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Short History of Cellphone Ringtones

Posted by Hemos on from the the-joy-of-MIDI dept.

RobotWisdom writes "This week's New Yorker magazine includes an interesting short history of cellphone ringtones, including statistics on their (huge) profitability worldwide. My favorite quote: 'I spent three days of productive work time listening to polyphonic ringtone versions of speed metal, trying to find exactly the ringtone that expressed my personality with enough irony and enough coolness that I could live with it going off ten times a day. In a quiet room, in a meeting, this phone's gonna go off-- what are they going to hear?'"

3 of 511 comments (clear)

  1. beep by 3.09+a+hour · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is why i use the single beep ringer, its short and functional, and acceptable in all areas. As an added benifit, if you left it on somewhere you shouldn't like school or the movies, one beep could be anything and mos tpeople arn't even sure they heard it.

    --
    Like the saying goes, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -Pyrotic
  2. Re:wow by tomhudson · · Score: 4, Informative
    unsuccessfully finding a "free" ringtone website
    All you have to do is look at the page source for any of the sites that demo the ring tones (they're usually along the lines of ringtones/poly0010, ringtones/poly0011, ringtones/poly0012 ...). curl and wget are your friends.

    I grabbed a couple hundred from a pay site that way, got them to play in xmms, along with selected Weird Al tunes, then plugged the sound card output into the company phone system's "hold" music for a couple of days (took them that long to realize people on hold were getting Neutron Dance or Amish Paradise instead of muzak)...

  3. Re:What are they going to hear? by EspoManiac · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here you are:
    http://www.geek.nl/pics/dilbert-arch/dilbert-20030 704.gif