CTIA: Cingular, MySpace to make original ringtones

LAS VEGAS--Cingular has turned band promoter, or at least it’s providing the first mobile platform that allows bands to promote themselves. Today at a Cingular luncheon at CTIA’s Wireless 2006, Australian band Shifter performed the song “Butter,” the first of what could be thousands of original songs from unknown bands to be made available over the Cingular deck.

Cingular and MySpace today kicked off the Mobile Music Studio, an online portal that will allow any of MySpace’s thousands of bands to submit their original music for conversion into a ringtone, which any user can then download into a Cingular phone for the usual $2.50 fee. Cingular executive director of high-growth segments Dave Garver said that the program could have enormous potential for Cingular even though the MySpace music site would not occupy a slot in the Cingular content deck or the ringtones promoted in its MEdia Mall download center. The power of self-promotion and viral marketing would do all of the work, he said.

“Shifter is way too small for Cingular to bring on as a partner--it’s even way too small for a record label,” Garver said. “But when you aggregate all of those bands, each with their own ringtones, you get a significant number of downloads.”

If each band has 100 friends buying their one ringtone, and thousands of bands participate, the numbers add up quickly, he said. And if a few of the bands start gaining notice and their download numbers start increasing, so much the better, Garver said. Ultimately, Garver said, Cingular would like to see bands like Shifter migrate from the music portal to its mainstream content deck, where they would occupy the same slots as the Billboard chart toppers. Until that happens, though, the mobile music portal gives these unknowns an excellent opportunity to promote and distribute their music, he said.

The program launched today as a Beta trial, following up on several recent music initiatives. Last month, Cingular began distributing ringtones of performances from “American Idol” less than 24 hours after the songs were sung. In the past it has also gotten rights to release ringtones of songs before the individual singles were released in other formats and has sold live ringtones of various artists. All of its music efforts, however, have been confined to ringtones and not to downloadable full-track music, but Garver said Cingular certainly isn’t ruling out the possibility as it looks into expanding its music capabilities. “I’m not saying we won’t in the future,” Garver said. “The fact is today Cingular doesn’t have a full-track download service.”

The MySpace program officially launches as a beta trial today with Shifter as the first band to be actively promoted. As the program gears up in the next six to eight weeks, it will begin accepting submissions from any MySpace band. Submission, however, won’t guarantee acceptance. A panel of experts from MySpace, its content aggregator InfoSpace and an outside consulting agency will review each song and reject those that are not original content. Covers and samples of other music won’t make the cut. But Cingular was hazy about what other criteria that panel might be using to decide whether a song makes the grade and implied there would be other subjective factors informing the decisions. “We don’t have a specific criteria yet,” Garver said. “We’ll take each song on a case-by-case basis and use our judgment on what’s appropriate content.”

But Garver also pointed out there would be little benefit for Cingular to censor or limit the music available over the service. The more content is out there, the more it will encourage people to download it.