(Mobile phone) Crazy Frog leaps up charts
November 8, 2007 – 5:54 am“Crazy Frog”, the first mobile phone ringtone to be released as a compact disc single, is set to leap to number one on the music chart tomorrow after intense television advertising.
Fronted by a half-naked animated frog singing “ding ding di-di ding”, the ringtone has been outselling Coldplay’s “Speed of Sound” by a margin of four to one.
The £3 ringtone has already been bought by more than 11m people in Europe and Jamster, the company behind “Crazy Frog”, expects to sell 150,000 copies of the CD by tomorrow.
The success of the ringtone’s crossover to the singles chart reflects the growing convergence of mobile phones and other forms of entertainment technology.
“This is the beginning of a new era in both the music and the mobile industries,” said Patrick Parodi, chairman of Mobile Entertainment Forum, a trade body. “The synergy between the two is creating new values.
“Music used to be just music. But when applied to mobiles in the form of ringtones, they take on a new functional value. People now assign a specific ringtone to each of their friends and relatives.”
Jamster said it expected similar crossovers to continue taking place.
Simon Dykson, a senior analyst at Informa Telecoms Media, was more sceptical. He believes the future of the convergence lies more with songs being marketed as ringtones and not the other way around. “Crazy Frog is an exception,” he said. “Its success is more the result of a gimmick than [of] a long-term strategy.”
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