T-Mobile Releases Caller Tunes

[Barry]

T-Mobile unveiled "Caller Tunes," which plays 40-second song snippets to your caller until you answer. Tunes range from Beyonc?'s Baby Boy to holiday classics. Verizon Wireless began testing a similar "ringback" service in two California markets last month.

They are part of a wave of new song-based ring features. Billboard now runs a chart of top-selling ringtones. Tonight, at its annual awards show, Billboard will give its first "Best Ringtone of the Year" award. "Master tones" ? ringers that play the actual song ? are just taking hold in the USA and work only on the newest handsets.

Popular ringtones can rack up sales of 200,000 units at $1.50 to $3 each, says Mark Frieser at researcher Consect, which compiles Billboard's chart.
Young people, of course, have resisted licensed online music services, preferring instead to face potential lawsuits from the recording industry and pluck songs for free from song-swap sites.

Ringtone sales here are a fraction of those in Europe and Asia. Frieser expects U.S. sales of $300 million in 2004. He projects U.S. sales could grow to nearly $1 billion by 2008.

Major record labels have been mostly left out of the ringtone market; royalties go to songwriters and music publishers. But master tones and services like Caller Tunes pay money to the labels. The cost per call back tone is 1.99USD.

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