The appetite for ring tones has not shown abatement with the global ring tone market forecasted to grow around $5.2 billion annually. In 2006, ring tones accounted for over 10 per cent of the $ 32.3 billion worldwide music market. With market researchers throwing up figures of increasing trends within consumers to seek music entertainment from their mobile phones, this industry has caught the fancy of ring tone artists. Several websites display a 'Top Ten' ring tone chartbuster list along with providing a list of popular international song artists' composition of their famous songs for ring tones. The Crazy Frog ring tone was the first mobile ring tone, as per reports, to top the pop charts in Britain.
The steadily growing popularity and influence amongst the youth, has led the music industry to embrace its kin with open arms for various reasons. The hip ? hop fraternity's contribution accounts for more than half of all the downloaded ring tones across the globe, according to sources. And therefore artists such as 50 Cent, Mariah Carey, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, et al are more than willing to compose ring tones of their famous numbers. It has already been forecasted by professionals and experts that ring tones will overshadow the sales of the music industry because royalties from mobile phone ring tones are expected to surpass the sales of CD's as the primary source of income for music makes across the globe.
The industry growth is indeed unstoppable with manufacturers releasing swankier models with the requisite operating systems to play the freely available ring tones in a variety of formats. The large fan following of the formerly dominant polyphonic hip hop tones, are now making room to accommodate fans of country music, Bollywood hits, pop, rock, and other genres.
Having said this, this industry is facing some turbulent times already. With the piracy issue looming large, there have been reports of disputes between songwriters and producers of films over royalty fees. The former have been receiving a one time fee for their compositions without any regard for the future value appreciation of their work. Their argument primarily being that ring tone royalties not being covered in the original contract need to be accounted for now with additional revenues generated from their piece of work being used across a variety of mediums. Bollywood, the iconic Indian film industry, generates roughly Rs. 200 crore in ring tone revenues annually; with the 50 million mobile phone subscribers downloading approximately 3 lakh ring tones daily, according to trade experts!
Ring tone subscription has been a strategy that has caught the lame consumer absolutely unawares. A 'free sign up' usually leads to a couple of free ring tones initially and before one realizes, the user is charged fees for these continuous monthly services.
Ring tones now being played out by the masses, have been fine tuned to suit various advertising and marketing strategies, thereby generating additional revenue for the industry. Several companies in the North American market compose their popular product jingles as ring tones and send out the sound files to their target market. Personalization of ring tones has attracted even the big wigs of the music industry who have ventured into a series of launches of MP3 players that allows users to splice sections of songs for use as mobile phone ring tones. The costs attached to this service are almost peanuts as compared to that charged by leading ring tone providers and will eventually eat into their market in the long run.
Whilst, personalization is undoubtedly the domain of the future, it remains to be seen how this industry sorts piracy and royalty issues to protect the unique compositions of ring tone artists.
Having started off in its most basic and crudest form in Finland, mobile phone ring tones today, according to reports, are generating more than $ 4 billion in annual worldwide revenues. And with the up gradation of technology at their disposal mobile phone ring tones are being constantly morphed into an exciting ?new? rage day in and day out.
As per reports, the Asian market by far remains within the strong hold of novel mobile phone ring tones for several reasons. South ? East Asian music artistes, enjoy immense popularity in their home countries largely owing to the fact that they are non ? English speaking nations and therefore their audiences are restricted to those within their home country and the relatively small Diaspora spread across the globe. With 'sing tones' having been touted as the latest avatar of ring tones, these have undoubtedly found a large fan following in countries such as Japan, which according to researchers is supposed to be the land of origin for Karaoke. Sing tones allow the user to record his or her voice to a popular soundtrack and tune in automatically to sound good with the help of available software. This can later be downloaded onto the user's mobile phone and then subsequently shared with others.
India, in the South ? Asian sub ? continent, is home to the burgeoning Bollywood industry and only naturally lends itself to being an extremely lucrative opportunity for mobile phone ring tones downloads. Experts say that the market for value added services for mobile phones stands at $125 million and in itself accounts for about 20 per cent of the revenue earned by mobile phone operators. Within this value added services segment, ring tones account for roughly 80 per cent of the segment, thereby being the largest player. Along with the popular Bollywood movies' sound tracks, there are several other budding artistes whose compositions are a favourite for mobile phone ring tones. These artistes along with the music composers for Bollywood films have taken to specifically composing ring tones for mobile phones and there is enough and more debate with regards to the demand of these professionals for an additional payment of fees for composing ring tones and licensing them to mobile phone operators. The widespread Indian Diaspora are also made available these ring tones through licensing arrangements made by the producers with off ? shore distributors for an already agreed upon fee. Industry experts peg this profit share on a 50 ? 50 basis largely. Although India is not an English speaking nation, the only advantage it has against its South ? East Asian counterparts is that with the popularity of the Bollywood industry lot of United Kingdom based artistes such as Dr. Dre, Rishi Rich, Sean, et al have taken to incorporating snippets of some famous tracks into their compositions thereby leading to its widespread presence and acceptance.
Speaking of United Kingdom that seems to be another region that experts say is a popular hot spot for mobile phone ring tones, with the trend of ring tone DJ's seriously catching up with its inhabitants. Not to mention the presence of local awards for the best ring tone compositions and the equivalent of 'Top Ten Chartbusters' list. Now, that is one country that surely has a lot of music artistes and ring tone composers humming all the way to the bank!