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Thomas Dolby, ringtone god?

This piece in the WSJ (paidreg req’d/paygated after 17-Feb-05 or sneak a peek here) was diverting in that way that only the WSJ can be. Their pop-culture stuff is among the quirkiest bits of trivia I acquire.

Thomas Dolby is apparently a ringtone wizard.

Although ringtones are typically just 30 seconds long, compared with three minutes for the average pop song, Mr. Dolby says there are similarities between composing pop songs and ringtones. “It’s helpful if it’s catchy,” he says of the ringtones. And, he concludes, whether one is writing a pop song or a ringtone, “A hook is a hook is a hook.” He says he wishes he had more time to make “real music,” but adds that with the ringtone phenomenon’s potentially limited shelf life, “It’s a case of make hay while the sun shines.”

I very much like his work (am listening to “One of Our Submarines” now) and was sad to miss his show in SF a couple years ago. It always interests me to see how people adapt their work to suit changing times. I can’t wait to play with the ringtone thing when I get my Treo650 (just a week or so!).

The article mentions a few other corp players - Retro RingTones and BlingTones (I marvel at $2.2B businesses that harbor such whimsically named players).

Retro RingTones, based in Half Moon Bay, Calif., with offices in Los Angeles and London, typically charges the phone carrier $500 to produce the ringtone and $2,000 more if it’s actually used in a phone. If a company wants to use the ringtone melody in a commercial, other fees apply — and if it becomes a jingle, a company may be charged $200,000 or more.

BlingTones, meanwhile, touts itself as “the world’s first wireless record label.” Just like a record label, BlingTones has “artists and repertoire,” or A&R representatives, who act as talent scouts, signing deals with artists — mostly rap artists and producers. BlingTones also commissions songs and distributes them for sale.

“Essentially, a record company is A&R, marketing, promotion and distribution,” says Jonathan Dworkin, a former manager of hip-hop artists who is now BlingTones’ vice president for A&R. “We provide those same services.”

Gosh I can’t tell you how I feel about ringtone companies having A&R guys…. Why are we supposed to pay for that overhead? When will they learn?

This all gets into the same sort of problem Ted Shelton of Orb mentioned during his MoMo presentation that content companies (and carriers too in this case, dammit) want to charge you anew for each format you consume - cd, walled garden download (AAC, ATRAC, WMA, SWMA, whatever others), streamed download (Rhapsody), and ringtone. While I don’t dispute the value of the implementation of the ringtone, the skill required to get it to sound right in that form factor and given the platform (specific phone), that’s paying the craftsman - the converter. That’s not paying for the copyright, which strikes me as off here, even though it’s clear legally (insofar as not being a lawyer I can logic my way through this stuff and am entitled to have an opinion). But I can see that if ads have to pay to use a jingle, perhpas consumers should pay to have the right to associate themselves with a song; it’s certainly grounded economically. But the creative communist in me howls wanting to know where that diverges from whistling and questions whether it’s not all just more marketing for the artist. Isn’t the artist can be said to be served by the consumer in this case, as it’s just more promotion?

Still, the best ringtone I’ve ever heard was this minor-key version of “Sweet Dreams” — more Manson than Eurhythmics — that Mike had on his Ericsson T68, which he typed in from a recipe he found online. That was the best thing about that phone.

(this is an old post that got caught in my drafts)