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.

Comments

Um, no. Actually I don't

[Snotnose]

I turned 42 in y2k. Had I called someone and got this bullshit I've have probably driven to their house and slapped them around asking "WTF asshole?".

Re:2000s? Try 1980s.

[omnichad]

Some of my friends were doing this shit back in the 80s on their answering machines and voicemail cards.

This audio plays before the callee picks up on the remote network (and it's not detected as a pickup by the networks either). Instead of the normal ringing tone you hear when you call someone (440 and 480 Hz together), you hear a recorded song instead.

Worked in a call center... HATED this.

[oic0]

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.

Re:Worked in a call center... HATED this.

[denbesten]

You may have just convinced me to purchase a ringback tone for my phone.

Some basics

[Balthisar]

First of all, a "ringback tone" isn't what you hear on an answering machine or voicemail; it's what you hear in lieu of the local signal for "the line is ringing." Apparently, according to the F.A., this was "a thing" in the early 2000s.

Next of all, was it really "a thing"? I've been on cellular since 1996, and exclusively since 2002. I'd never heard of this thing until 2011, when I moved to China, where they're (apparently) all the rage. Call a number, and instead "ring, ring, ring", you hear someone's chosen song or other audio. Nifty. Irritating (am I on hold? Is there a switching problem?). Quite popular in China. Non-existent in the USA where Slashdot is based.

In the USA, from 1996 until 2011, and from 2016 until now? I've literally never experienced a ringback tone, unless a thousand people are trolling me with country-representative ringback tones that are identical to the normal switched network.

The F.A. seems to be US-based. WTF are they talking about?

Re:Some basics

[nine-times]

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.

Here's the background...

[GerryGilmore]

This started as a "Thing(TM)" in Japan and South Korea in the late 90s and early 2000's. Technically, it's called "color ringback" and - as opposed to custom answering machine setups, etc. - is implemented at the carrier level. As an earlier poster described, this is the sound that you would hear rather than the standard (in the US) 4/2 second ringtone you hear when you dial a number waiting for someone to answer. Working in the industry at the time, we started getting requests for it, so implemented it, but it never took off here in the US, so it dropped off in use to pretty much zero.

Re:Um, no. Actually I don't

[demonlapin]

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 red flag back then

[schleimkeim]

All the people I knew that had a ringback song were assholes or criminals.

Re:Never heard of this

[Chrisq]

Me neither. The Register says: Custom RBTs never really took off in the UK. Only T-Mobile gave them any credence but never bothered to promote them much. They aren't kidding, I have never heard one or even heard of them.

Re:Um, no. Actually I don't

[AmiMoJo]

Ye of little imagination. People used to use a "sorry, this number has been disconnected" message, and then tell their friends to just ignore it. Got rid of most phone spam in the days before TrueCaller.