What am I missing here? How is a 30-second, time-limited excerpt worth three times as much as the full work forever?ĭoes this not enter the heads of the people who are paying $5 billion a year? Three bucks for a 30-second snippet that lasts a year-when you can buy the entire song online for $1 and own it forever? Incredibly, after 90 days, every Sprint ringtone dies, and you have to pay another $2.50 if you want to keep it. You don't get to customize them,Ĭhoose the start and end points, adjust the looping and so on. Pop song ringtones from T-Mobile and Sprint cost $2.50 apiece from Verizon, $3.

Question 1: Apple is selling a ringtone and the full song together for $2, and claims that that's a bargain.Īs it turns out, that's correct-at least compared with existing sources for ringtone sales. Truth is, I'm a bit baffled by the whole phenomenon. But I have some questions about ringtones. O.K., this is all fine, and fun, and just what a lot of people had been asking for. Then you can buy the ringtone for another $1 and transfer it to your iPhone. You can control whether it loops and whether it fades in or out. Here, you can select a slice of the song, between 3 and 30 seconds long, Once you've downloaded the song to the iTunes program on your Mac or PC, you click the little bell icon to open up a very slick ringtone editor. The eligible songs are indicated by a little bell icon in the Ringtones column, which appears when you open the View menu, choose View Options, and turn on the Ringtone checkbox.) Apple says about half a million of the store's 6 million songs are available as ringtones more will follow as Apple gets permission from the record companies, one songĪt a time. (At the moment, they're far and few between. It's an insanely profitable industry-to the tune of $5 billion a year, worldwide.Īpple's version works like this: you buy a song from Apple's iTunes store for $1-a song that, in the latest version of the iTunes software, bears the little ringtone icon (looks like a bell). Ringtones, of course, are little 30-second snippets from pop songs that play on your cellphone when somebody calls.

Verizon ringtones store