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Now this would be ironic.
You're at the movies, and as often happens, the guy in the next row has his cellphone go off. Instead of ringing, it's playing that Alanis Morissette song with the lyrics about her performing a sex act in a theatre. And her voice is coming from the guy's pants.
Get used to it.
Ding dong, the ring is dead. Soon you won't even hear ringing at the other end of the line.
Most cellphones don't even have a traditional ring as an option anymore. They come with "ringtones" -- beepy song clips of well-known tunes like the Hockey Night In Canada theme, either in "mono" or a more elaborate "polyphonic" format (the latter of which have a backbeat and sound like they're being played on a Casio keyboard).
And even they're on the endangered-species list.
In Europe and Asia for the past two years, and more recently in the U.S., the hot handset craze has been "truetones" -- clips of actual artists' recordings that play when you get a call.
Hip-hop, techno, punk, you name it. From Stockholm to Bangkok, the streets are alive with the sound of cellphone music.
And this month Canada officially joins the rest of the world.
Fuelled by record labels following the scent of money, a flood of truetone songs are either on offer or will be within weeks, via cellphone carriers such as Bell, Rogers and Telus. There's also online ringtone "portals" like MuchMusic and a new one to be launched next month by CanWest Global, as an arm of its new "freebie" newspaper Dose.
As well, Universal is offering up more than 500 songs from its catalogue for Bell's "Mastertone" truetone service. It's the exclusive truetone supplier for Bell, and also supplies MuchMusic's online ringtone store along with Sony and BMG.
That means you're probably going to be hearing a lot more 50 Cent, Ja Rule and Jay-Z, along with Black Eyed Peas and Ashlee Simpson, on the streetcar as your fellow passengers receive calls. And if you're passing anywhere near a high school, it'll be pretty much the guaranteed background noise.
Horrifying?
Does this sound horrifying? Then in marketers' terms, you're old.
Even before it offered up truetones, MuchMusic sold more than 1.5 million ringtones (at up to $2.50 a pop) in the past year.
And everybody's expecting the demand from the 15-29 demographic to go white-hot now that authentic songs are for sale.
This week, delegates at Canadian Music Week will pack a conference room at the Fairmont Royal York to hear international players and music execs talk up the ringtone boom.
More than $3.5 billion worth of ringtones were sold worldwide in the past year. This year the U.S. is expected to top $500 million in sales. Any way you cut it, that's a lot of money being spent just to annoy you in a crowded elevator.
The stake that the record labels have in the ringtone boom is obvious. An industry that has been getting beaten up by free music downloading is looking to another digital mode as its salvation. As long as ringtones were merely beepy cover-versions, only songwriters stood to collect any royalties.
"Now artists, labels, producers ... all the people who normally get paid when things are sampled (on hip-hop songs) will now receive payment for ringtones," says Universal Music senior executive Erika Savage.
"Imagine the millions of 50 Cent In Da Club polyphonics that have been sold up to this day. And 50 Cent has not been compensated under artist agreement in any way for those millions of sales. It's been very frustrating."
In the U.S., ringtones even have their own charts.
"What's very interesting is how certain songs catalogued have a brand new life when they come out as a Mastertone," Savage says. "Like Celebration by Kool &The Gang. That's a song we've seen have a brand new life in the U.S. and Europe as a ringtone, even though that band might not be selling CDs anymore. It really is a singles market.
"Drop It Like It's Hot by Snoop Dogg took the No. 1 spot in the U.S. Mastertone chart, but that album was nowhere near the top of the (album) charts for us."
Why has Canada been so slow getting in on the ringtones party? Believe it or not, the CRTC has nothing to do with it.
Canada 'different'
"In the U.S. and Europe, it's a little more Wild West. The carriers are larger, and the approach is simply, 'Let's really market this to our own subscribers,' and they've got the scale to make that work," says Mike Brown of MyThum Interactive, a Canadian firm that acts as a middleman between phone carriers and portals.
MyThum facilitates the on-screen audience text-messaging on TV stations MuchMusic, Sportsnet and Toronto 1, and will provide content for CanWest's ringtones service.
"The approach in Canada is different," he says, "the feeling is it doesn't work until you get everybody involved. And now everybody is."
The trick is bringing everybody up to speed technologically. Only about 10% of cellphones in Canada are estimated to be capable of downloading truetones.
But almost all the ones for sale now are. MuchMusic markets its own Rogers phone to get a leg up on the techno issue. It even lets you download Ed the Sock screaming at you to answer your phone.
"It freaks people out when my phone rings because it's Ed the Sock screaming across a noisy room calling me an idiot," laughs Roma Khanna, v-p Interactive for CHUM TV.
"The thing is, once your phone can take a truetone, who really wants polyphonic? Why would you want a bad muzak version of a song when you can have the real thing?
"The learning curve for Canadians and technology is actually really fast. By Christmas, you'll see phones marketed with full MP3 players. Your phone will be your iPod. Those phones have already been released in Europe."
At a price. Khanna's own phone, manufactured by Sony Ericsson, retails at $700 and has an MP3 recorder in it -- possibly the fly-in-the-ointment for the labels' plans to cash in.
After all, an MP3 recorder allows people to record ringtones free of charge off their stereo.
"I've heard it suggested that maybe the record companies will ask the phone companies to turn that function off. But that's like trying to stop a boulder from rolling down a hill," Khanna says.
For the techno savvy, there's also software for converting MP3s to truetones.
But otherwise, the ringtone business is relatively piracy-free. Savage admits that the 99c Universal sells its songs for on iTunes is "priced that low because the alternative is free," whereas ringtone pricing is what the market will bear.
Says Khanna: "The thing about a cellphone is it's a closed network, which gives you a greater degree of control. Believe me, as we speak there are kids out there learning how to hack it. But unlike the Internet, where there is no geographical limit, there is a limitation to a cellphone network -- a physical signal and a physical tower.
"So there's a certain amount of control and copyright protection the record labels get that they can't get on the Internet."
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You're now in control
Coming this month to a cellular phone near you -- "ringbacks."
While ringtones can replace the age-old electronic ringing sound your cellphone makes when someone calls you, ringbacks are tunes the caller hears -- instead of the traditional ringing sound --on their end.
You control it, and you can program specific ringback tunes for specific callers. It currently is available to Bell home-phone subscribers.
"When my mom phones me from Calgary, she can hear a Jann Arden song. When my sister calls me she can hear a KISS song. It's really kind of exciting," says Universal Music Canada senior executive Erika Savage.
That label is supplying 100 songs -- most of them in the adult-contemporary genre -- for Bell's "Callertunes" ringback service that begins tomorrow.
Rogers is soon to announce a similar program to start in April.
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THE TOP-SELLING RINGTONE DOWNLOADS IN THE U.S.:
SOURCE: Billboard.com
THE TOP-SELLING RINGTONE DOWNLOADS IN CANADA:
SOURCE: muchmusic.com