Global ringtone sales have peaked (well, they had to some time) but within that there are bigger winners and losers than everyone simply stopping growing across the board. In general, Jupiter Research puts the ringtone share of the overall mobile content market in Europe at 29 percent, down from 33 percent last year…the European ringtone market is expected to be about $1.1 billion this year, a 10 percent increase on 2006. In emerging markets ringtone sales are still growing, but in mature markets they’re falling off. M:Metrics reports that in Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Italy “the percentage of mobile phone subscribers buying a ringtone in an average month has fallen consistently over the past 12 months, to a low of 3.4 percent in Britain in October. In the United States, it was 9.3 percent, higher than the 9.0 percent of last October but below its January 2007 peak of 10.0 percent” reports the International Herald Tribune.

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More dramatically, the structure of the ringtone market is changing to be less amenable to ringtone aggregators. The IHT cites reasons such as the rise of handsets and services which lets people create ringtones out of the songs they’ve purchased, digital music stores selling ringtones and the rise of video ringtones and mastertones, which sell for the same price but requires royalties to the record labels. It misses one of the biggest—moves by the industry to stamp out irresponsible subscription practices. Even if ringtone sales do fall off over the next few years, but there’ll always be a group of people who regularly buy ringtones, either to change the one they have or to link different ringtones to different people in their address book.