The Ringtones Racket By JOHN GRUBER Thursday, 13 September 2007
Steve Jobs, introducing iTunes 7.4 during last week's Apple special event: "We're going to ship a new version of iTunes tonight, to support some of the new products you're going to hear about shortly. And the biggest new feature is going to be ringtones. Well, we're going to do ringtones in our own special way."
Apple's own special way of doing ringtones is this: You can only use songs purchased from the iTunes Store; you must pay an additional 99 cents on top of the price of the song itself; only a small subset of the songs at the iTunes Store are eligible; and, if you decide to create a second ringtone using a different segment of the same song which you've already paid for twice, you must pay for it again. But you do get to pick which segment of the song to use.
This "special way" seems fair only when compared to the ringtones offered by competitors, which, as Jobs pointed out in his keynote, typically sell for $2.50, which price includes only the ringtone snippet, not the entire original song itself.
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