Ringtones no longer ringing the tills

The days of making easy money from ringtones short clips of music for mobile phones are over.

What has been a hugely profitable business is coming under pressure from a narrowing of the craze to a smaller group of mostly younger people, a shift in the nature of ringtones themselves, and growing competition among distributors.

In the UK and other European countries, where the fad first took hold, many of the people who once paid￡2 ($3.5) or more for a 10-second clip have given up buying ringtones, said Chris Jones, an analyst at Canalys, a technology industry consultancy: People were doing it because it was a new thing to do. That has worn off with a big part of the market. In the US, where the business is at a much earlier stage, the craze appears to have stalled even before it has reached a mass market. Only about one in 10 mobile subscribers is buying ringtones. That is the same proportion as a year ago, according to InfoSpace, a US ringtone company that claims 47 percent of the US market, though it adds that reliable statistics about the market are difficult to come by.

At the same time, the new band of distributors that sprang up to sell ringtones is finding the fat profits much harder to come by. Users are starting to switch away from the familiar polyphonic renditions of famous tunes to short clips of the original music known in the industry as truetones or realtones.

Most of the profits from these go straight to the record labels, not the middlemen who made a killing from earlier, cruder versions.