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If 2003 was the year of the mobile game and I think we can safely say that it was 2004 is going to be the year of mobile music. And what a varied range of service come under the broad umbrella of mobile music. We have all heard and many of us have profited from ringtones. Truetones and other 'real' music clips are also set to be huge this year; bolstering flagging ringtone revenues, as well as finally giving some record companies a cut of the money.
But what appears to be the most intriguing newcomer to the mobile music fold and the one that is poised for the most imminent success is the curious phenomenon of ringback tones.
One of the first services added to the new fangled telephone was the 'brrrp brrrp' tone heard by the caller when the phone belonging to the person whose phone they were calling rang daintily in a distant room. Well, after more than 100 years of this, the 'brrp brrp' is poised to be replaced by music. And the mobile operators and the music industry not to mention a host of third parties who are all set to roll out ringback services very soon in Europe following early successes in Korea are eyeing this new craze as a real money spinner.
The idea is simple: the user pays to set up a service where nominated callers get to hear a specific tune when they call the users mobile. The money paid for these tunes is then passed back through the service provider and on to the record companies and publishers that own the rights to that music.
For example, 18 year old Jenny uses the service to provide a variety of ringback tones to the four key callers to her mobile. When her boyfriend rings he hears Light my Fire performed by The Doors until Jenny answers the call. Her mum, on the other hand, gets Angels by cheeky chappy Robbie Williams. Her father gets the 1812 Overture and her Gran gets My Way (sadly, Sinatra's version, not Sid Vicious').
When her Dad complains that he is only 45 and deems Tchikovsky "too maudlin and reminiscent of Mother Russia for my taste", Jenny can very easily change her father's designated call back tune to Blazing Squad's Meet You at the Crossroads, ensuring that he never calls again.
After he complains, she relents and assigns him Bachman Turner Overdrive's You Ain¹t seen Nothing Yet, and turns a blind eye to his wild air guitaring whenever he calls her mobile.
Another level
Fun aside, these services cleverly take ringtones to the next level, as well as adding a whole new dimension to phone personalisation. And it goes further: ringback tones are also being touted as creating special relationships through the creation of private associations. The caller feels special especially if they call and get Happy Birthday on their birthday, say. In this way ringback tones not only corner the shifting sands of the lucrative 'yoof' market which is always mindful of the next gimmick, but it also opens up these sorts of mobile services to use in the commercial environment.
But what makes it especially interesting is that it uses original music which is securely streamed to the user so that the user gets a quality product and, perhaps more importantly, the music industry gets some money from the transaction.
"2004 is year one for real mobile music," says Nick Price, director of managed ringback tone company Muzicall. "Consumers will demand real music from their favourite bands and artists and this is the first part of that service."
The process of transforming a recording artist¹s tune to a saleable ringback tone is a complex one. One of the key hurdles to delivering 'real' music to mobiles and to some extent through the web is formatting. While delivering a whole track for someone to play has some DRM and coding issues, turning real music in to value adds such as ringback tones requires quite a lot of musical and technical expertise as well as a complex method of management and delivery tracking and billing. This is why companies such as Muzicall have entered the frame. The record companies own and licence the content: a third party has to format that content ( for a wide variety of networks and handsets ) and then manage the delivery and billing thereof.
An added complication is that ringback tones are not whole songs: they have to be edited down to 30 second, 60 second or in some cases 90 second 'remixes' of the original that encapsulates the whole essence of the song. This is where Muzicall and its ilk fit in. They take the content from the record company, licence it, remix it which is a lengthy and musical process package it with traceable metadata and DRM and publish it, then manage its distribution across mobile networks who have signed up to the service. The mobile phone company then markets and bills for it and Muzicall then handles the three way split of the money.
"To make mobile music work we have to sit between the interests of the music industry which has the content and the mobile phone companies that have the customers. We have to manage the interests of both," says Price. "And it is a difficult position but one that we feel is the only way that mobile music in all its future forms is going to be managed: both sides have too much at stake and will never be able to agree between themselves how else to do it."
Information
w: www.muzicall.com |
