Short Sighted Music Industry Surprised By Xingtone
Sometimes certain things make you wonder how people made it to the position of power they’re now in. We’ve been saying for months now that the biggest risk to the whole ringtone phenomena was that as mobile phones became more open it was only a matter of time until people created a “Napster for mobile phones” that got around the need to go through a service provider to get their ringtones. We’re not patting ourselves on the back for this prediction because it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. It doesn’t take much at all, but apparently there are some music industry execs who didn’t figure it out at all, and are now afraid that things like Xingtone (which let people create their own ringtones from their own music collection, or whatever soundfile they have) will end up taking business away from the ringtone market. How this could take them by surprise at all is the only surprise here. It would seem that the industry would have a hard time proving that someone taking 10 seconds of a song they legally purchased and turning it into a personal ringtone for their own use isn’t exercising their fair use rights.
