Ring Tones Will Save the Music Industry

tabdelgawad writes "Well, not quite, but according to Jay A. Samit, senior vice president for new media at music label EMI Group PLC, quoted in this Washington Post article, "This is huge. This is the largest growth area for music companies and our artists". The article goes on to prove two facts we already know: that the music industry is greedy (already asking for a bigger slice of this pie!) and that the porn industry is a prime innovator in marketing and technology :-)"

Comments

Don't Hold Your Breath

[limekiller4]

From the article:
Approximately 50 percent of Europeans under the age of 30 have downloaded ring tones, according to Stonefield, who believes the U.S. market is ripe for similar growth. "There is no way that kind of distribution is going to be held back; it is a real social trend," he said.

Yes, it is a social trend, but not a U.S. one.

Most of the fads we see tend to have some obvious -- if obnoxious -- logic to it. Macarena? Catchy and annoying as all get-out. Pokemon? Competition, community, kids running around saying dumb things (which is precisely what kids are supposed to do). Micro RC cars? Cute and disturbingly entertaining to everyone but our employers and cats. I could go on for quite some time but because I wish to annoy you, the gracious reader, as little as possible, I'll get right to the point.

What do frickin' ringtones offer?

"Oh, hey! Cool, Rock Me Amadaeus as a ringtone! Sweet! ... Hm. Hey, so anyway, did you watch Friends last night?..."

This is not a U.S. phenomenon and it won't ever be a U.S. phenominon. I'm not trying to imply that the United States is somehow more sophisticated, I'm suggesting that Americans tend to view cellphones ringing about as enjoyable as listening to a car alarm going off. And not because they're boring, monotone and tedious, either. We dislike the phone because it represents an interruption, rendered jarringly, like an audial ICQ popup (though I'm told they don't do that anymore).

Again, from the article:
"This is huge," said Jay A. Samit, senior vice president for new media at music label EMI Group PLC. "This is the largest growth area for music companies and our artists."

This is a sign that companies are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel, not the bleeding edge of the Next Great Thing.

Re:Are you all idiots???

[balloonhead]

What if you own the CD - should you pay again to listen to a degraded version? Bugger that, once I've paid royalties I think I have a permanent licence to listen to that particular track. It's the whole time-shift / space-shift thing from another angle. If you own the VHS, is it piracy to download the DivX?

Legally, maybe; morally, definitely not piracy.