Personalize your ringer, but don't follow the crowd
By Alfred Lee

Not too long ago, I found myself participating in a history-steeped college tradition– sitting around with a bunch of guys doing nothing before a night out – when someone’s cell phone went off. For those of us who didn’t know the lucky owner so well, the immediately recognizable ring tone, the theme from “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” was greeted with chuckles and approval of his little pop culture reference. By the third call, however, we were ready to throw his phone out the window.

People complain about the music industry’s inability to adapt with technology, but the fact that this guy shelled out a few bucks for a novelty that got old in five minutes is proof that old guys in suits will never run out of ways for us to give them our money. In recognition, this week’s Billboard charts feature the launch of a new category – Hot Ringtones, a weekly top 20 tracking of polyphonic ring tone sales.

You may laugh, but the numbers are no joke. The cell phone ring tone market is projected to top $300 million this year, and it only keeps growing. Ring tones are outselling legal downloads by more than 3-to-1, despite costing twice as much, and not being a real song. And they’ll be raking in even more dough once “mastertones,” or actual recordings, are rolled out in the near future. (When this happens, I’ll be switching first thing to Robert Plant’s blood-curdling rebel yell from Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.”)

So, gimmicky, poorly imitated versions of successful songs are selling by the millions.

But the surprise lies in just how not surprising the chart is: the top-selling cell phone ring tone in the country is also the current #1 single – Usher and Alicia Keys’s “My Boo.” In fact, at first glance, the Hot Ringtones chart could easily be mistaken for the Billboard singles chart-– Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” Terror Squad’s “Lean Back,” and Ciara’s “Goodies” all grace the top ten of both charts.

This kind of bothers me. There are literally thousands of cell phone ring tones available for purchase, from classical to video game theme music (nothing’s more entertaining than a professor’s reaction to being interrupted by the Super Mario theme song). It allows for a remarkable level of personalization and creativity in an everyday device. I mean, you can set different ring tones to go off based on whoever’s calling. Like “Superfly” for a best friend, and “Mama Said Knock You Out” for when mother dearest is checking up. I used my trial download on “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” but use it only for people I’m trying to avoid. The possibilities here are endless.

Instead we get 97,000 purchases of “My Boo” in one week. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of personalizing your cell phone? Why would you pay to have the same particular ring tone as hundreds of thousands of other people? (By the way, how much longer can the rest of us be expected to put up with 50 Cent ring tones? He has to be the all-time bestseller. But there seems to be something wrong with college kids carrying phones playing the chorus “Many men wish death upon me” around campus).

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that, like trucker hats, even when given an opportunity to express their individuality in the most individualistic society in the world, Americans would rather just follow the crowd. In this case, all the credit goes to the music industry for keeping up this illusion of choice between pre-programmed personalities. It’s been very successful for them for quite a few years now.

So if you’re going to buy into their scheme, you might as well do so with a little fun and ingenuity. Or better yet, just keep your phone on vibrate.