Today Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, a combination cellphone, iPod, and Blackberry device all in one. In many ways it is the ultimate digital device. It plays music, widescreen movies, surfs the net, checks your email, is a phone, does text messaging, and has an amazingly intuitive user interface that is without equal in either the MP3 player, Video Player, or Cellphone market. It uses multi-touchscreen sensing technology to accommodate all of those functionalities in a familiar and easy-to-use way. Everyone is talking and will continue to talk about its impact on the cellphone, smart phone, and media player markets. What nobody has mentioned yet is what effect this will have on the paid ringtone industry.
Let me be the first to say that the iPhone is huge problem for the ringtone industry. In many ways it makes the ringtone industry completely obsolete. It’s an iPod so any song that you own can be used as a Ringtone. Don’t want to pay $1.99 for a low-quality re-sampling of a song that you already own to be used as your ringtone? Great, you don’t have to. What about wallpapers? Well, any photo on the iPhone can be used as a wallpaper, so just download one from the iPhone’s built-in web browser and you’re golden. Goodbye $9.99 per month ringtone subscription fees!
For all of you ringtone affiliate marketers, don’t worry too much. The ringtone industry isn’t going to die overnight, but it will shrink sooner rather than later because Apple’s iPhone is just the first iPhone device, not the last. In a year or two when the iPhone Nano and the iPhone Shuffle are released, they will be smaller, cheaper, more mass-market devices. Instead of being $500, they will be $200 to start with and will eventually be free with 2 year contract. They will be the next RAZR.
In 3-5 years just about all of the newest phones will have easy syncing with your music library and the paid ringtone market will shrivel up and die. Only the older phones will need ringtone services and as they are replaced the amount of people subscribing will dwindle to almost nothing.
So there, all you ringtone lovers(and haters). Soon it will all be free and easy for everyone to have their favorite song as their ringtone for free. Unfortunately, that also means that whenever the latest annoying fad pop song like “Who Let The Dogs Out” gets popular, it will be even easier for people to make it their ringtone. *sigh* I guess not every change is for the better.
Tagged:Free Ringtones, ppc arbitrage, Ringtone Affiliates, Ringtones
