At last week's presentation for journalists in California, Apple unveiled a refreshed iPod lineup and several secondary developments. One of them, which I didn't have room to cover in my iPod review today, involves the availability of custom ringtones for the iPhone.

Continue reading...

ADVERTISEMENT

Ringtones, of course, are little 30-second snippets from pop songs that play on your cellphone when somebody calls. It's an insanely profitable industry—to the tune of $5 billion a year, worldwide.

Apple's version works like this: you buy a song from Apple's iTunes store for $1—a song that, in the latest version of the iTunes software, bears the little ringtone icon (looks like a bell).

(At the moment, they're far and few between. Apple says about half a million of the store's 6 million songs are available as ringtones; more will follow as Apple gets permission from the record companies, one song at a time. The eligible songs are indicated by a little bell icon in the Ringtones column, which appears when you open the View menu, choose View Options, and turn on the Ringtone checkbox.)

Once you've downloaded the song to the iTunes program on your Mac or PC, you click the little bell icon to open up a very slick ringtone editor. Here, you can select a slice of the song, between 3 and 30 seconds long, that you want to be your ringtone. You can control whether it loops and whether it fades in or out. Then you can buy the ringtone for another $1 and transfer it to your iPhone.

O.K., this is all fine, and fun, and just what a lot of people had been asking for. But I have some questions about ringtones. Truth is, I'm a bit baffled by the whole phenomenon. Maybe some articulate 14-year-old can answer them for me.

Question 1: Apple is selling a ringtone and the full song together for $2, and claims that that's a bargain.

As it turns out, that's correct—at least compared with existing sources for ringtone sales. Pop song ringtones from T-Mobile and Sprint cost $2.50 apiece; from Verizon, $3. You don't get to customize them, choose the start and end points, adjust the looping and so on. Incredibly, after 90 days, every Sprint ringtone dies, and you have to pay another $2.50 if you want to keep it. Verizon's last only a year.

Three bucks for a 30-second snippet that lasts a year—when you can buy the entire song online for $1 and own it forever?

What am I missing here? How is a 30-second, time-limited excerpt worth three times as much as the full work forever?

Does this not enter the heads of the people who are paying $5 billion a year?

Question 2: If I buy and download a pop song legitimately, shouldn't I be able to trigger playback any way I want? Why must I pay one fee to play it by tapping Play, and a second fee to play it when someone calls my phone?

It just makes no sense.

Now, I realize that it's easy to get ringtones onto your phone (or iPhone) for free, using unauthorized techniques of varying degrees of difficulty. Thousands of people do ringtones that way, but I'm not even going there.

And my intention isn't to shoot the messenger by blaming Apple for the insanity of this pricing. Apple's pricing is lower than any American carrier, offers customizability that nobody else does, and gets you both the ringtone and the full song.

No, I'm sure that, if you follow the ringtone gravy train to its source, you'll find record-company executives. There they'll be sitting, rubbing their hands together with glee and hoping that their young customers don't identify the ringtone industry for what it is: the last great digital rip off.