Ringtones have been commercial successes for as long as they have been around. The mobile phones that have carried them have been great vessels to this hot mobile commodity, which has been expanding in leaps and bounds since the early days. Both have been evolving constantly since the beginning of their runs, with mobile phones shedding the clunky and chunky look they had in the beginning and transforming from unwieldy blocks of plastic and metal into sleek, sophisticated cosmopolitan mobile devices, truly mobile and truly compact. Ringtones have done the same, blossoming into higher and higher quality and spawning all sorts of mobile media.
However, while ringtones remain popular to a significant extent – noticeable in that almost everyone has at least one based on a favorite song or artist or film – the sales for them have been dropping considerably over the last few years, not least due to tech-savvy consumers being increasingly able to create and sideload their own. All this is done with new, highly accessible and simple software and hardware at much less cost – certainly almost no cost every time – when compared to the versatile and loaded but cumulatively-expensive ringtone ordering or downloading services that have proliferated over the last several years.
One business feeling the effects of this change – and making changes of their own to adapt to it – is Thumbplay, a US-based subscription service offering users the ability to download various types of mobile content like music, games and video to their mobiles. Founded in 2004, the New York-based company has also always offered users the ability to manage, store and share all of this content either on their mobile devices or online. Backed by such reputable entities as SoftBank Capital, i-Hatch Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Meritech, Bain Capital Ventures and others, Thumbplay has run their $9.99 monthly subscription service to provide a significantly sizeable audio, video and game library with licensed “premium” content from various mainstream media properties as well as independent artists.
Now Thumbplay is launching what has been described as an “all-you-can-eat” subscription service, a change which is heralded by the arrival of former Apple engineer Pablo Calamera as CTO. Adding the music subscription game to their existing stable of offerings is projected to widen Thumbplay’s range, as well as potentially offset the weakening ringtone performance. At $10 a month, users can listen to any amount of music without actually owning the copies of the tracks – purchasing individual songs costs as much as buying them from iTunes, around 69c to $1.29 – which is a reasonably entertaining enough deal with a catalog of some eight million available tracks.
In an interestingly novel approach, Thumbplay – who is promoting this as both a mobile streaming service and a desktop application – is initially targeting BlackBerry users, who have typically not been the target market for most mobile music services. However, in later months the company plans to also roll out similar applications for both the iPhone and Android platforms, widening their reach even further.
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