Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Ring tone upstart calls Nextel customers

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 18:38:25 -0500

Ring tone upstart calls Nextel customers

By Ben Charny
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
January 23, 2003, 12:16 PM PT

A ring tone company that two years ago was seeding the market by hitching a free
ride on a U.S. carrier's network is now selling tones to Nextel Communications
subscribers, the two companies announced Thursday.

New York-based Zingy began to offer its catalog of 2,500 tones to Nextel subscribers that
own
Motorola i95cl and i90c handsets. The tones sell for $2 each.

Most U.S. carriers now sell ring tones and are using companies like Zingy to usher in a
new
breed of better-sounding tones in the hope of prodding sales figures upward. Sales of ring

tones, which are popular in Europe, generated between $500 million and $1 billion in
revenue in
2002, according to research firm the Informa Group. The figures include a U.S. market that
has
been lackadaisical at best in downloading these 15-second snippets of well-known melodies,

which include everything from the theme song to TV's "Bewitched" to Tchaikovsky's "1812
Overture" to the Troggs' "Wild Thing."

New ring tones from Zingy and other providers can generate two different notes at the same

time, creating the harmonies missing from most currently available ring tones. The new,
richer
sounding tones are "an important opportunity for growth," said Peter Aloumanis, Motorola
vice
president and general manager. Motorola is supplying Nextel with the two handsets.

The ring tones can be downloaded at Nextel's Web site. The tones will also be offered
through
other Zingy partner sites, including MSN. Financial details of the deal between Nextel and

Zingy were not disclosed.

The arrangement reached with Nextel helps to further legitimize Zingy, a company that
began
distributing ring tones for free in January 2001. At the time, Zingy and a handful of
other ring
tone providers found an open door on wireless carriers' networks that let them hitch a
free ride
for their ring tones.

Ironically, carriers helped create the industry because they wanted to give people an easy
way
to let anyone with an Internet connection send a text message to a cell phone for free.
The
carriers created these "message centers" on their networks to route the text messages. The

free ring tone site operators quickly developed ways to use the message centers to send
the
ring tones.

In fact, Zingy began using these same message centers to distribute ring tones to some
AT&T
Wireless subscribers about five or six months before AT&T Wireless launched its own ring
tone
download offerings.

Both carriers and the recording industry took notice. Carriers acknowledged that giving
away
ring tones ate into their own ring-tone selling business plans. The recording industry
began
weeding out those ring tone sellers that were distributing the song snippets without
paying
royalties.

Zingy avoided litigation by reaching agreements with the major recording companies. It now

claims to offer royalties whenever it sells any of its 2,500 tones. It also began charging
for ring
tones in the second half of 2002.

Nextel is Zingy's first carrier partnership, according to a Zingy representative.

http://news.com.com/2100-1033-981863.html

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/