James Delahunty
25 Jun 2005 13:00
Major record labels are starting to see some high revenue from the sales of ringtones to mobile phone users. These "real sound" ringtones, playback usually only for about 15 seconds but the company that sells them could charge easily 3 or 4 times as much as iTunes would charge to download a full music track to a computer. Major record labels are now seeing ringtones as a new "piracy free" source of revenue that could help fix any damage cause buy lost sales due to rising rates of piracy around the world.
"This is not a fad that will go away in the next year or so," said Thomas Hesse, president of global digital business at Sony BMG Music Entertainment. Of course it won’t go away; people will always be looking for tones to be played when they are receiving incoming calls. However, up until recently, phones could only handle polyphonic and monophonic ringtones at best, but compared to real audio (or what the industry refers to as "master tones") they sound pretty dead and lifeless.
"We knew it was an area of revenue that had record companies excited, but I don't think we were really prepared for the dimension of success we were seeing," said Geoff Mayfield, Billboard senior analyst and charts editor. Billboard launched a sales chart for ringtones last October. In many cases now, ringtones are outselling download sales. For example, "My Goodies" by R&B singer Ciara has already been sold as a ringtone over 1 million times.
The music industry would like to see mobile phones eventually become everyday multimedia devices, and they believe they can rely on them enough to not worry about piracy. However, it's likely that upcoming mobile phones will support MP3 playback and as well as allowing you to play mp3 through a headphone, they should also allow you to use a certain of any MP3 file stored as a ringtone. While it will be a good source of revenue, I would highly doubt that piracy won’t be a problem.
Source:
News.com