The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form

Introduction

Introduction The task of this book is, to cite Blake, to see a world in a grain of sand. Its eccentric, even perverse ambition is to examine the ringtone—the customizable , often musicalized ringer signal on mobile phones, typically several seconds long and first popularized in the late 1990s—as a means of understanding a spatial and temporal totality, a world-system and a global conjuncture . The relationship between part and whole, however, is not exactly one of microcosm and macrocosm, in which the minuscule element expresses and reflects the vast system in all its features; nor is the exercise to divine the future of the world from the present of the grain. Rather, for a period of time the ringtone itself became a world—a multi-billion-dollar micro-industrial economy and a novel cultural form—that both mimicked and shaped much of the world writ large; thus, by grasping the history of the former, one captures an historical semblance of the latter. Moreover, the ringtone is fundamentally a digital commodity and as such is a part—a central part, I argue—of the momentous transformations in the music industry and the consumer’s experience of music resulting from the digitization of sound and from its articulation with mobile devices.1 Blake’s sand in “Auguries of Innocence,” it would seem, was refined and processed into a silicon wafer, the substrate for a microchip in a now long-discarded flip phone. It is fair to say that the world conjured by the ringtone has now ended, with less a bang than a whimper.2 About ten years ago, in many of the world’s metropoles and other urban centers, the ringtone seemed to be ubiquitous, the tinkling (and often individualized) treble frequencies of beeping mobile phones differentiating the soundscape of that moment from the then-recent past. The creation of a worldwide fad and opportunity for booming profits was predicated on the thinnest of offerings when compared to other new content available on the market. In the words of Andrew Bud, co-founder and executive chairman of the mobile billing firm xiv Introduction mBlox (and Global Chair of the Mobile Entertainment Forum), the essential problem of the ringtone could be summed up in the question “How much can you charge people for things that are more or less worthless?”3 Indeed. The ringtone was typically an expensive digital commodity and played a formative role in producing the mobile entertainment business, which Bud himself assessed as being worth $25 billion worldwide in mid 2008 (roughly at the peak of ringtone sales in the largest markets) and is said to have been worth $33 billion by 2011.4 The centrality of the ringtone to the formation of the mobile entertainment business, including the technological forms and labor practices particular to its production, warrants the description of an entire system of production: a global ringtone industry.5 In this book I view the development of that industry rather critically, but my goal, rather than to produce an unnecessary polemic against a waning entity, is to examine the material logics and marketing strategies of the industry and to study its effects on cultural production in a variety of aesthetic and geographical contexts. I attempt to both elucidate and circumvent one of the primary marketing ideologies that governed it: personalization. Discussed in greater depth in chapter 1, marketing personalization essentially means that advertising and exchange should be customized to the individual consumer, producing an idealized marketplace for that consumer. Although such a marketplace is difficult to produce in physical space, it is far more feasible in the digital portals of the wired world, with recommendation algorithms, collaborative filtering, and, more recently, shifting hierarchies on search engines helping to tailor the online experience to individual users—and with online marketers hoping to maximize sales profits and to commodify attention spans.6 As recommendations become more accurate, the benefits of consumer customization are apparent to sellers and, perhaps, to buyers. But there are dangers. In addition to the extraordinary growth of the consumer surveillance trade, Eli Pariser has cogently argued that personalization produces “filter bubbles”—i.e., that one’s access to digital media con- firms one’s prejudices and interests, producing a kind of “autopropaganda” and potentially preventing the development of collective civic responses to large-scale societal problems.7 The ringtone industry, however, goes one discursive step further: it makes personalization the voluntary task of an individual, and...