How the iPhone killed the custom ringtone

By Saskia Solomon

It isn’t often that a king tells a president, “Why don’t you just shut up?” But at a summit in Santiago in November 2007, Juan Carlos, then king of Spain, lost his cool when Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez called a former Spanish prime minister a fascist. These days such a catty remark would generate a multitude of memes within seconds. Yet 14 years ago few people had the skills for a YouTube remix and Twitter had only 50,000 users. Juan Carlos went viral in what now seems like the quaintest of fashions: as a custom ringtone for mobile phones. Half a million people in Spain downloaded a recording of the outburst, as did many in Venezuela (where the recording had to be voiced by actors to avoid slander). For weeks, mobiles in the Spanish-speaking world blared out, “Por qué no te callas?”

Custom ringtones were everywhere in the mid-Noughties. Restaurants and shopping malls resounded with a cacophony of competing jingles: a snatch of hip hop here, a blast of dubstep there. Teenagers on public transport broadcast tinny music from their handsets – a practice one British newspaper dubbed “sodcasting”.

It didn’t matter if ringtones were naff. The insanely irritating “Crazy Frog” ringtone, released in 2004, made £40m in downloads for its Swedish producer Jamba!. People embraced the silly, too: some used a cough or a snort to alert them to the arrival of a new text message; the theme from “Jaws” might have accompanied an incoming call from your mother-in-law.

Before Facebook and Twitter, ringtones were a way to advertise your sense of humour and great taste

In the days before Facebook profiles and tweets, ringtones were a way to advertise your sense of humour and great taste in music. They became an essential form of self-expression for a generation, a kind of personal theme-tune: “You are your ringtone”, proclaimed the Los Angeles Times in 2005.

The reign of personalised ringtones lasted a decade. In the late 1990s mobile-phone users were limited to the dozen or so tunes that came pre-installed on their device. Most ubiquitous was Nokia’s default ringtone, sampled from “Gran Vals”, a classical-guitar solo dating from 1902. The 13-note earworm became a hallmark of antisocial phone use, parodied in Britain by Dom Joly’s candid-camera TV show, which featured him shouting into a monster-sized phone in public: “HELLO? I CAN’T TALK! I’M IN THE LIBRARY!”

Nokia was at the vanguard of the ringtone revolution. The changeable fascias of the Finnish company’s “3210” handset, launched in 1999, were wildly popular with teenagers the world over – and for the first time users were given the ability to compose their own ringtones. In 2001 Nokia changed the game again, enabling users of its phones to send and receive ringtones by text message. Entrepreneurs sensed an opportunity. Ringtones required little expertise – musical or technical – to develop or market. Soon, a swathe of companies with names like Jamster, Zingy and Dwango were making versions of popular tunes which they advertised online or in the back of music magazines and sold for up to $4 each.

Early jingles were crude and monophonic, but in 2002 Nokia launched the first mass-market phones with polyphonic ringtones which layered several notes and instruments at once, bearing greater resemblance to the original song. By 2004 the most cutting-edge phones let people use audio clips (known as “truetones”) as their ringtone: rather than hearing an approximation of “Toxic”, you could hear Britney herself serenade you from your pocket.

The theme from “Jaws” might accompany an incoming call from your mother-in-law

The benefit wasn’t just auditory. Record companies had been slow to adapt to the internet and were fearful as they watched the rise of file-sharing sites like Napster and LimeWire, on which users swapped pirated MP3 files of pop songs. Some thought ringtones might be their saviour: monophonic or polyphonic versions of pop songs could be made by anyone with the technology, but providers of truetone ringtones had to license the song, giving the record companies a welcome revenue stream, as well as discretion over who used their music. Many firms chose to join up with the big telecoms providers. It paid off: in 2003 sales of ringtones overtook those of CD singles.

Musicians embraced the new medium. The rapper 50 Cent, whose hit “In Da Club” was the recipient of Billboard magazine’s inaugural Ringtone of the Year award in 2004, released a whole series of original jingles, including a voice recording: “Ay yo what’s up, yo this the kid, 50 Cent man. Stop playin’, you better answer!” Madonna made music history in 2005 by releasing her single “Hung Up” as a ringtone before it was aired on the radio. Unsurprisingly there was a backlash among indie bands. “There’s only music so that there’s new ringtones,” sang a grumpy Alex Turner, frontman for the Arctic Monkeys, in 2006.

It didn’t last. Developers at Apple were already working on technology that would silence the ringtone revolution. In June 2007, five months before Juan Carlos’s undiplomatic outburst, the first iPhone was released. Soon, mobile phones were no longer simply telephones that didn’t have to be plugged into the wall, they were pocket computers for living your life on. The rise of 4G networks, coupled with instant messaging apps like WhatsApp, meant people didn’t have to call someone to have a real-time conversation. The mobile phone was growing up fast, and the custom ringtone turned out to be something of an embarrassing, teenage phase.

That’s not to say Apple didn’t consider them. But allowing users to import ringtones from their music library, as was originally intended, would have delayed the release of the iPhone by enveloping the firm in complicated legal wranglings. The idea of puerile jingles also challenged the desire of Steve Jobs, the iPhone’s creator, for purity of design. The new phone offered bounteous possibilities in many other spheres – including music downloads – but it gave its users a choice of only 25 factory-set ringtones. One of them, “Old Phone”, a softly ringing bell, had a pleasing link with the past.

The mobile phone was growing up, and the ringtone turned out to be something of an embarrassing, teenage phase

Early users of telephone lines would whistle into the transmitter to alert the telephone-exchange operator to their call. This sound was soon replaced with a bell, triggered by the electric current running down the line. Nearly 150 years on from the invention of the telephone, most of us give little thought to the clunky technology of our phone’s forebears. But within our pocket computers there lurk traces of what came before: as well as the bell, there’s the fake shutter-click of the camera. Even on the newest iPhones, “Old Phone” is still there, hidden away from the rest of the futuristic tinkles in a sub-menu called “Classic”.

Few of us will seek it out. Twenty years after custom ringtones first made themselves heard, most smartphone users stick to the default xylophone melody. Why bother to change it when your phone hardly ever rings? Few people under 40 would dream of calling someone up. The ringing telephone has come full circle: as in its early days, it is used mainly for calamities or great news. As for personalisation, social media now offer far more possibilities for us to curate our public image than snippets of symphonies or tacky jingles ever did. For the computer in our pocket, the bell rarely tolls.■

Saskia Solomon is a freelance writer in London

ILLUSTRATIONS: BARBARA GIBSON