7/14/2023 0 Comments Rude voice ringtonesSelling ringtone versions of their songs was seen as sort of a way to make up for that lost revenue. With the rise of both legal and illegal file sharing, the revenue in the music industry was decreasing. And not just for the phone companies, also for the music industry which was struggling in the early 2000s. With millions of cellphone users buying Real Tone pop songs, ringtones became a cash cow. “We missed getting to actually get into the nitty-gritty and create the audio ourselves.” And that bleepy bloopy ringtone aesthetic was gone forever. “Once we got the rights to the actual songs and once the technology got savvy enough, we became much more editors at that point than anything else,” remembers Levine. And as cool as it was to finally hear music on your phone in high fidelity, for composers like Mike, it was hard not to see the rise of the Real Tone as something of a loss. It was the closest thing to listening to music on our phones in the mid-2000s. Like Uncle Scooter’s ringtone, it was just that Maxwell song. Real Tones were basically just snippets of the song cut down to size. All of these forces: licensing, tech, and business came together to usher in the final, fully evolved form of the ringtone: The Real Tone. And so oftentimes our job was feverish really trying, you know, within the space of hours to figure out which publishers and labels owned rights to certain songs,” Abiraj explains. “…We need to make sure that we have the ringtone the day the song drops. Stacey Abiraj handled licensing at Zingy, and she said that as soon as a new song dropped, it was a mad scramble to get the license to turn it into a ringtone. But using all of these popular songs meant companies Zingy needed to get the rights to them. In a short period of time, ringtones became a booming business. This created a demand for better, more musically complex ringtones. Phone companies starting giving away phones for very little money with the idea that they would make their profits on the contract and other services like wallpaper backgrounds or ringtones. But phones eventually got smaller and cheaper, and the business model began to change. These were basic monophonic ringtones which were simple melodies played one note at a time. In 2004, the company says it sold 2.5 million ringtones a month. Zingy was one of the largest ringtone producers in the world. “You’d have to think of just that melody line and do it in such a way where it would still communicate you know what the song was to folks with when the ringtone went off,” explains Levine Polyphonic Spree And he says that being a ringtone maker was kind of like being a translator. “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?’” Levine worked for a ringtone production company called Zingy while he was studying technology at NYU and found the job listing on Craigslist. Mike Levine was one of these ringtone composers. But to build that library they needed ringtone composers. This meant they needed a massive library of everyone’s favorite songs in ringtone form. Vesku’s software allowed anyone with time on their hands to make their own musical ringtone creations, but most people didn’t have time on their hands. A Finnish wireless provider called Radiolinja said yes, and took Vesku’s idea and scaled it up. He started pitching telephone companies on the idea of an application that would allow people to create, share, and download custom ringtones. Vesku wanted everyone to be able to do the same and choose the ringtone they wanted to hear. Everyone on the train was staring at him, and he loved it. Someone called his phone, and “Jump” screamed from his pocket. His big moment came on the way to a meeting on a packed rush-hour train. Once he got that working, Vesku was able to create a really basic version of Van Halen’s “Jump.” He loaded the ringtone into his phone and was excited to test it out in public. Vesku and his friends realized that they could compose ringtones in a program Vesku created called Harmonium - and then use that Smart Messaging platform to transfer bits of a song as code to a cell phone. It turned out that the Nokia phones that Vesku and his friends were using had an early text messaging function called Smart Messaging, which let Nokia users send messages to each other.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |