Is The Traditional Ringtone Ready To Be Retired?

Probably not for a while, but though it’s a little light on numbers to back up the claims of the ringtone’s demise, this Digital Music News story quotes several phone/music industry types still wary, several years after the technology was introduced, about getting users to shift from buying your average blip-of-Linkin Park tone to buying a download of the whole damn song over their phones. DMN muses on the format’s eventual burnout, which brings a tear to the eye of this ringtone addict. Then again, with Nickelback’s “Rockstar” the currently the No. 1 ringtone on iTunes, perhaps the format needs to be put down:

The next phase is mostly unknown, though the decreases bode poorly for more complicated formats – at least in the US and Europe. Over-the-air (OTA) formats have performed only modestly – on both sides of the Atlantic – though expectations may have been set too high by a strapped recording industry. “We are still dealing with a business that has profound challenges,” explained Adam Sexton, chief marketing officer at mobile music backend provider Groove Mobile.

That puts the pressure on “the next big thing,” yet this platform remains in its infancy. “Mobile music is still less than one percent of the industry,” said Dave Ulmer, senior director of Entertainment Products at Motorola Media Solutions.

In other words, “profound challenges” seems like biz spin that translates to “as the bottom drops out of the ringtone market, cell phone technology has to start advancing at such a rate as to make over-the-air downloads profitable/more than a novelty, thereby allowing us to bring down the price on/attract more customers to integrated MP3 player/cell phone combos, as they have finally, slowly begun to shift folks toward downloading whole songs over their phones as an activity as every day as stealing music online. But people are starting to shy away from the circumscribed world of the 30-second polyphonic ringtone except crazed music bloggers who don’t mind dropping the cost of four cups of coffee on two cruddy pop snippets, even though they keep their phone on vibrate 90% of the time. But those kooks will only give up their muddy Boots Randolph and Hurricane Chris ringtones that don’t even loop properly when you pry their overly expensive, barely functional telephone from their front left pockets.”

Softening Ringtone Raises Questions On Mobile Music [Digital Music News]