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Ring-Tone Barons? Japanese Record Companies Raided
PuceBaboon writes "
The Asahi Shimbun is reporting that officers from the Fair Trade
Commission raided several major record companies in Japan, including
Sony Music Entertainment, Toshiba EMI and Avex, on suspicion of
creating a monopoly for the purpose of maintaining artificially high
prices on... telephone ring-tone tunes."
Or why not just let a phone play a 10 second or so clip of an MP3? The decoder chips are cheap enough now.
The newest Nokia phones are able to use midi files or mp3 files as ringtones. You can load them via infrared, cable or bluetooth connection and thus don't have to pay a single cent for your new ringtones.
RedShirt
Microsft spel chekar vor sail, worgs grate !!!
I bought the cable for my LG VX6000 phone and use some third party software bit_pm to upload ringtones that I make from any sound file. I just lower the quality a bit (soundforge free trial or any other editor) and make it mono and cut about 30-60 seconds out of an mp3 to make my ringtones then upload them to the phone. Took a fair amount of head scratching to get it all to work right but there is no reason to pay just to format shift the music you already have to a ringtone. Its amazing how the verizon software that comes with the cable can't even convert my phone book into a .csv but some guy in his spare time has managed to let me make my own ringtones.
Then you can transfer them to the phone with whatever expensive cables they sell or by IR, or by putting the tune on a wap-enabled apache server.
Not all carriers allow OTA (over the air) downloads of ringtones, wallpapers, or Java programs. I almost didn't get T-Mobile service because of this, but they were the only carrier with good reception in my area. AT&T (soon to be Cingular) is good about being open. I'm not sure where the other carriers stand.
Because they are recording companies.
(And to clarify, it's not just the vocals -- it's the particular recording, usually including vocals.)
The record company owns the recording, not the composition. To sell the record, the record company must licence the song from the composer (who is often not the performer in question.)
As an example, let's take the song "Remember (Walking in the Sand)", originally performed by the Shangri-Las, and written by George Morton. It was since covered by Patsy Cline, the Beach Boys and Aerosmith, among others.
If you wanted the Aerosmith version as your ringtone, you'd have to licence it from whoever owns that Aerosmith recording, and from whoever now owns the rights to the composition... but not from the Shangri-Las' right-holders, because you're not using their recording.
If you just wanted the song itself as a midi file in your phone, you don't have to pay anything to Aerosmith's label, nor to the Beach Boys' label, nor to the Shangri-Las' label -- because you're not using those recordings. You just have to pay whoever now owns George Morton's composition rights (provided the copyright hasn't lapsed) because that's all you're using.
yo.
Because mobiles have traditionally had very limited software capabilities, they have been able to charge outrageous sums for mobile services. Instead of browsing the web you'll be browsing some specialized service with content created specifically for mobiles.
And the problem isn't just that the mobile operators and content owners do everything they can to keep it that way.
And even worse, people like Danish mobile analyst John Strand from Strand Consult are attacking anything which threatens this mobile hegemony by operators and content owners.
John Strand has been known to use his influence to try to make sure that today's situation with crappy and overpriced services will remain. He basically tells the press that "yeah, these people don't understand the mobile market and won't survive for long" if it threatens today's hegemony.
One specific example is the rise of software on mobiles that can browse the web instead of the customer being force fed what the operator wants him to. John Strand is using his influence to claim that companies that offer such solutions will never survive because they operate outside the "mobile food chain".
John Strand and his ilk are basically trying to maintain today's situation because overpriced mobile services are a good thing to them. It's a mobile market they know, and they are making good money by just being "consultants".
So yeah, mobile services suck and are over priced. Software like real web browsers is arriving to give the customer an actual choice and make it cheaper, but on the other hand, corrupt "analysts" like John Strand are doing everything they can to stop this more customer friendly development, and really fight to keep today's system with customer lock-in and over priced services.
Clever signature text goes here.
http://ringtonetools.mikekohn.net/ has a great little F/OSS program called Ringtone Tools for generating your own ringtones from a variety of different formats for a cavalcade of phone models. The program (Ringtone Tools) runs on Windows, DOS, and *nix'es, with source fully available, and some purchasable PHP and Java versions. Really nice tool, I've used it to translate Nokia text ringtones into ones for my Motorola t120.
Yes, that's right, older cell phone models used to actually let you type the ringtones directly into them, without special software or cables, though that option has always seemingly been available for these types. Very nice, economical solution for those of us who want custom or special ringtones but not enough to pay a high price for them. Besides, it's not like these companies are making anime ringtones (Go Totoro!) available anyway.
Most men are not thought unwise until they speak.
. . . or, rather, misleading. It's not "ring tones" in the MIDI sense, but actual MP3 clips of songs that are the subject of the raid.
In Japan, anyone is allowed to make and sell MIDI-style ring tones as long as they pay a usage fee to the copyright office. This fee is then paid back to the original authors of the song--but not to the record labels. There are something like 200 companies producing ring tones now, and the labels get nothing out of any of them.
So when the next wave--ring songs, for lack of a better term; MP3 (or similarly encoded) digital sound--came around, the labels got greedy. Since they own the copyrights on the actual recordings, they decided not to let anyone but their own group companies sell clips from the songs. The Fair Trade Commission decided that this was unfair use of monopoly, and thus the raid.