The first Nokia tune was a simple monophonic ringtones with only one beep sound. Soon after the Nokia tune there came a lot of other monophonic ringtones and even real songs that were composed to monophonic ringtones. But the technology did not stop. Because some years after the first Nokia tune the first polyphonic ringtones came out. Polyphonic ringtones became a big hype and every one who had a mobile cell phone wanted a new one that supported polyphonic ringtones. These polyphonic ringtones consist of more beeps than just one, so it sounds like a real song but without any singing. And the drums and the piano were very realistic. But after the polyphonic ringtones the technology behind ringtones slowed down a little bit. For a few years many companies were looking to find the best quality ringtone sound with the least file size. But after a while the mobile phone companies started to create and use bigger memory chips in their phones, and upgraded the quality of the sound. So after a while it became possible to have MP3 songs on your mobile phone and play them with good quality of sound. The first realtones are born...



But the first realtones weren't actually the realtones we use to know. Because it was a little bit too risky to set up deals with record label companies to use their artists songs. Just because they didn't know if anyone would be interested in the realtones. And the mobile phones that supported the realtones were very expensive and almost nobody had one. So the first realtones were actually called truetones. Truetones are mp3 sounds of real things. Like a mowing cat or the mowing of a cow. You even had a Yihaa! as a truetone or a big burp or a fart. But eventually more people bought a MP3 supported mobile phone as they became less expensive and those people actually bought those truetones. And eventually the market became bigger and bigger. The next thing after the truetones were the covertones. Covertones are the covers of real existing songs. But it was useless to make those because the productional costs were very high and you still had to pay a lot of money to the record label companies. So after the flop of covertones the ringtone providers switched to realtones. Real songs of real artists.

But why did it took so long before the realtones came? Well, that is really easy to answer: money. The realtone providers had and still have to make deals with record companies these deals go deep into the $100.000's only for the deal! After the deal you still have to pay for every realtone you sell! So it is really expensive to legally offer those realtones. And you have to make deals with a lot of record label companies because there are a lot of artists at different companies. So there just was not a big market for the realtones at first and the ringtone companies had to wait until the big crowds got into the MP3 supported mobile phones.

There are some negative things about realtones, the quality of the sound on your phone is most of the time not as good as the real song so you might hear a different way of the song on your mobile phone than when you listen to the preview. Also, realtones are very expensive because of the high record deals. Realtones sometimes even cost two times as much as a polyphonic ringtone. And when you buy a realtone online you pay more for the realtone then when you buy the full song online!

But there are also some bright sides of realtones. Realtones are mp3 ringtones so they're the newest thing and you can really show off when you have one! Also the realtones of the future are probably going to be a lot less expensive because the market gets bigger and bigger every day. Also the mobile phones of the future have better technology and better sound. There are even now mobile phones which have about 4 gigabytes of memory storage and it's only going to be more in the future. So with realtones you can make turn your mobile phone into a media system.

So the realtones might be a little expensive right now, but in the future they're going to be big, really big!