A T THE WEB 2.0 CONFERENCE, A PANEL of teens talked about their habits and
attitudes for a wide range of gadgets and
services. All of them said they almost never pay for
digital music, and seemed incredulous that anyone
would. Then the moderator asked them about
cellphones. One of the teens confessed that he
spent $50 a month on ringtones. FIFTY DOLLARS A
MONTH! A red light on my maker radar went off.
Shouldn’t people make their own ringtones, not
buy them? They already own the music. Don’t they
know how to get it on their cellphones?
The business press is happy to repeat the phrase,
“the blah-blah billion-dollar ringtone market
worldwide” (the number they say is $4 billion, but
when they use big, unsubstantiated numbers so
freely, what I hear is “blah-blah”). This means lots of
people are making money on ringtones, and they do
so mostly by pickpocketing teens and their parents.
Imagine if websites could automatically charge
your ISP for activities that your children engage in
online. Ringtone vendors, which include carriers,
phone manufacturers, and third-party vendors, are
taking advantage of the automatic billing relation-
ship behind every cellphone. Increasingly, the game
is to get teens to initiate recurring monthly fees hid-
den from parents in a large, complicated phone bill.
One San Diego parent has brought a class action
suit against Jamster, charging fraud and false
advertising. This Verisign subsidiary offers a “free”
ringtone and then enrolls anyone who asks for it in a service costing $5.99 a month. They advertise on MTV, Nickelodeon, and the Cartoon Network, also promising a free ringtone if you send them a text message. What they don’t advertise is that they automatically sign you up for their costly service.
Another infuriated father set up a webpage ( www.sleaze-mobile.com) to rant about what happened once he noticed that his 11-year-old daughter had been duped into a $3.99-a-week ringtone service. His screenshots show how a teen could easily think she is saying yes to a free download, since the message saying that she is actually signing up for the service is on a later screen.
Why would anyone pay more for a 30-second ringtone than for a song on i Tunes? One answer is that teens see ringtones as personalizing their phones while music downloads are just pure entertainment. Isn’t this a terribly shoddy view of personalization?
Do you personalize your phone by signing up for a $5.99 monthly plan to download “I’m N Luv (Wit A Stripper)” by T-Pain, the number one ringtone on Jamster today? Or by downloading Beyoncé’s “Check On It” from Cingular’s Media Mall for $2.49, where you can’t get to the song without seeing promos to “Idolize My Phone” by downloading “Yo Dawg” and other “famous and fun sayings” from American Idol?
And why do teens buy so many ringtones? Apparently, teens assign a distinctive ringtone to each friend. The more friends, the more ringtones you buy. Or is it the more ringtones you buy, the more friends you have? It’s a sign of your social network.
Of course, DIY ringtones are the best option for true personalization, but don’t expect to find good information in your phone’s manual or on your carrier’s website. They don’t want you to know how.
You can own your own ringtones, and we’ll do our best on makezine.com to cover the tools and techniques for making them on your own.
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