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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 are almost all telephone ringtones *overpriced*. I mean, come on, they are selling crappy midi files for outrageous (comparatively) prices. Perhaps its all just good business, but I get irritated at such extreme profit turns.
Not being horrible or anything... but
"The companies are suspected of colluding to restrict sales of recordings "
Well duh! How long did it take to figure this one out???
Make sure you pay top dollar for that ring tone. After all, it is _stealing_ if you use a ring tone you didn't pay us extra for, and only _we_ can allow you to add a new ring tone.
Is it just me, or is this rediculous?
First, that there is money to be had in making consumers pay to be able to upload a WAV file into their Cell phone, and second, that the government is breaking into corporate offices over this?
Bizarre.
Collusion among Japanese companies?
I'm shocked! Shocked!!
The GOJ raids probably 2-3 major industries each year on average. Collusion is bound to happen when:
1. almost every major company has its HQ in one city (Tokyo)
2. everyone knows each other
3. if/when a manager changes teams, it is assumed he will take the Db and any other data he can obtain on his way out the door
4. "gentlemanly cooperation" is seen as a way to maintain safe sales levels for everyone, while going for the jugular on external (overseas) sales
davejenkins.com |
Or you preserve global public sanity by just having a ringtone that rings instead of abusing cell phone rining as some sort of individualised message to the world. Bah. It's not like I have anything against mobiles, but heck, the vibration alarm is really all you need in public.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
They need to make new phones come with NORMAL standard ring tones. Not fairy tale musicals, no rotary style ring rings, how about a decent sounding 'ring ring' eh? The fact that I had to use Adobe Audition and pieces of a midi ringtone to make my 'ring ring' is an outrage. As far as musical ringtones from MP3s some phones support MP3 ringstones and more often than not, WAV ringtones. If you're lucky enough to have a smartphone, well you're like me and have a LOT more freedom over ringtones on your phone. MP3 > edit > drag drop > set as tone > done! Hell, I just got a freeware DiVX player for my cell phone :)
[intekra] - [www.plex.nu]
I don't know about anybody else here, but I imagine I'm far from the only one who would love to see those blasted things continue to have artificially inflated prices.
I mean, come on, they are selling crappy midi files for outrageous (comparatively) prices.
I have no problem with companies selling the ringtones at whatever the market will bear, as long as there's no collusion.
What I have a problem with, is any idiot who butchers *any* piece of music by playing it through a 1.5" diameter piezoelectric speaker. Even rap "music" deserves more respect than that.
It's bad enough that I have to cope with cellphones ringing everywhere I go, but it's worse still when it's another anime-loving dimwitted 17-year-old whose cellphone is playing Britney Spears' Toxic from the back of a Hello Kitty schoolbag, or some poseur with a 3-series BMW who wants to appear cultured with a rousing rendition of the 1812 Overture.
I hope every single person with a ringtone on his or her cellphone contracts inoperable colon cancer.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Full song on iTunes: $.99
30 second clip of "similar" song made with high pitched tones: $3+
Getting raped by your cellular provider: Priceless.
Profit - yeah, bad joke. A lot of cell phones don't support MP3. A lot of people don't connect their phones to computer. Those that do may not use USB. They might use IR or Bluetooth. You're missing a lot.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
The thing with the Japanese ring tones recently is that it's not just a crappy MIDI file, you can actually get real audio files on most of the cell phones. I have an old(ish) DoCoMo P504i and recently found out that it actually supported these audio files, which I had always assumed was just for the most recent phones.
.wav file into a .mld file. Upload the .mld file to some server, type in the URL in your cellphone and download it! Pretty darn easy. The wav2mld software costs 900yen (about US$8.00 or so) if you want to make clips longer than 2 seconds, which I figure is fair. The software works really well and automatically creates a file for about 10 different models, automatically adjusting volume levels etc. along with some kinks that some phones have.
But I wasn't interested in paying the insanely high prices for a low-sample clip of some song, especially since I have my phone on silent mode for most of the time. But just for the heck of it, I tried making my own, and found out that it was really easy. Just use wav2mld which will convert a
We have a guy at work (that I'm "lucky" enough to sit next to) that has a phone that supports polyphonic ring tones.
