Fine-tuning your ring is the latest thing
By Tom Beer

Angela Landon's boyfriend calls her on her cellphone, and she's treated to the celestial strains of Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus." When it's her family in Texas calling, her phone plays the theme from television's "Dallas." NYC friends set off a round of "New York, New York." Pesky unidentified callers? She's warned with a snippet of Elvis' "Suspicious Minds."
Landon has joined the army of consumers spending $300 million a year, according to one market study, to download customized "ringtones" for their phones.

For one thing, it's a way to integrate favorite music, whether it be novelties like the "Pink Panther" theme or pop hits like Usher and Alicia Keys' "My Boo," into their everyday lives.

For wireless companies, it represents big money — the next step in a technological evolution that has transformed the mobile phone into a personalized multipurpose gadget for talking to friends, surfing the Web, sending e-mail, snapping photos and listening to tunes. And for the music labels, it could mean a lifesaving foothold in the digital download market during financially troubled times.

The industry takes this very seriously, so much so that Billboard magazine now tracks the nation's Top 20 ringtones, alongside its well-established charts for album sales and radio play.

Big business

Most ringtones come as "MIDI" files: brief, synthesized versions of songs created especially for the cellphone market. At $1.99 to $2.49 a pop, ringtones are more costly than downloading the original recordings from a service like iTunes or Napster. They're also, believe it or not, more popular: According to Billboard, in its first week tracking sales last month, the No. 1 ringtone, "My Boo," sold 97,000 units, whereas the No. 1 downloaded song, U2's "Vertigo," sold only 30,000.

That surprised Billboard's editors, said Geoff Mayfield, the magazine's director of charts. "With the download you get the whole song, the full dynamics and vocals, and you can play it as often as you want. With the ringtone you get 15, maybe 20, seconds of a synthesizer approximating your song. And yet the No. 1 ringtone outsold the No. 1 download by more than 3-to-1. Considering the economics of it, and the value proposition, we were just stunned that it was so big."

Explore the ringtones market, says Mayfield, and you'll quickly find that "it's a hip-hop world." Rappers Snoop Dogg, Lil' Flip, Chingy and Petey Pablo dominate the Top 10.

Hip-hop artists have been the most aggressive in marketing themselves with ringtones. Eminem offers a free ringtone of his single "Just Lose It" for consumers who purchase the double-disc collector's edition of his new album, "Encore." Sir Mix-A-Lot has signed an agreement with Versaly Entertainment to produce ringtones for the youth market, to be made available by most U.S. carriers.

Ludacris, Kanye West and The Game joined forces to produce an original ringtone, "Anthem," for Boost Mobile (a division of Nextel); the song is featured in Boost's TV ads, and proceeds from its sales have raised more than $20,000 for youth organizations.

Also popular are TV and movie themes: "Sex and the City," "The Godfather" and "John Carpenter's Halloween." Latin music, both rock and salsa, is a growing market. You can even get your fix of Bollywood hits from India.