The Line is Busy: Country Music Dials into Ringtones

There are basically two types of ringtones: "polyphonic," which are synthesizer-like reproductions of a melody, and the much more popular "mastertone" or "realtone" format, which is excerpted from an actual recording. By Nielsen's count, mastertone buys accounted for 91 percent of ringtones sold last year in the United States.

In both formats, a ringtone of a song still under copyright has to be licensed from a music publisher. If it's a mastertone, licensing also has to be arranged from the record label that owns the master recording. Royalties must also be paid for ringbacks, the sound snippets that replace the ring a caller would normally hear after dialing someone's number.

In June 2006, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which awards Gold, Platinum and Diamond certifications for sales of singles and albums, announced that it would begin doing the same for mastertone ringtones, with Gold sales of ringtones achieved at 500,000 downloads, Platinum at 1 million and multi-Platinum starting at 2 million and earning new certifications with every subsequent increment of 1 million downloads.

Sales of ringtones based on Country songs lag somewhat behind those in other formats, with no Country songs included among the Top 10 mastertones of 2007 and only Rascal Flatts' "What Hurts the Most" carrying the flag within the polyphonic Top 10. Still, Country Music did start hitting impressive sales numbers last year. While nothing quite matched hip-hop artist T-Pain's "Buy U A Drank," whose 2,309,000 sales made it the highest-charting mastertone, the bestselling Country titles, all in mastertone configuration, were Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats" (915,000 downloads) and "Jesus, Take the Wheel" (291,000), Brad Paisley's "She's Everything" (395,000) and "Ticks" (230,000), Trace Adkins' "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk" (301,000), Brooks & Dunn's "Hillbilly Deluxe" (267,000), Lonestar's "Amazed" (234,000), the Dixie Chicks' "Not Ready to Make Nice" (223,000), Rascal Flatts' "Life is a Highway" (208,000) and Taylor Swift's "Teardrops on My Guitar" (194,000), as tallied by Nielsen RingScan.

The lesson suggested by these figures wasn't lost on Rascal Flatts, who began selling excerpts from two of their hits, "Bless the Broken Road" and "Take Me There," and Faith Hill, who is selling ringtone segments from more than 20 of her best-known songs, directly through their Web sites.

"Any song that's on an album, we're open to making available for a ringtone, assuming we can get the appropriate clearances that go along with it," explained Heather McBee, VP, Digital Business, Sony BMG Nashville. The decision to offer ringtone versions of a song, she continued, "is based on a larger marketing plan for an album. Is a song being released to radio? Is a song being worked somewhere else - a television show or commercial?"

As songs generate interest, McBee summed up, she initiates the process to make them ringtone-ready.

Todd Ellis, Licensing Manager for Sony/ATV Music Publishing, added that "just about everything" in his firm's mammoth catalog is open for use as ringtones. Though a few major pop writers - "maybe three or four" - have withheld their work because of objections to ringtone sound quality, all of Sony/ATV's Country songs are available.

From the industry point of view, Ellis said, a ringtone embodies both a performance and a mechanical right, and royalties are collected for both. (The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled early in 2008 that no public performance right is involved in downloading, but the stature and impact of this ruling is still to be determined.)

All major cell phone services offer ringtones, as do other commercial concerns. For a study that it published last year, BMI collected data from more than 325 ringtone providers. There are programs as well that enable home computers to adapt songs to ringtones, though these devices bypass the licensing process. When it comes to dividing up the royalties that derive from legitimate ringtone sales, the record company gets around 50 percent of the retail price, if a mastertone is involved. The music publisher's cut is from 10 to 12 percent, which in turn is split half-and-half with the songwriter or songwriters.

"Ringtone royalties are minuscule in the overall scheme of things," Ellis said. "Compared to CD sales, they're still rather small. But they are gaining some significant income, especially in the pop and R&B worlds. Country has been a little bit slow to catch up. The really large [Country] hits will do well, ringtone-wise, for income, but the big money is still with R&B and rap songs. Ballads don't usually do as well as ringtones because they don't sound as good as upbeat songs that have a real catchy chorus or a cool intro."