How a Moped Noise Beat Coldplay: Remembering the Ringtone Years

In 1997 a seventeen-year-old student in Gothenburg called Daniel Malmedahl recorded himself doing an impression of a two-stroke engine, the whiny little motor you get on a moped, and stuck it up on a website because that is what you did with that kind of thing in 1997. Eight years later the same noise was sitting at number one in the UK singles chart, and Coldplay were stuck underneath it at number two.

I still find that a bit hard to believe. I was there for it, too. If you grew up in the States, you probably got off lightly. In Britain in 2005 you could not watch half an hour of telly without the thing turning up, and I mean that pretty much literally; there are numbers on it which I will get to.

This is about those few years, roughly 2004 to 2008, when the phone in your pocket turned into a strange sort of record store. People paid two or three dollars, sometimes more, for thirty seconds of a song they never even heard properly, just so it would go off on the bus home. It made a huge amount of money for a short while. Most of it went to people who had nothing to do with the music, and that is the part I keep getting stuck on.

A Moped Noise Beat Coldplay

The story goes like this, and it is all on the record. A Swedish TV researcher heard Malmedahl's engine noise and talked him into doing it live on air, and after that the recording drifted round the file sharing networks as 2TAKTARE.MP3, which is Swedish for two-stroker, more or less. Then in late 2003 an animator called Erik Wernquist came across the sound without knowing any of that and built a little 3D character to go with it. He called it The Annoying Thing. It took him six to eight weeks of spare time and he posted it online on the 7th of October 2003.

It did not take the ringtone companies long to notice. Two of them, Ringtone Europe and Jamster in Belgium, both later folded into a Berlin company called Jamba, licensed the character, renamed it Crazy Frog and started pushing it in the middle of 2004. You can read the whole odd history of the Crazy Frog if you have an afternoon spare. It goes on into video games and a tour of Australian shopping centres, which I genuinely did not know about untill this week.

Remember, the song came after the ringtone. Axel F, the old Harold Faltermeyer theme from Beverly Hills Cop with the frog noise laid over a eurodance beat, came out on the 23rd of May 2005, went straight in at number one and stayed there four weeks. Coldplay had their comeback single Speed of Sound out at the same time. HMV told the NME the frog was outselling them about four to one in its shops. Funnily enough, Faltermeyer's own version only got to number two in the UK in 1985, so a cartoon frog did better with his tune then he did.

The Adverts Were the Actual Product

What you have to understand is that the record was almost a side effect. The thing Jamba really sold, trading as Jamster in English-speaking countries, was the ringtone. And it sold the ringtone through television, a frankly ridiculous amount of television.

According to figures The Guardian reported at the time, Jamster bought 73,716 advertising slots on British TV in May 2005 alone. That is one month. Most of the country saw the advert, on average, something like 26 times each, and in a house like ours where the telly stayed on all evening it was a good deal more.

People complained, obviously. Some of it was about the frog itself. The complaints that mattered came from viewers who thought they were paying once for a ringtone when they had actually signed up to a subscription that kept on charging their phone. The Advertising Standards Authority upheld those, and in September 2005 it ruled that Jamba's ringtone adverts could not go out before 9 pm, by which point the summer was over and the money was in the bank.

And it was serious money. VeriSign, the internet security company, bought Jamba in late 2004 for $270 million, when it was turning over about $15 million a quarter. Three quarters later it was doing $150 million a quarter on ringtones and wallpapers and the odd little game. Ten times the size in under a year. Tech people go a bit misty-eyed over a chart like that. The year after, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought a controlling stake in the business.

Meanwhile, America got a chart for thirty seconds of music

The US got there a bit later and from a different direction, through hip hop more than cartoon animals, though Jamster was over there too, and its first artist-backed ringtone advert in the US was with Mike Jones, who had his debut album coming out on Warner around the same time. Billboard announced on the 26th of October 2004 that it was adding a chart just for ringtones, which tells you how seriously the business took it. In 2006 it went further with a separate chart for master ringtones, the clips of the actual recording rather than a beepy version, and when Hot RingMasters got going that December its first number one was Smack That by Akon and Eminem.

What I find genuinely interesting as a music person is what it did to how songs sounded. There was a wave of Atlanta records from about 2005 to 2007, snap music, that people started calling ringtone rap, mostly as a dig. Laffy Taffy by D4L went to number one on the Hot 100. Yung Joc's It's Goin' Down got to number three with a popping sound sat where the snare would normally go.

The beats were thin, mostly finger snaps and an 808, with a hook you could clock inside two seconds, which is exactly the sort of thing that still sounds alright out of a tiny speaker in a coat pocket. The New York Times reviewed Laffy Taffy in January 2006 and said that on the hip hop prestige scale goofy dance songs like it did not rate very high. It went to number one anyway.

Then Soulja Boy. Crank That started out as a track a teenager from Batesville, Mississippi put up on SoundClick in 2006. Mr Collipark picked it up, Interscope put it out properly in May 2007, and it spent seven weeks at number one that autumn. In January 2008 it became the first song to sell three million digital copies in the US. That steel pan riff was made for a phone; I don't think anybody would argue with that now.

