10 ms·

The custom ringtone industry paved the way for the app store and then vanished

120 points by AlexDragusin 6y ago

rcarmo 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    Yeah, well, I _was_ in the brand police, but _after_ Live! And 360 I honestly don’t care anymore.
- WWLink 6y ago
  > 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. I think this is the real reason why. I hate the marimba ringtone for that reason too lol.
Daub 6y ago
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.
- hosteur 6y ago
  That and custom covers for Nokia phones.
  - majikandy 6y ago
    And adding after market vibration motors to the 3210 since they decided to leave it out of the UK model. I still have mine.
- djxfade 6y ago
  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.
  - skibz 6y ago
    I had a lot of fun writing J2ME apps on my old mobile phone back then. If I recall, it also used a special version of the JVM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_virtual_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_virtual_machine) known as the KVM.
  - Daub 6y ago
    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.
buro9 6y ago
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.
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  > "Long-term, when the final vestiges of openly available music vanish (CDs gone, streamed content heavily DRM'd)" Thankfully the options to simply buy and download music in DRM-free formats are better than ever. So I don't think that prophecy will come true. No matter how locked down mainstream music gets, there will always be artists who will stand up for open, easy and in some cases free access to their music.
  - iso1631 6y ago
    And of course there will always be torrents, usenet, irc, or whatever. Even if that weren't the case, the final choice is "don't buy that song". There is always competition, and that will always keep a lid of prices to an extent.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  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/
bfuclusion 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
  - bfuclusion 6y ago
    Ouch. There is _no_ excuse for that. With an a13 you should be able to use 5.1 surround as your ring tone if you want.
  - asutekku 6y ago
    That's false. Granted it's not as simple as just choosing a song from your library, but it's certainly possible: https://www.tomsguide.com/us/how-to-make-ringtones-iphone,review-6526.html https://www.tomsguide.com/us/how-to-make-ringtones-iphone,re...
  - evgen 6y ago
    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.
    - oarsinsync 6y ago
      > It is fairly trivial to <x> in iTunes I’m not sure that statement is ever true for any value of <x>, as any task in iTunes is non trivial given what a painful experience using iTunes is. That said, I can confirm the rest of the point, having made custom ringtones and pushed them to my iPhone on a few (painful) occasions.
pmlnr 6y ago
While `apt`, `yum`, etc has surely nothing to do with the appstore idea.
pjc50 6y ago
> 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 6y ago
  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.
jwilk 6y ago
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2272/ https://xkcd.com/2272/
the-dude 6y ago
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.
billpg 6y ago
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.
ourcat 6y ago
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(?).
jaybeeayyy 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
- BitwiseFool 6y ago
  I used a novelty ringtone until I realized it was conditioning me to dislike the song it was based off of. It was also slightly embarrassing to have a novel ringtone when no one else had one. I now realize the best ringtone is one that is nondescript and has no other associations.
mrkramer 6y ago
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.

120 points by AlexDragusin 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  Yeah, well, I _was_ in the brand police, but _after_ Live! And 360 I honestly don’t care anymore.
WWLink 6y ago
> 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. I think this is the real reason why. I hate the marimba ringtone for that reason too lol.

Daub 6y ago

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.

hosteur 6y ago
That and custom covers for Nokia phones.
- majikandy 6y ago
  And adding after market vibration motors to the 3210 since they decided to leave it out of the UK model. I still have mine.
djxfade 6y ago
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.
- skibz 6y ago
  I had a lot of fun writing J2ME apps on my old mobile phone back then. If I recall, it also used a special version of the JVM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_virtual_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_virtual_machine) known as the KVM.
- Daub 6y ago
  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.

buro9 6y ago

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.

KozmoNau7 6y ago
> "Long-term, when the final vestiges of openly available music vanish (CDs gone, streamed content heavily DRM'd)" Thankfully the options to simply buy and download music in DRM-free formats are better than ever. So I don't think that prophecy will come true. No matter how locked down mainstream music gets, there will always be artists who will stand up for open, easy and in some cases free access to their music.
- iso1631 6y ago
  And of course there will always be torrents, usenet, irc, or whatever. Even if that weren't the case, the final choice is "don't buy that song". There is always competition, and that will always keep a lid of prices to an extent.
chrisco255 6y ago
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/

bfuclusion 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.
- bfuclusion 6y ago
  Ouch. There is _no_ excuse for that. With an a13 you should be able to use 5.1 surround as your ring tone if you want.
- asutekku 6y ago
  That's false. Granted it's not as simple as just choosing a song from your library, but it's certainly possible: https://www.tomsguide.com/us/how-to-make-ringtones-iphone,review-6526.html https://www.tomsguide.com/us/how-to-make-ringtones-iphone,re...
- evgen 6y ago
  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.
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    > It is fairly trivial to <x> in iTunes I’m not sure that statement is ever true for any value of <x>, as any task in iTunes is non trivial given what a painful experience using iTunes is. That said, I can confirm the rest of the point, having made custom ringtones and pushed them to my iPhone on a few (painful) occasions.

pmlnr 6y ago

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

pjc50 6y ago

> 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 6y ago
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.

jwilk 6y ago

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2272/ https://xkcd.com/2272/

the-dude 6y ago

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.

billpg 6y ago

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.

ourcat 6y ago

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(?).

jaybeeayyy 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.
BitwiseFool 6y ago
I used a novelty ringtone until I realized it was conditioning me to dislike the song it was based off of. It was also slightly embarrassing to have a novel ringtone when no one else had one. I now realize the best ringtone is one that is nondescript and has no other associations.

mrkramer 6y ago

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.