Pop's Ring-Tone Kings

In August, upstart Atlanta hip-hop crew D4L (Down 4 Life) went into a studio for thirty minutes and came out with "Laffy Taffy," an infectious bare-bones confection in the city's emergent minimalist "snap" style. Within days, Asylum Records signed the group and looked to break the song. But rather than release it as a single or push it at radio, the label took a fresh approach: It put the song out as a ring tone.

By September, "Laffy Taffy" was the Number One download at top services like Ringtone Jukebox and Jamster -- and has continued to sell, moving 500,000 copies at around $2.50 a pop. Radio programmers picked up on the song, and it steadily climbed the singles chart -- it has reached Number Thirteen and is rising. By the time D4L's debut album, Down for Life, hit stores November 8th, the group had a hit single and had been transformed from Atlanta underground favorites to pop stars with videos on MTV and appearances on BET's 106 and Park.

Hip-hop has led the way in capitalizing on ring tones, but rock, pop and reggaeton artists are starting to embrace the format. Madonna debuted her new single, "Hung Up" -- which includes the appropriate lines "I'm hung up on you/Waiting for your call" -- as a ring tone on mtv.com and vh1.com to build steam for the November 15th release of Confessions on a Dance Floor.

"Ring tones are the new singles," says Todd Moscowitz, president of Asylum, the year-old Warner Bros. imprint that used ring-tone marketing to introduce Houston rap stars Mike Jones, Paul Wall and Bun B to broader audiences. "We start all of our projects with ring tones. We did it with this D4L record, and that's why it got so far along."

"The ring tone has done its job," adds D4L's Mook-B. "It's unbelievable how fast this thing has grown."

Earning a staggering $5 billion per year, ring tones are the music industry's rare growth business and are a natural marketing tool for reaching young fans. "Ring tones spread the word on what songs are out there, what people are listening to," says Ted Suh, chief marketing officer of 9 Squared, the company behind Ringtone Jukebox. "In March, Mike Jones came out of nowhere and had a huge presence in the mobile space. We saw the same thing with D4L: They came out of nowhere. They were immediately downloading so many sales that it drove their titles to the top. In each case, the viral connection got out there, and people were like 'What is that?'"

It helps that the snap style -- spare beats, often with natural sounds like whistles and finger snaps -- seems perfectly designed for the short ring-tone format and mobile phones' inferior speakers. "We wanted to create something real simple," says Mook-B, "like going back to the days with your mama's pots and pans and paint buckets."

"It works great as a ring tone," Moscowitz says of the snap aesthetic. Not surprisingly, ring-tone consumers swarm to the sound: Three of the top five "realtones" on Ringtone Jukebox.com (some outlets use "realtones" to describe ring tones based on studio music) fit the mold.

"Ring tones are affecting the way music is made," says Suh. "If you look at the history of music, the format determines what kind of music there is. Songs became three minutes long to fit on a single LP. You're seeing the same stuff on the mobile stage."