March 01, 2005
RING MY BELL
Originally posted by emily from ringtonia.com, reBlogged by ts
Two different takes on New Yorker’s essay on the ringtone market, “RING MY BELL”.
From Marc Perton for Engadget: “New Yorker offers up history of ringtones”
“Harmonium, the first program developed to create polyphonic ringtones, was developed by a Finnish programmer. What may be more surprising is the size of the ringtone market: a whopping $4 billion in 2004. In true New Yorker fashion, the article looks at the ringtone business, tone junkies one guy claims to spend $10 a month on tones, mostly of Led Zep songs and the evolution of the technology, which is poised to take the wind out of that $4 billion market, since it s getting easier to make your own ringtones.
From Mark Frauenfelder for TheFeature.com: “Polyphonic Ringtone Nostalgia”
“The latest issue of the New Yorker has a fairly lengthy article about polyphonic ringtones versus MP3 ringtones. The author, Sasha Frere-Jones argues that the polyphonic tones deliver the pure pop essence of a song, and are in some ways, superior to the actual songs they’re based on.
If a song can survive being transposed from live instruments to a cell-phone microchip, it must have musically hardy DNA. Many recent hip-hop songs make terrific ringtones because they already sound like ringtones. The polyphonic and master-tone versions of Goodies, by Ciara, for example, are nearly identical. Ringtones, it turns out, are inherently pop: musical expression distilled to one urgent, representative hook.