After hearing a really bad midi version of "The Final Countdown" for a good 9 months, at full volume, having the majority of the people in proximity to him complain about it, he replaces it with some bullshit spewing out of William Shatner's mouth. Meanwhile, the rest of us leave our phones with the generic stock tones (polyphonic or not), and those that get calls often set their phones to just vibrate.
Granted, this is the guy who is proud of writing 40k LOC of useless code that we replaced with a 100 line perl module and doesn't even work because he never finished a working build system for it. I guess that explains a lot.
Government raiding corporate offices?
Dear or dear, what does that say to business?
That's just contrary to a free market system where market conditions are what should rightfully dictate to corporations what prices should be.
Bullshit!
Is it me or is it that any time in North America, where busines activities are curtailed by societal interests, the business community comes out swinging with the words of "what are they saying to business?".
As far as I am concerned and I'm a business owner too.... The message to business should be to play fair, don't be greedy and respect the world you're making a living in.
There's no conspiracy, just a bunch of stupid people who don't realise you can get the ringtones for free off the net, and who don't realise the incredible lack of value a ringtone has. Because these people don't have a clue, they keep on paying $3 for 20K of data, which keeps these companies in business. If people stopped paying the extortionate prices, they would drop.
in fact, I can assign all sounds except phone # keypresses to any mp3 I'd like...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The whole hype surrounding ringtones makes me laugh because they are basically the only "killer app" for modern mobile phones, at least here in the US where text messaging hasn't caught on like in Japan and the EU. All this hype about smart phones and 3G networks and prices of $100+ for a phone and the most used user feature is custom ringtones? How sad is that? So with ringtones being the only service that people actually want and use of course the cell phone companies will make it as difficult as possible to do without paying an arm and a leg to do it their way.
"Trying is only the first step towards failure." - Homer
Gee... I have an old Ericsson phone... and a Palmtop..
There is free software for my palmtop for converting and editing (midi like) ringtones.. I can transfer them using infrared or bluetooth...
This all is like 3 years old.. you are telling me that 'modern' phones no longer allow this kind of thing? that is insane.
Then maybe people will start using the VIBRATE mode, instead of the cry-for-attention, I-am-teh-5uX ringtone mode.
Yeah, right.
Well, you could always play a ringtone on an old phone and record that.
That's an interesting idea. But what do you mean by 'old phone'. Would it be the 1960's-style rotary dial phone (Ma Bell standard) or an even earlier 1920's-style microwave-oven-sized wooden box. The kind with the earpiece on a thick black wire.
And where would you get a recording of one of these phones ringing tones? The physical phones aren't around anymore. Maybe taking a sound sample from the sound tracks of movies from the desired period.
Personally, I hate ring tones. Vicious little piezos blasting synthetic Bach for looooong times in inappropriate places. The only decent ring tone would only be one second long at most and consist of a precise musical phrase of three or four notes that would let the owner know a call was waiting but not bother all the other people around that don't want to know about it.
I may be old, but I find that having ordinary normal-like people suddenly pick up a screaching little plastic box, hold it to their ear, go into totally spaced out mode with their eyes unfocused and staring into space, and spend minutes talking to themselves speaking disconnected nonsense, then clicking the little plastic box shut and rejoining the group while acting like nothing unusual happened...well I find this to be extraordinarily weird. On the same level of weirdness as any of the behavior of the burned-out acid head hippies in the 1970's.
Maybe it's just me....
You americans and your cell phone networks... In Europe, no provider creates custom firmware, all phones can be used on all networks and with all ringtone/game/wallpaper services. These crazy lock-in things are unimaginable and illegal.
Last time I checked, there was nothing stopping people composing their own music.
The record companies may be greedy monopolistic talent processors and their tactics akin to legalised gangsterism, but their product is not critical to life. If you're sufficient of an idiot to pay for "personalised" phone covers and ringtones, you deserve exploiting.
Learn to "personalise" it yourself, rather than borrowing someone else's personality.