Mobile Ringtone Industry – the gizmos of desire today!
By Grigoriy Anoshenko

The mobile ringtones are creating mammoth revolution in the market, surpassing the music industry alone. The market for ringtones is globally expected to rise around USD 5.2 billion annually. Consumers worldwide are seeking towards digital entertainment on their mobile handsets. While the mobile music is on its peak, the growth of the music industry is unparalleled with new high end mechanisms and ritzier models getting launched on a regular basis.

The youth today is getting more fascinated by mobile music, ringtones as well as downloads. Teenagers aged between 12 to 25 years of age, who are obsessed with ringtones, are leading the industry earn greater amount of profits than ever before. More than half of the ringtones downloading is greatly contributed by the Hip Hop fraternity alone. Polyphonic ringtones can now be availed in different genres owing to the growing demand of consumers; Pop, Rock, Hip Hop and Bollywood, to name a few.

Ringtones were initially invented to serve as an alert for the mobile phone user to his incoming calls. Later when the rime progressed, these little odes have turned out to be more elaborative in the consumer market place. The technological advancements now allow the use of real music within mobile phones for ringtone purposes. The music entertainment industry is now not just limited to generating small ringtones for its consumers that the latter can now also use ones personal favorite music as ringtones. This has also given the music industry new commercial opportunities to expand its base.

Many a times, music and ringtone are interchangeably used with other. There has also been a sturdy increase witnessed in the sales of downloaded music over the recent past. The digital revolution enables consumers to download their favorite songs and set them as their ringtones, a major disappointment to the ringtone industry. This tightens the competitiveness between the two otherwise growing industries.

As per trade analysts, the Indian film industry (Bollywood) alone generated about USD 1 billion from ringtones downloads amounting to 1 million on an annual basis. The digital revolution has also brought in a cliché demand for ringtones through technologies like iPods, which can hold better amount of ringtones, longer tunes and DVD clarity. Many global companies such as Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and Samsung are also introducing handsets that feature FM radios, MP3 players and a good memory space to be more appealing to the consumers. While all this is putting the music industry at a loss, it is charging the consumer an expensive CD before he opts for a cheaper ringtone. Not just that, the music industry is also witnessing things done against the law, such as transfer of music via Bluetooth has reached thrice the amount mentioned in the law.

Globally, it is uncertain if the diminishing, conventional music distribution will be able to stay in this rapidly-moving digital world, growing by more than 50 percent annually, for a longer period. Sooner the music companies may acquire artists and film soundtracks for mobile downloads on 3G networks.