The Rise and Fall of the Ringtone Economy. This Business of Ringtones : The Unstable Value Chain and Accumulation of Capital by Rent in the Global Ringtone Industry -- Ramifications of the Ringtone's Identity Crisis : The Social and Cultural Fallout of Technological Transformation. Ringtones and the Deskilling of Mobile-Musical Labor : A Preliminary Investigation ; Left Behind : Case Studies of Decline and Recapitulation in the Ringtone as Representation ; The Ringtone and Its Aesthetic Subgenres in Contemporary Classical Music and Media Performance/Installation Art -- The Ringtone's Dialectical Reversals. The Annoying Thing : Crazy Frog and the Strange Career of a Sample ; The Voice of the Politician and the Geographic Dispersion of the Political Ringtone ; A Spectrum of Forms : The Aesthetic Logic of Original Sound-File Ringtone Composition -- Revivals and the (Universal) Particularization of the Ringtone. Personalization and Spectatorship : The Ringtone's Narrative Functions in Cinematic and Televisual Media ; What's in a Name? Race and the Ringtone's Revival in (Un- )Popular Music -- Epilogue
Summary
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the customisable ringtone was ubiquitous. Almost any crowd of cell phone owners could produce a carillon of tinkly, beeping, synthy, musicalised ringer signals. Ringtones quickly became a multi-billion-dollar global industry - and almost as quickly faded away. This book charts the rise and fall of the ringtone economy and assesses its effect on cultural production
