamster at which point they started marketing the clip and sound as ringtones and renamed the thing crazy frog crazy frog did see a ton of success as a ringtone in the uk but like any true artist he hadn't even begun to reach his peak in early 2005 electronic production group the base bumpers released a version of the 80 synth hit axle f that incorporated crazy frog's signature ding dings and bam bams this rendition took the hell off in the uk topping the charts and outselling coldplay's speed of sound four to one chris martin defeated by a naked frog i'm a coldplay fan and even i love to see it seafrog's axel f was a remarkable showcase for what ringtones and ringtone adjacent media could accomplish like i know i've been a little me boy for this bit of the video but i mean this sincerely crazy frog is the old town road of the 2000s and his success led to even more animated characters poised as marketing tools you got sweetie the chick nessie the dragon crazy cow dj mozart my main man wonky over here you and me make the perfect couple hope it is not only a bubble wonky is so hilarious what do you mean he's professing his love for you that's not funny you got anna blue damien dawn schnuffle bunny jaden the vampire boy [Music] well i can think of one reason why it's complicated so many cartoon creatures aimed at what the hell is this [Music] this is soulless this is absolute derivative trash there is no soul or originality with the crazy frogs just a shameless ripoff unlike crazy frog who is special and unique what a great pair of sentences but just as the frogs rise seemingly positioned ringtones as a long-lasting player in media his gluttony helped lead to their fall the gradual exit of ringtones from pop culture can be tied to many different factors crazy frog was certainly one due to how overpromoted he was for real a study done in the uk found that during the height of his popularity the majority of people saw a crazy frog ad at least once a day turns out when you go hard marketing a character originally called the annoying thing people get annoyed pretty quickly but don't blame just crazy frog the aggregators were to blame as well first when it came to marketing just look at this ad from jamster one day the people of the world will end their wars and destroy their weapons the whole world will be united in love and understanding but there will still be one conflict that divides humanity [Music] also i mentioned it briefly before but somewhere in this massive block of text shown during ringtone ads is a line about a subscription fee when you bought a ringtone you were actually buying into an aggregator's subscription plan and they were quite hard to get out of this led to several lawsuits over the practices these companies used to make money at the same time as other lawsuits including one arguing that playing ringtones in a public space constituted copyright infringement of course aside from everyone trying to outright drain the market there was also just the fact that mobile phone technology was moving forward with smartphones like the first iphone you could not only store mp3s on your phone but you could cut them into ringtones without having to pay two to four dollars along with the market saturation it's also worth recognizing the oral saturation just being around a ton of other people who had their own distinct ringtones to put this another way does anyone not have their phone on vibrate or mute for the most part these days along with the rise of smartphones the primary demographic that we're buying ringtones a got older and b began to call less and text more all of these little changes made the ringtone market essentially obsolete and over the 10 years after its peak in 2007 revenue dropped 97 for all intents and purposes ringtones were done most of the major figures in the ringtone space either moved on to other things or downsized to the extreme phone companies were able to move on fairly unscathed but the aggregators were basically done for good radiolinja became part of finnish company elisa zingy shut down their ringtone division in 2007 and is now a part of japanese company four side yamba jamster was acquired by fox mobile group in 2008 which was then turned into just a digital they had a few more hits after crazy frog like the gummy bear and our good friend molly who is quite well known in europe just to digital a worldwide leader in mobile entertainment and so much more that's why we can turn this into this panonin went to work at microsoft and win awards for his impact on ringtones thomas dolby teaches at john hopkins university and eric vernquist is a video producer his most famous non-frog related work is get this the music video for jamie xx's gosh yeah one of the best music videos of the past few years was done by the guy who made the annoying thing perhaps the final mail in the ringtone's coffin was the end of billboard's ringtones chart in 2014 with the last number one being taylor swift's shake it off the only mentions i could find to ringtones in the past few years are a song by 100 gex and a recurring joke on bojack horseman your telephone is ringing i'm ira glass thank you for being a sustaining member of public radio everyone has a story and your phone's story is that it's ringing excuse me despite once being a billion dollar industry it sure feels like ringtones have just disappeared completely the ringtone fad did burn bright and fast but it's remarkable that it gave birth to some of the first digital delivery platforms out there and to see its dna in other industries on the first point the aggregator's subscription plans were possibly the first instance of years before netflix or any other streaming service came into the same field and on the second point the ringtone surge and the industry that came with it exhibited characteristics that would pop up and become more pronounced in today's industries ringtones highlighted songs that came with attention-grabbing visuals making it one of the first platforms where memes could thrive the providers of said ringtone started what were possibly the first digital storefronts for online media years before smartphones were doing app stores even the shady practices meant to lure in kids can be seen in a medium like video games which have been riddled with microtransactions and gambling mechanics for many a fortnight it might be strange to believe but ringtones were a landmark if primitive achievement in digital media and if you have any fond memories of ringtones or a favorite one as a kid i'd love to hear about it in the comments now let's close this out with one more animated creature from jamster crazy wait that's just molly again how does he know he's yummy and fat [Music] you

Channel: Mic The Snare

Views: 54,357

Rating: 4.982563 out of 5

Keywords: micthesnare, mic the snare, music analysis, video essay, ringtone, ringtones, crazy frog, axel f, soulja boy, crank that, kiss me thru the phone, jamba, jamster, crunk, usher, lil jon, ying yang twins, review, remix, reaction, 2020, 100 gecs, bojack horseman, ringtone rap, monophonic, polyphonic, truetone, realtone

Id: DFCSTjUVRY0

Length: 20min 20sec (1220 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/randomFUCKfromcherry]

my boy’s got his own ringtone

[u/bookmovietvworm]

my only comment to add is that I literally bought a ring tone for my iPad in middle school because that was the only way to get I Heart ? by Taylor Swift on iTunes. It still is the only way I believe.

[u/Empty-Tea]

I’ll never forget spending £2.99 on a pollyphonic ringtone of babycakes for my Nokia 3310