Ringtones… wha?!

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I’ve been trying to coalesce my thoughts on this subject for a while now, and as is often the case, someone else says so eloquently what I’ve been trying to put into words for weeks.

Read David Pogue’s New York Times article on the ringtone phenomenon, then weigh in here if you agree. Or disagree. Either way. I’m genuinely curious.

Maybe it’s merely a convenience thing. Maybe people just don’t want to hassle with finding the selected segment of the song they like (or even making that decision in the first place) and would rather waste - er, pay - money to the record company (or distributor, in the case of iTunes) so they don’t have to trasnfer the favorite part of the hot single of the month to their phone. But even if that were the case, you’re accepting the fact that it’ll only be good for a limited license term (1 year).

Let’s say I have a fantastic digital image that I make available to people for their computer desktops. I’ll keep it cheap, so that illegally downloading my Hot New Desktop Image (and bothering to remove the watermarking and logo brand) and resizing it wouldn’t be worth it for the Average Joe, so he drops $1 and has a gorgeous new desktop image. I can’t imagine, in all good conscience, going back to him for another $1 if he wanted to use it on his cell phone as wallpaper - a “Ringimage” if you will - let alone making that image unusable, invalid, or invisible on day no. 366.

I just don’t get the rationale of the music business using this model as we try to chart a viable path to the future.

As a music production company (and songwriters and artists) it may seem like we should be fighting for every little scrap of revenue we can get. But ringtones have never made any sense to me - at least the revenue and licensing model associated with the industry hasn’t. And the fact that people are dropping $5B on this ridiculous arrangement each year absolutely baffles my mind!

And as an Apple stockholder you’d think I’d be all for new revenue streams from the iTunes behemoth, but even I’m having trouble wrapping my head around the ringtone portion of the music industry’s business plan. Help me understand this, eh? [dh]