Apple Muddying Up the Already Ridiculous Ringtone Business

Between Dan Frakes and John Gru­ber, we have a great sum­mary of the cur­rent mess that is the ring­tone busi­ness, par­tic­u­larly as it is addressed by Apple:

What it comes down to is, as Gru­ber so elo­quently put it, that “the dis­tinc­tion between ring­tones and songs is an arti­fi­cial mar­ket­ing con­struct.” The entire ring­tone mar­ket is based on arti­fi­cial restrictions—not phys­i­cal ones, not tech­no­log­i­cal ones, not even log­i­cal ones—put in place to cre­ate a mar­ket where one would oth­er­wise not exist.

It’s this last point that is par­tic­u­larly impor­tant for our pur­poses. The idea of cre­at­ing a mar­ket where one doesn’t exist is the foun­da­tion of entre­pre­neuri­al­ism. It’s how the com­puter and cell phone indus­try got started. It’s how peo­ple are wear­ing jeans as a result of the West­ward Expan­sion. It’s how Las Vegas was founded in the mid­dle of the desert.


But in those exam­ples, you have new prod­uct and ser­vice niches that form out of prod­uct or ser­vice vac­u­ums, which make sense in the scheme of the cur­rent envi­ron­men­tal, busi­ness, cul­tural, or tech­no­log­i­cal land­scape. Each addresses a prob­lem in a way that makes life bet­ter for users at a fair cost (note: price is not a par­tic­u­larly good base­line, given the psycho-social costs in things like Las Vegas).

If you look at a cell­phone ring­tone at it’s root, it’s a noti­fi­ca­tion of pend­ing activ­ity. That’s the func­tion. The fea­ture is allow­ing users to cus­tomize that func­tion in a way that makes the noti­fi­ca­tion more or less con­ve­nient in using the device.I don’t actu­ally have so much of a prob­lem with pay­ing for ring­tones. I believe that the indus­try is stuck in a cycle of behold­ed­ness; a sort of blind, self-congratulatory may­hem. I have lit­tle con­fi­dence that they’ll fig­ure this out, and the mar­ket will deter­mine what a ringtone’s value actu­ally is.

But to impose arti­fi­cial tech­no­log­i­cal con­structs to block cus­tomiza­tion of a key func­tion of a device, and to impose illog­i­cal con­trac­tual restric­tions on use of per­sonal media, this gets in the way adop­tion. The old saw holds true here: you can tell me what to do, or you can tell me how to do it. But you can’t do both.

As it stands, Apple is doing every­thing that it can to stop me from cre­at­ing my own ring­tones. That includes lit­er­ally cre­at­ing my own ring­tones — from orig­i­nal music and sound effects. As Frakes points out, Apple is in a unique posi­tion here, but they’re quickly com­ing out as the rock between so many hard places, eschew­ing the “Cre­ate” mantra for more of a “Stran­gle­hold” chant, and they’re doing so in areas that are removed from their core prod­uct competency.