Twenty-Four Cents for Whoever Wrote It

This next bit is less fun. A ringtone back then could cost anything up to five dollars, and some estimates put the global market at $4 billion in 2004, although figures for those years jump about a lot depending on who is counting. A big chunk of every sale went to the phone network becuase they owned the pipe and the billing; the ringtone company took its cut on top, the label got something if it was a master tone, and the songwriter was somewhere at the back of that queue.

In the US the songwriter's share got argued over formally. In October 2008 the Copyright Royalty Board set the mechanical royalty on a ringtone at 24 cents a go, the first time it had set a rate for them at all, and left a full song download at 9.1 cents. On a two-dollar fifty ringtone, that is roughly ten per cent. Which was more or less what the industry was paying anyway.

Then ASCAP, the performing rights organisation, went after AT&T and Verizon for something extra, arguing that every time your phone went off on a train it was a public performance of the song. The phone companies said no. In October 2009, a federal judge in New York, Denise Cote, sided with them. The gist of her ruling was that someone whose phone rings in public is not doing it for profit and is not charging anybody admission, so there was no public performance to license. Fair enough as a reading of the law, I suppose, even if the split still looks pretty mean from where the songwriter is sitting.

Free Ringtone, Small Print Further Down

The other thing those years built, and I definitely did not appreciate this at the time, was the habit of paying somebody a fee for every new customer they brought in. Plenty of the free ringtone banners all over the web had nothing to do with the ringtone companies directly. Marketers put them up and got a flat payment for each person who signed up. The tracking behind it was crude, which is partly why so much of it went sour.

It stayed sour a long time. As late as 2013, the US Federal Trade Commission settled with Jesta Digital, the company that by then owned Jamster, for $1.2 million, over banner ads inside Angry Birds on Android phones that were made to look like virus warnings. Tap one, and you could end up with a $9.99 a month charge for ringtones and the like on your phone bill. You don't often see it put in writing, but the FTC's complaint quoted an internal company email saying they were "anxious to move [the] business out of being a scam and more into a valued service."

The pay-per-signup idea itself did not go anywhere. It grew up and started getting measured properly. Regulated industries watch it most closely now, gambling being the obvious one, since an operator has to know which partner sent which player and pay them on what that player actually went on to do, with records a regulator may well ask to see. That side runs on casino affiliate software, platforms such as MAP that follow a player from the first click through to the deposits and then the partner's payout. It is a long way from a banner shouting FREE TONES in yellow capitals, even if the basic deal underneath is the same one.

The Honest Bit: It was not all a racket

I have been fairly grumpy about all of this, so it is only right to give the other side, becuase there is one. For a few years, ringtone money was real money for artists who were not getting a great deal anywhere else. The snap acts in Atlanta did not get much respect and the New York Times was sniffy about them, but a lot of their money came through phones, which is how the nickname stuck. A ringtone sale paid something back to the people who made the record. That is more than you could say for most of what was happening on LimeWire at the time.

Soulja Boy worked that out early. By most accounts, he built his career by turning up everywhere online a sixteen-year-old could get to: SoundClick and MySpace and blogs, even changing the details on his LimeWire files so they looked like whatever song was popular that week. The phone was one more place for his song to live, and he used it.

And go back to that Copyright Royalty Board decision for a second. 24 cents a ringtone is more than two and a half times the 9.1 cents a songwriter got for a whole downloaded song, so for a short while the person at the back of the queue did better per sale on thirty seconds of their work than on the full three minutes. I did not expect the sum to come out that way when I started looking.

Why it Stopped, and What Stayed on the Bill

It dropped off fast. One estimate put US ringtone sales in 2008 at $541 million and falling, and the reasons were not complicated. Phones got proper internet. You could just buy the whole song. Once you could make your own ringtone out of a track you already owned, paying again for a clip started to look a bit daft. Billboard kept its ringtone chart going for years after anyone was looking. It was quietly dropped at the end of 2014 and the very last number one on it was Shake It Off by Taylor Swift, which I find oddly sweet.

What never went away was the billing. The ringtone business ran on the idea that you could buy something on a phone and have it land on your phone bill without typing in a card number. That trick outlived the ringtone by a mile; plenty of people paid for apps and games that way for years after. Over in the UK, it has even ended up as one way to top up a mobile casino account. Jackpot Mobile Casino, for example, lets players put a deposit on their monthly bill or pay-as-you-go credit and confirm it with a text, which is more or less the mechanic Jamster used to sell everyone the frog, with a very different product on the end and an age check in front.

What I hear now when a phone goes off

Hardly anybody has a ringtone any more. Phones live on vibrate, and if one does ring out loud on a train, people look round like somebody dropped a plate. Thomas Dolby, of all people, the She Blinded Me With Science guy, had a company called Beatnik that made one of the first software synths built into phones for playing polyphonic tones, starting with a Nokia in 2002. He has said he is pleased to see people getting interested in the classic ones again, and there is a whole little corner of the internet now that collects the old preloaded tunes and posts them like lost records.

My own phone has been on silent for the best part of ten years. I can still do the frog noise, though, badly, and nobody in my house has ever thanked me for it.

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