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Remember When You Called Someone and Heard a Song? (vice.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Motherboard article: If you were youngish in the early 2000s, you probably remember this phenomenon -- calling a friend's cell phone, and instead of hearing the the standard ring, you heard a pop song. Called ringback tones, this digital music fad allowed cell phone owners to subject callers to their own musical preference. Ringback tones were incredibly trendy in the early and mid-2000's, but have since tapered off nearly to oblivion. Though almost nobody is buying ringbacks anymore, plenty of people still have them from back in the day. [...] In the process of writing this story, I heard from several people that they or someone they knew still had a ringback tone, in large part because they have had it for years, and don't know how to get rid of it.
Not the salesman kind of call center, a disaster recovery kind of place. Had to call a lot of people back. Ringbacks were the bane of my existence. Right up there with the answering machine / voicemail sermons. People would go into an entire Bible study before the beep to let you record a message. Forced by my job to listen through it so I could leave a message. Arrrrrg.
It was really annoying, especially if you were on a per-minute-charge cell plan and used the old three-ring call as a calling card so you didn't have to pay for a phone call if they weren't there - it would still be on their caller ID so they would know you had called, just no message. Harder to judge timing.
It was a bit of a thing in the US. Not so big that it's strange you didn't experience it, but it existed and it was a brief fad. I think it was more mid-2000s, but I'm mostly basing that on my memory of mobile media sales peaking around 2007.
Anyway, they never became very mainstream because they were terrible. Even if the music was good and the cut was edited well, the nature of the product was that it had to be played over the cell phone network.
If you don't know why that's such a problem, cell phone networks compress their audio in order to save bandwidth. The audio compression schemes they used were designed to use as little bandwidth as possible while still rendering speech understandable. Of all the frequencies you can hear, human speech generally only uses a subset. Of that subset of frequencies that human speech uses, there's an even smaller subset that are required to understand what a person is saying. So in order to save space, they'd strip out all the frequencies that aren't needed to understand speech, and then compress what was left.
The big problem is, music uses a lot of those frequencies that aren't needed to understand speech. When you strip those frequencies out, the music usually ends up sounding like garbage. There was no way to make ringbacks sound good, so customer satisfaction was low.
Actually, though, there are newer standards being used for cell phone audio that would allow ringbacks to sound much better now. I don't know if people even buy ringtones anymore, though.
dude ringtones were popular from around 97 or whatever the year nokia introduced the sms deliverable beep tones was to.. well, up to phones having mp3 and a little while beyond. itunes probably has still some ringtones.. but.
RINGBACK tones are an OPERATOR SERVICE where instead of the beep pause beep tones you can force people calling you to listen a very shitty quality song - and typically, afaik, you only get to select from a list from the operator. and since it is a business where they can then bill you monthly for it or whatever..
it's still somewhat popular in asia. they think novelty like that is cool.
and because it's an operator service it can be tricky to turn off if you're too stupid to browse the sms codes for your operator.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
They are/were most certainly a real thing. I helped implement them back in the day when I worked for a large telecom. We were throwing tons of ideas out to try and keep the money flowing in after the telecom bubble popped in the early 2000's. At my old company we had dozens of people working on ringback tones as well as other more crazy ideas.
Luckily one that I pitched at the time never got traction. I proposed instead of playing music as a ringback tone to play advertisements to whoever called you in order to get a better rate plan. (This predated many of the unlimited whatever plans, back when text messages cost $0.10/message send OR receive). I felt dirty at the time, but luckily my idea was ignored. I would hate to have been remembered as the guy who made it where everyone had to listen to ads whenever they placed a call to some cheap bastard looking to score a less expensive rate plan.
Though now I'm wondering how you get this, because if I set up a ringback tone that sounded like a fax machine it'd probably finally put an end to the calls from that bitch susan from member services.
Let's be honest here, people: What is that story doing here? This isn't even a story. This is something you'd probably get asked by a buddy when you're sitting there on his porch, beer in the hand, it's too hot to think of a relevant subject and he's bothered by the awkward silence and the buzzing of flies around you that he tries to stir up some kind of conversation, hell, ANY topic will do, as long as you can at least talk about something.
This is usually when you'd grunt something agreeing, take another sip from your beer and say something non-committing like "Yeah. Kinda remember. Sucked." or something like this, before the two of you return to quietly sipping your beer and one of you saying "Hell, let's go inside where the AC is, the heat's killing me".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It is still quite popular in India too though but it has been on s slight decline for the past 3-4 years. Telcos are still advertising this feature mostly through unsolicited, automated calls. They call you up, play a list of songs and ask you to press an appropriate number to set a song as your "ringback tone". The thing with this is that a large percentage of mobile users are senior citizens and such calls often confuse them to the point where they inadvertently end up pressing a random number on the phone. Voila! The "ringback tone" is set and the telco can start changing for this on the monthly bills. I have a feeling that this entire thing is intentional.