Ringback tones rising

Ringback tones continue to gain traction even as the U.S. ringtone market plateaus, according to new figures from M:Metrics.
The market research firm found that the popularity of ringback tones-music clips that a caller hears instead of a traditional ring before the person being called answers the phone-more than tripled last year, exploding from 2.4 million subscribers in January to nearly 8 million subscribers in November. The application continued to gain ground in Europe, as well, growing at a rate of roughly 150 percent in Germany and the United Kingdom during the year.
Meanwhile, ringtones remain popular, if not as lucrative. Nearly 7 percent of all U.S. wireless subscribers have made their own ringtones, M:Metrics found, as the percentage of users purchasing ringtones slipped from 10 percent of wireless consumers to less than 9 percent.
“The rise in ringbacks indicates that personalization remains an important motivation for mobile content purchases,” said M:Metrics entertainment analyst Jen Wu. “While we see a decrease in ringtone purchases, we do wee an increase in user-created ringtones. Since it’s impossible to hack a ringback tone, this growing market is not threatened by piracy and end-user savvy.”