And the mobile sector needs to start competing properly with the online download space, especially if a new report in the Financial Times is to be believed - because that report reckons that the ringtone bubble might be about to burst. The willingness for the great general public to waste a few quid just to have a poor imitation of a top pop tune as their ringtone was what got the mobile sector so excited about music in the first place - the logic always flowed "if they'll spend three quid on a ring tone, surely they'll pay two quid for a full track download". But, if ringtone sales start to decline, it might turn out the mobile networks have missed the boat, if there was ever a boat to catch.
That said, the FT report suggested the people most struggling at the moment are those companies that specialize in just ringtones - the companies who bought the publishing rights to tracks, converted them into ring tones, and then flogged them on to mobile networks, or direct to the consumer. They seem to be suffering because of the growth of 'realtones' - the ringtones which are actually a clip of a real track rather than a casio keyboard style reproduction. The record labels control those clips, and they are selling them directly to the mobile networks, leaving the middle men with an ever decreasing slice of the market (except, of course, those middle men who don't need the record labels and their realtone clips because they've got a crazy frog all of their own to flog).