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On January 19, 2009, the cartoonist Garry Trudeau inaugurated a weeklong foray into the world of ringtones. In a series of Doonesbury strips depicting a radio interview between a central character, the NPR DJ Mark Slackmeyer, and a minor character, the genre-switching rock star Jimmy Thudpucker, now working as a self-described “ringtone artist,” Trudeau treats the scene as a pretext for humorous commentary on the ringtone phenomenon. As might be expected, the familiar marketing discourse of ringtones acting as a means of personalization looms large, with ringtones being “about self-expression.” According to Jimmy, jerks are known to download Kanye West songs, and hedge-fund managers gravitate toward a trumpet-laden ringtone featuring the lyrics “It’s good to be king! . . . It’s good to be king!”1 Also unsurprisingly, the short duration of the ringtone itself served in a number of gags, including Mark’s befuddlement by the brevity of Jimmy’s “latest release” and, more curiously, Jimmy’s description of a “summer ring-tone festival called Baby Bells,” in which an entire concert requires “about 80 acts.”2 More interesting, however, are the meditations on musical form and genre in these strips. Ringtones are understood as “haiku-like” forms into which one “can pack a whole world” and are highly variable in their staying power (“some of them are evergreens, others are very perishable”); the aesthetic advantages and limitations of composing new ringtones as opposed to using full-length songs also merit comment.3 Jimmy: . . . with the longer form, you no longer have control over when the user interrupts the song. If it’s before the hook, his experience is compromised. But with a two-second song, no matter when he picks up, the user gets my whole message. Mark: Which is? Jimmy: Your phone is ringing.4 2 Ringtones and the Deskilling of Mobile-Musical Labor: A Preliminary Investigation 58 Chapter 2 In his characteristically wry way, Trudeau draws attention to a wide range of issues surrounding the ringtone—for example, as can be gleaned above, his allusion to the ringtone’s thinning of song content verges on the awareness of the ringtone as being nothing more than an advertisement for mobile telephony itself.5 And yet, for all his perspicacity, Trudeau perhaps unwittingly equates ringtone production as being driven by musical artists and thereby ignores the complex division of labor found within the ringtone industry itself. Indeed, given the satirical form of Doonesbury, its general focus on members of the Baby Boomer generation, and the reality that most of its minor characters tend to remain “identifiable social types,”6 Jimmy Thudpucker, the musically fickle but genial aging rock star, serves primarily as a figure of ridicule as a result of his involvement with ringtones—perhaps most explicitly demonstrated in his laughable participation in a vexed United Service Organizations entertainment tour to troops stationed in Bagram, Afghanistan. One might argue, then, that for all of the comic strip’s capaciousness, certain possibilities—such as the depiction of relatively nameless ringtone workers, largely Generation X and Y members—would appear to fall outside its purview, perhaps even being unthinkable within its very form. For a week, the largely invisible work of making ringtones received more public attention within US print media than it had before or since, and yet the picture on offer was tilted toward a caricature of those privileged enough to call themselves “artists” in the world of mobile entertainment.7 In contrast, my purpose here is to offer a preliminary account of musical labor in the ringtone industry, including descriptions of the various types of labor found in that industry, discrepancies in payment and prestige between its numerous participants, and work/workplace arrangements, all produced by the technical transformations occurring over the brief and still ongoing history of what might be understood, perhaps paradoxically, as a global micro-industry. The point about technical transformations is of prime importance here, as the labor needs of companies hiring musicians to produce ringtones have varied substantially over time. Specifically, as the file format of the ringtone changed (see chapter 1), different forms of work and numbers of employees were required to create a sufficient volume of ringtones for purchase on a mass scale. These technical changes in the file format of ringtones have resulted in two thoroughgoing transformations in labor skill requirements in the ringtone industry. With the supersession of the monophonic ringtone by the polyphonic ringtone, a major skill increase in ringtone labor was required...

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