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AT&T Tries New Approach To Waning Ringtone Market; BMI Says Ringtone Market Still Falling

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AT&T (NYSE: T) is announcing a few new music services today, but the one that stands out is a new offering for ringtones, which the carrier likely hopes will counter a worldwide trend of decreasing ringtone sales. The company is also launching a way for customers to listen to music that’s on their PC, and that Napster (NSDQ: NAPS) Mobile will be available on more handsets. Release.

SEE ALSO: Ringtone On The Wane Globally

AT&T said it is now offering mSpot’s Make-UR-Tones and Remix, which allows customers to pick the 30-seconds of a song that they would like to have for their ringtone. This is a nice feature because even if you have a phone that allows you to designate a ringtone from your music collection, it’s the first 30-seconds, which is often not as interesting. From the phone, they choose from a library of more than 250,000 titles and then edit the song. The service isn’t cheap. Make-UR-Tones is $6.99 a month for three songs and each additional ring is $2.99. Perhaps, the service will renew customer interest in ringtones. BMI came out with a report today, predicting that the U.S. ringtone market will continue to decline in 2008, generating about $510 million in sales, or 7 percent less than in 2007. They said this is the second year in a row that the market has retracted, after peaking in 2006 at $600 million. A less dire report was released by M:Metrics last year. It reported that in the U.S, the percentage of subscribers buying a ringtone was 9.3 percent in October 2007. That was slightly higher than the 9 percent in 2006, which was still falling from a high of 10 percent.

Starting today, AT&T is also offering customers a service that will allow them to access PC libraries from their phone for $9.99 a month. This summer, AT&T said it will offer Napster Mobile to more than 12 million customers. In November, AT&T launched Napster Mobile on the Samsung SLM.

Mar 27, 2008 11:21 AM ET

Posted In: Entertainment, Music, Companies, AT&T

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