The expansion of mobile content is hardly surprising at this stage, where mobile music and video have become all but commonplace on the increasingly-flexible and somewhat ubiquitous mobile phones that support them. However, it remains an interesting phenomenon to look at – considering the relatively slow pace of technological advancement at the turn of the previous century, or even halfway back – and an even more interesting one to be part of, as one can count on one’s favorite artist to have some sort of mobile content available, be it a ringtone or a full track for downloading and playing on today’s MP3-supporting, high-quality-playback smartphones.
Ringtones in particular are becoming “more musically relevant”, as Marketplace columnist Kay Ryssdal established in a recent interview with the University of Southern California’s Popular Music Project director Josh Kun. The interview took a closer look at the connection between Mexican bands, ringtones and mobile music in general; the insights shared were fairly interesting. Kun began by explaining that ringtones are a “huge business” for regional Mexican bands, implying that the reverse – regional Mexican bands being important ringtone revenue generators for major labels – was also true. This, he went on to say, might be because the mobile phone has become an effective vessel for bringing regional Mexican music to the US.
This, Kun explained, has resulted in mobile phones taking the place of iPhones and iPods and other MP3 players as default players for ranchera, banda music, norteno music and some other types that are “exclusively listened to by working-class… Mexican migrant audiences and their kids.” This may not be immediately evident when looking at the “general” market numbers, which place 80% of all digital downloads as occurring online and leave 20% on cell phones. However, when looking at the regional Mexican market, Kun counters, the numbers are “flipped” – suggesting that the cell phone’s mobile popularity is supported by the cell phone’s comparative ease of payment and access for many migrant listeners who may not have access to the credit card and credit history required to get an iTunes account like many do.
This phenomenon has allowed the average regional Mexican market-based mobile phone user to enjoy a variety of songs, some of which were discussed and listened to as part of Ryssdal’s interview. One such song is “La Cumbia del Rio”, by the band Los Pikadientes De Caborca – characterized by Kun as a “good” and “unbvelievably popular” tune, and one that enjoyed a viral sort of promotion, the modern equivalent of really, really good word of mouth. The “fairly silly song about dancing a cumbia by the side of the river” started out as a homemade recording shared with friends via mobile phone, which is where the sharing and passing on happened and inspired a trend of people recording mobile videos of themselves dancing to the song – videos which, of course, quickly ended up on YouTube. This, in turn, led the band to getting signed by Sony, who wisely incorporated the grassroots video recording motif into the “official” music video for the song.
Kun went on to suggest that such an experience and such a situation may be “a kind of new kind of global experience,” characterizing the cell phone as “the dominant way that people are experiencing everything from songs to TV shows to webisodes to films.”
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