In addition to the iPod touch, the new iPod nano, and the iTunes WiFi Music Store Apple bestowed upon the world custom iPhone ringtones. Reactions have been a bit chilly. While I’m certain plenty iPhone owners are thrilled at the opportunity Apple has provided, neither David Pogue, nor John Gruber, nor the Macalope seem to have very nice things to say.
I don’t own an iPhone, but I have purchased ringtones. Two of them: “Kickstart My Heart” by Mötley Crüe and “Sweet Child of Mine” by Guns N Roses. I might not have purchased those two had the MIDI instrumentation on my W810 made my previous ringtones sound just awful. I can’t say I’m surprised that the iPhone ringtone function is less than stellar, given that the ringtones pull in somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 to 600 million dollars a year. You don’t pull in that sort of revenue on 30 second song clips without screwing somebody.
If anything, the iPhone – iTunes ringtone creator only makes it that much more unambiguous that there ain’t a damned thing special about a ringtone. Once it has been removed from the locked down context of a mobile phone provider’s website and placed in the familiar iTunes window it becomes that much more clear that it’s a god damned MP3 file. You already knew that, but everything on your phone was always locked up so tight. Maybe, just maybe, something was special about that little clip you just downloaded.
Will the overpriced ringtone ever go away? Probably not anytime soon, but as long as mobile phones continue to become ever more like computers it’ll probably just get easier and easier to circumvent the bullshit protections put in place by mobile phone providers.
