“Ringtones, of course, are little 30-second snippets from pop songs that play on your cellphone when somebody calls. It’s an insanely profitable industry—to the tune of $5 billion a year, worldwide,” David Pogue blogs for The New York Times.
“Apple is selling a [user-customizable] ringtone and the full song together for $2, and… that’s a bargain… at least compared with existing sources for ringtone sales. Pop song ringtones from T-Mobile and Sprint cost $2.50 apiece; from Verizon, $3. You don’t get to customize them, choose the start and end points, adjust the looping and so on. Incredibly, after 90 days, every Sprint ringtone dies, and you have to pay another $2.50 if you want to keep it. Verizon’s last only a year,” Pogue reports.
“Now, I realize that it’s easy to get ringtones onto your phone (or iPhone) for free, using unauthorized techniques of varying degrees of difficulty. Thousands of people do ringtones that way, but I’m not even going there,” Pogue reports.
“And my intention isn’t to shoot the messenger by blaming Apple for the insanity of this pricing. Apple’s pricing is lower than any American carrier, offers customizability that nobody else does, and gets you both the ringtone and the full song,” Pogue writes. “No, I’m sure that, if you follow the ringtone gravy train to its source, you’ll find record-company executives. There they’ll be sitting, rubbing their hands together with glee and hoping that their young customers don’t identify the ringtone industry for what it is: the last great digital rip off.”
Full article here.
Someone’s got to pay for Middlebronfman’s yacht fuel, right?