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Major cell phones ringtones auction takes on classical tunes

Move over, 50 Cent. The nation’s first major ringtone auction will expand the cellphone musical library beyond rap and pop by putting original tunes by classical U.S. composers up for sale.

Organized by the American Composers Orchestra to raise money for its young-composer and educational programs, the auction offers miniworks written expressly for cellular phone by 10 artists. Among them are already established composers such as Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson, Hollywood’s prolific scoreman Danny Elfman and emerging talent Jason Freeman.

Each will conceive one 20- to 30-second ringtone. The bids, which start at $100, may be placed online from April 10 to May 5. (Items can be previewed now at www.americancomposers.org.)
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The auction also features signed scores and manuscripts, lunches with composers and in-home performances.

“Everyone can get a Beyonce ringtone for a buck or so,” said Barbara Burch, director of development at the New York-based non-profit group that seeks to support, promote and invigorate work by American composers. “But just one person in the world will have the ringtone by Philip Glass. This is a collectible ringtone.”

Elfman’s music, which includes scores for television shows such as The Simpsons and Desperate Housewives as well as the movies Spider-man and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, already has been used as ringtones. The composer had stumbled upon them while doing his own search for tunes to assign to calls from his family and friends.

This will be his first original ringtone, however, and although he hasn’t yet composed it, he said he’d approach the work as he would a jingle, but one written for orchestra.

“I’ll do it very quickly and spontaneously,” Elfman, 52, said by phone from New York, where he was visiting. “I expect that it will be slightly strange and bizarre, but catchy at the same time.”

Mobile ringtones have been a growing niche for wireless-phone providers, record labels and marketers. More than 205 million people have mobile phones in the United States and its territories, according to the most recent data compiled by CTIA-The Wireless Association. About 24.1 million consumers purchased ringtones in the fourth quarter of 2005, up from 15.6 million in the third quarter, according to Telephia, a San Francisco-based mobile communications market-research firm that uses data from four major mobile-phone carriers.

“We still see the dominance of rap, R&B, alternative, punk and pop,” said Drew Hull, research director of mobile content at NPD Group. “But we are definitely seeing growth in jazz and classical music.”

Almost non-existent as recently as three years ago, ringtones in those genres now make up about 5 percent of the market, he said.

The participation of big names in the American Composers Orchestra’s auction is a sign “that this market is growing and becoming part of the mainstream,” Hull said.

“You have famous classical composers, whom you won’t associate with the teenager market, becoming involved, and it’s not looked down upon,” he said.

Composing original tunes for ringtones is a trend seen in the broader market, where until recently popular songs have been edited down to produce the mobile tunes.