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In late December 2010, Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate, the News Corporation, ended its involvement in mobile entertainment and sold off the Fox Mobile Group (FMG) to the Jesta Group for an amount not disclosed to the public. The new owner of FMG would command the brands Jamba, Jamster, Mobizzo, and Bitbop. The president of the Jesta Group, Jason Aintabi, claimed, in the face of all existing evidence, to see “a very bright future for the company and its brands.”1 One suspects that the sale price was far less than the hundreds of millions that News Corp. spent in acquiring the division’s main label Jamster/Jamba, which was during the mid 2000s one of the most successful mobile entertainment firms in the world on account of its flagship ringtone product, Crazy Frog. Although the dramatic decrease in ringtone sales by the time of the FMG sale led to a probable devaluing of the company, the aggressive (and in many ways illegal) marketing of this product led to dizzying initial successes and subsequent, spectacular failures, which affected not only the fortunes of Jamster, but also the ringtone industry as a whole. Nonetheless, the particular method of the ringtone-product’s creation, the back story of which spans nearly ten years, demonstrated the mass and global marketability of a single ringtone, as well as the way that amateur-produced Internet detritus could find its way into the production of popular music. This chapter examines the history of Crazy Frog, interpreting its unprecedented ringtone-derived aesthetic form and its popularity as a kind of Freudian family romance involving newly empowered child consumers. Moreover, the phenomenon itself is viewed as a cipher for the racial fantasies , animus, and melancholia that followed the decline of the European empires (especially the British Empire). As will be discussed, however, Crazy Frog also had profound economic consequences, not only for its parent company but also for the ringtone fad as a whole. Though it was a trivial novelty (complementing the ringtone as novelty), it had wide-ranging 5 The Annoying Thing: Crazy Frog and the Strange Career of a Sample 134 Chapter 5 economic and cultural effects. Thus, Crazy Frog and its dramatic overreach and decline must be seen in light of the pre-recessionary conjuncture within Europe (and particularly in the United Kingdom, where it was especially prevalent). The Origins of Crazy Frog First we must ask the most important question: What is Crazy Frog?2 Its tale begins in 1997, when a recording of a Swedish teenager (Daniel Malmedahl ) imitating the sound of a two-stroke moped engine was posted online. The recording, an MP3 file, floated around on the Internet for some time unbeknownst to its creator, appearing online in conjunction with various images—including, in 2001, a static image of a race car that is known as the “Insanity Test,” meant to test how long one could look and listen without laughing.3 The sound file was eventually found in 2002 or 2003 by Erik Wernquist, a young Swedish theater actor/director and animation artist. Wernquist created an animation sequence, called “The Annoying Thing,” that featured a strange-looking frog and was accompanied by the sounds of Daniel Malmedahl. He posted “The Annoying Thing” online, initially without knowing who had produced the sounds. After encountering the animation and incorrect assertions on online message boards regarding the sound file’s provenance, Malmedahl contacted Wernquist and demonstrated over the phone that he was indeed the voice behind Crazy Frog.4 The two partnered, and by 2001 they had licensed their joint creation to Ringtone Europe, Jamster België, and other mobile media companies for the purpose of advertising ringtone sales. In 2004 Jamba!/Jamster licensed the sound for use as a ringtone itself and included the animation as part of a quickly expanding marketing campaign promoting that ringtone worldwide. The ringtone soon became a high-sales item and became quite familiar to the European public, particularly in the United Kingdom. A transformative moment took place in early 2005 when Henning Reith and Reinhard “DJ Voodoo” Raith, members of a German production group known as Bass Bumpers, produced a mash-up arrangement of the Crazy Frog voice with a simple synthesizer version of Harold Faltermeyer’s hit tune “Axel F,” originally part of the soundtrack to the 1984 film Beverly Hills Cop. By May 23, 2005, the single had quickly earned £10 million in sales (as of late 2006, it had made at least £14 million...

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