The music industry has always been an interesting place. From the way it accommodates various shifting trends in music and style, to the way it interacts with fashion and popular culture to create new identities for new generations, it has always been as influential as it is interesting. The current wave of transformations prompted by the advent of digital media and online formats has also wrought considerable change upon the music industry, the way it does business, and the way it reaches its public. Fortunately, music and media have also always gone hand in hand. One such venue of intertwined formats that has become a force to be reckoned with is mobile media, specifically the ringtone.
Mobile media has emerged as a strong force in the modern economic climate that takes advantage of technology to blend practicality with convenience and aesthetics. Offering various marketing approaches and strategies for providers to use in reaching their target market – a market that includes virtually anyone with a phone and a sense of creativity and individuality – mobile media has become quite the profitable commodity. There are myriad formats and options to be experimented upon in the quest to provide desirable services at a reasonable overhead cost, and the influx of efforts from the music industry has also exacerbated the evolution of mobile media. Some are hits, and some are misses.
One such apparent missed effort put into developing new and profitable ways for the music and mobile markets to merge was the ringle, a combination of “ringtone” and “single”, the latter being a term used to refer to a song that is being promoted from a record artist’s album. Sony BMG Music Entertainment came up with the idea, seeking to partner with Universal Music Group to produce an initial offering of 50 titles and 10-20 titles respectively. The ringle concept was embodied in a tangible effort to get record stores involved in the ringtone phenomenon by selling compact discs, much like CD singles with a twist – each disc would contain a single, a remix, and an older track, and a code allowing users to go online and redeem a ringtone.
Aside from practicality – users seeking to turn a song into a ringtone would almost certainly already have a copy of the song — the main issue with the ringle was apparently the cost. The profit margin, even early on, was deemed to be too slim, and the potential for customers to lose interest in connecting to the Internet via the CD was too high. While big retail supporters like Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart and Target offered to back up ringle sales in their stores, ultimately the projected profit margin for labels was considerably smaller than would have been practical.
The move to online-available mobile content seems to have stemmed the tide of the ringle’s progress, although it got far enough to be approved by the Recording Industry Association of America and have an industry-wide brand logo designed for it. However, while a follow-up or comeback is certainly not beyond the pale, in this day and age the multiplicity of good ideas for ringtones and other mobile content far outnumber and outpace the bad.
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