Mobile Encyclopedia

Cellphone ringtones dial into pop culture (mobile)

Ringtones are hitting a high note. Downloadable 30-second music snippets — from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 to Snoop Dogg’s Let’s Get Blown — are surging as cellphone users swap mundane “ring ring” for MP3-quality tunes.

Industry tracker M:Metrics says a record 24.6 million consumers downloaded at least one ringtone in April alone. About 250 million ringtones were downloaded by U.S. cellphone users in 2004, and they are expected to climb 60% to 400 million in 2005.

“They personalize your cellphone. You don’t have to listen to all that bland (stuff), you can have real music instead,” says industry analyst Roger Entner of Ovum Research, whose cellphone currently rings a slice of the Spin Doctors’ early 1990s hit Pocketful of Kryptonite.

Though they may be the latest annoyance to the technophobic, ringtones hit a milestone of sorts this week in Britain, where the ringtone-inspired tune Crazy Frog Axel F hit No.1 on the singles charts.

Ringtones aren’t a threat to standard U.S. music forms just yet. But bands and record companies are clamoring for them as revenue sources and promotional tools. Today, Cingular Wireless, the USA’s largest wireless carrier, launches exclusive ringtones from Gwen …