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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. Re:Ringtones are one of the dumbest things to pay by Celestial+Avenger · · Score: 0, Troll

    That's why I have the dungeon theme from Super Mario Brothers 3 and you have Fuga. Cheapass.

  2. Re:Purchasing Ringtones? by TheDormouse · · Score: 0, Troll
    Why would anyone purchase ringtones when it's possible to convert your own audio files as ring tones and then upload them to the cell phone?
    Whoever posts a link to free software that does this easily will get modded up.
  3. Re:The sound of silence by iamlucky13 · · Score: 0, Troll
    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
    What a disgusting person. 3 days picking out a stupid sound? I think she has officially redefined shallow. It's stupid enough to see a woman agonizing for half an hour over whether to wear the seafoam or the aqua colored turtlneck. We're talking about a 10 second freaking sound clip you stupid yuppie. "Three days of productive work time?" Does that mean you get to charge a client for this BS? Then she presumes that it's perfectly fine for her phone to go off in a meeting, where other people are hopefully trying to get some work accomplished, and if not, desperately hoping the meeting won't lengthened by some dumb broad taking a break to say "Can you hear me now?" 10 times over while pacing around the room looking for better reception.

    Then the next paragraph goes on to babble about the artistic value of a ringtone because it "teaches us how songs work." Anybody who buys into that crap needs to go read Maddox's latest article on impressionable idiots, right now.