Monday, January 13, 2003		Feature

Ringing in new tunes

Peeyush Agnihotri

THE next time you hear Las Ketchup Asereje jingle do not look around for idiot box to fix responsibility on MTV or Channel V. Chances are the tune could jolly well be emanating from your next-seat-Uncleji’s pocket.

That’s the latest fad and the music industry has found a new partner in the cellphone industry. Down loading hip tunes from the Websites onto the cellular phone is already a cult in the USA, Europe and IT-advanced Asia-Pacific countries while in India, the craze has started scaling the windward side of the curve.

Sanjay, a geologist and a cellphone user, has a Bollywood jingle as his ringtone. He also has a reason for it: "It so happened that once during a party when a cellphone buzzed, five friends around accessed their respective pockets to check whether it’s a call for them. Even I checked mine. It was then I decided that my ringtone had to stand out." That’s it. An offbeat ringtone not only distinguishes a mobile phone from others, it also lends some character to the handheld gizmos.

Cellphones have a microprocessor that also have pre-programmed ringtones (an array of musical notes) stored on them. A software fed in the microprocessor tells what permutations and combinations to play to emanate a particular melody through the cellphonespeaker when a call is received. Ringtones are to cellphones what MIDI files are to a computer — a set of control commands for synthesisers. The difference is that while MIDI files can hold many channels (more than 15), ringtones hold just one.

It’s the world of instant. Everything from coffee to noodles is instant. Similarly, many Websites offer instant ringtones. The first step is to find a ringtone of choice. Some sites charge to cover the song royalties while others offer it for free. Old memorable melodies, whose copyrights have expired and are nobody’s babies have been ‘adapted’ by public domain. Though there are various methods to suck in the right jingle onto the mobile phone yet the most common one is to send a ringtone via airwaves. For this the user has to visit a ringtone Website (see box), choose, pick, enter the mobile phone number and let the site administrator do the job of sending the right tune.

Anyone who downloads any composition without paying the royalty pirates. "Ringtone piracy is not a gargantuan issue in the Indian music industry currently as comparatively such a piracy is at a foetal stage. However, the issue is to be taken up in the Indian Music Association’s next meeting," Rajeev Sogani, senior vice-president, Tips Cassettes, says. What most of the Websites give to recording companies and composers is just peanuts. Even otherwise, reducing a song to a mere ringtone could mean degrading someone’s creative work. The most recognisable melody, even if it lasts just a fraction of the whole composition, may mean substantial copying. Globally, Envisional, a UK-based Internet monitoring company, warned that the current craze for downloading musical ringtones to mobile phones has created massive intellectual property abuses that have the potential to cost the music industry as much as $1 million per day.

A nationwide recent survey by Samsung points out that downloading ringtones from Websites onto the hardware in the hand is getting popular with each passing day. Already Airtel has tied up with Yahoo! in this region. Devika from Airtel says that the latest songs, filmi, non-filmi, albums, pop and everything that’s hummable is a hit with youngsters. "Any song that’s a hit gets it demand. User preferences change immediately and at Rs 1.50 as fixed cost, ringtones come cheap," the executive says. " This is the first of its kind tie-up in north of Delhi. Besides Yahoo! tie-up, there are other ringtone tie-ups with Phonytunes, Estel etc.," she asserts.

Spice Telecom’s Mukul Khanna says that ringtones have existed on their site since long and this feature has been popular. "From the nature and language used in calls and e-mails, we can safely presume that downloading ringtones has been fairly popular among the young segment.

As far as devices go, some of them have gone polyphonic, thereby meaning that a cellphone can play more than one note at a time. Many models now have the capability of assigning different ringtones for incoming calls from different numbers (remember, turkey-cluck-at-boss-number ad).

"In the USA too, downloading ringtones is an ongoing craze. Cellphone with small digital camera, is one more thing coming up nowadays. Smart phones with PIM (Protocol Independent Multicast) capability will be the future. Most of the advanced cellphones will have one microprocessor and one baseband chip. The microprocessor will handle PIM applications (like calculator, notepad, et al). The baseband chip will be for usual communication purposes," explains Sandeep Malhotra from Neomagic, a device driver multinational.

This implies that you might have song ringtone as jingle and video file as display. But that’s the future. Till then, everyone is busy downloading ringtones. And humming along.