Ringtones are still big business and a multi-billion dollar industry but how long will it be before this dies down?

Mobile phones have come a long way since the days of beep beep monophonic ringtones. Mono ringtones due to their basic nature were relatively easy to compose as well and most monophonic ringtone phones towards the end would include a composer that allowed you to compose your own ringtones.

A big boost to the ringtone industry was the introduction of polyphonic ringtones. These were much more believable and a lot of the professionally recorded ringtones actually sounded like the song they were based on. Being multi-toned ringtones they were much more difficult to compose for the average mobile phone user and the only option open to you if you wanted your favourite song as a ringtone was to buy it. This usually involved calling a premium rate telephone to place your order and a download link would then be sent to your phone for you to get your chosen ringtone.

As the market grew so did the options for payment and the introduction of reverse sms billing and the subscription model.

The trouble with the subscription system was that it was often miss-sold with the lure of “Free Ringtones” and aimed mainly at kids who didn’t know any better and before you knew it you could have been charged a £100 or so before you realised. You only have to look at the complaints at Grumbletext to see the underlying problem. Naturally as this problem gained more and more press attention people have become wiser to these so called “Free Ringtones” offers often with a negative effect. Are they becoming too scared to order ringtones just in case they end up on a subscription?

This may all become irrelevant soon as more and more mobile phones now have the capability to play MP3 files. It’s a simple enough process now to transfer an MP3 to your phone that you may already have on your iPod and use that as your ringtone.

Ringtones sales I’m sure will peak and start to decline now but it’s not all bad news for the suppliers. There is a constantly growing market for other mobile phone content including games, videos, wallpapers, screensavers and mobile TV and who knows what else in the future.

Posted in Ringtones