A curious sign of the times is that people all over the world have been downloading high quality music from the web for nothing yet have been prepared to pay through the nose for simple ringtones to be sent to their mobile phones. The market for ringtones and logos - often costing from £1 to £3 a time - has grown from almost nothing to a billion dollar business in a couple of years. Even in a sophisticated market like Japan, where it is possible to send moving images from phone to phone, ringtones still rule the roost.
The traditional ring of a telephone is being rapidly replaced, especially among the the young, by samplings from the likes of Robbie Williams or So Solid Crew. The Finnish pop band Nylon Beat hit the number one spot with a recent CD after a taster had been released as a ringtone.
A recent NOP survey found that 80% of 15 to 24 year olds downloaded at least one ringtone during the year. Exactly why they are prepared to pay handsomely for such an ephemeral thing as a ringtone while continuing to resist paying for music from the web is a bit of a mystery. It is part of the culture that persuades younger people to pay more for a T-shirt that advertises the maker's name in ever larger letters. In the old days advertisers used to pay to advertise their wares - now we pay them.
Ringtones have become a badge of passage, particularly having one of the latest ones - though how long the cult will last is a moot point. At the moment, the producers can't believe their cash machines. At a time when everyone else is unsuccessfully trying to work out ways of making punters pay for the web, young consumers are paying twice over - royalties for the content as well as the (premium-rated) telephone calls. If such a business model could be transplanted to the mainstream internet, it would transform the commercial prospects of the web.
But how much longer can this last? It is so cheap to produce ringtones (virtually nothing once the infrastructure is in place) that new competitors are bound to enter the market driving the price down. In the short term, companies will try to keep prices up by bundling in new services enabled by technological improvements - such as animated cartoons and multimedia messaging - but prices are bound to be driven down.
While ringtones are becoming ever more popular, and even addictive to young people, the older generation are finding them difficult to come to terms with. According to the same NOP survey, a third of respondents found them infuriating. It may seem strange to older folk that while the mobile manufacturing industry seems to be going down the plughole, ring tones are booming. But what is wrong with them?
Criticism is based on a mistaken notion of what constitutes a product. If companies were manufacturing, say, boiled sweets they would be counted as part of the index of manufacturing industry and so a "good thing". But ringtones generate added value - and also export income - just like any other product, except that they do not devour vital raw materials other then intellectual property. And they don't rot your teeth, either.
