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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.