These days cell phones are ubiquitous – almost everybody has one. But with this popularity came a great deal of confusion, with everyone in the room reaching for his or her phone when the ringtone sounded loud and clear. Combine this with our contradictory human desire to be different while fitting in, and you have the perfect backdrop against which the development of the myriad ringtones available today took place. Here is a brief history of that most modern of sounds: the cell phone ringtone.

Even when cell phones were first introduced, people displayed the urge to make their own handset unique to themselves. The cell phone manufacturers realised the importance of individualisation too, by including their corporate logo as a part of the design. Many cell phone handset allowed consumers to personalize their phone by altering this logo, creating something fairly unique on a standard handset.

As cell phones crested upon the technological wave, however, and the audio capabilities of handsets improved, ringtones became the more popular way to make a generic cell phone more personal. It was also supremely practical also, helping to prevent the mass dive for a ringing phone mentioned before. Manufacturers began including a variety of ringtones with the cell phone handset, allowing consumers to create a phone that was unique to them. But, as is the human condition, once cell phone users saw what was becoming possible, they immediately wanted more!

The popularity of personalizing a cell phone’s ringtone lead to the appearance on the market of companies, usually web based, that offered for download a range of versions of the latest tunes that could then be used as ringtones. Initially, this service was largely a cost free one, but as popularity increased fees became an inevitable part of ringtone procurement. As more and more people logged on to get the ringtone for them, the need to create new and different ringtones emerged, resulting in a wide variety of tunes that were advertised aggressively to the public in order to get them to buy.

And buy they did, in large numbers. But it was, in fact, this mass purchasing of the advertised ringtones that resulted in a slight undermining of the original purpose of the custom ringtone – the most popular tones are know the incoming call signal on such a number of cell phones that the familiar dive for the ringing phone that might possibly belong to any one of the twenty people in the room has once again become a problem. But who cares? When we have to choose between the practical and the fashionable, the outcome is always the same. Fashion wins out every time!