29

Aug

Apple: Hey, It’s Not Our Fault You Can’t Make Ringtones. Blame the Labels.

Filed Under (gadgetry) by arthurfreydin on 29-08-2008

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Was activating my new iPhone (more on this later) in iTunes and saw this gem before syncing my music:

Clearly Apple doesn’t want its users blaming them for not being able to make ringtones out of their purchased songs from the iTunes Store.

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11 Responses to “Apple: Hey, It’s Not Our Fault You Can’t Make Ringtones. Blame the Labels.”

  1. Sam on 29 Aug 2008 at 3:28 pm #

    It’s pretty ridiculous that Apple doesn’t let you use songs you’ve ripped from CDs, or any old MIDI file as your ringtone. You have to pay 0.99 for the song, then ANOTHER 0.99 for a 30-second snippet of that song. That’s pretty ridiculous.

    I’m a huge iPhone fan, but that one gets my goat…

  2. arthurfreydin on 29 Aug 2008 at 3:36 pm #

    Well, as they point out above, it’s not really Apple that is bootstrapping those songs. It’s the record companies that nail you to the wall and dangle their goods in front of you.

  3. Synthmeister on 29 Aug 2008 at 5:20 pm #

    Actually, you can make a ringtone from any non-DRM song or midi file in GarageBand. It’s simple. There is actually a ringtone command. Then you drop the file back into iTunes and voila, it syncs right back into your iPhone.

    Try that with Verizon. Oh, I forgot, Verizon doesn’t let you make ringtones or sync anything unless you use their $15 per month V-Cast, which, by the way doesn’t work on Mac.

    You can also strip the DRM from any iTunes song by importing it into iMovie. Then exporting it back out, at which point you can suck it into Garagband and do the ringtone command.

  4. arthurfreydin on 29 Aug 2008 at 5:22 pm #

    Thanks for that.

    How bout us Windows XP users?

  5. bjack on 29 Aug 2008 at 5:25 pm #

    I heard somewhere that the artist doesn’t even get a share of the ringtone revenue. Something about not counting ringtones as a separate mechanical royalty.

  6. arthurfreydin on 29 Aug 2008 at 5:27 pm #

    bjack,
    I’m pretty sure I heard the same somewhere too.

    I just keep pounding in my head that Apple is not the culprit here. Soooo much easier to hate the RIAA.

  7. Peter on 29 Aug 2008 at 5:31 pm #

    Absolute rubbish.

    First, ringtones are a perfect example of fair-use rights. I bought the song–if I choose to use it as a ringtone or as an alarm or whatever, that’s my business.

    So Apple could easily offer to make ringtones from any song that you have, carte blanche.

    However, the music industry loves ringtones. They went to court and won a case against artists who wanted to be compensated for using their music as ringtones. So they pay little to no compensation to the artist and keep the money. So on the one hand, they argue that there isn’t enough “music” in the ringtone to pay royalties to artist and then they turn around claim that using a ringtone on your phone requires that you pay the owner of the song.

    Again, the music industry is desperately trying to put the concept into people’s heads that they have to get permission from the industry to do anything with the music they bought.

    So why doesn’t Apple come to our rescue? Because, frankly, Apple needs the labels. So Apple goes along with it. Apple tries to convince us it’s giving us a deal, “Look! Most ringtones cost $3.50 a year to use! We’re giving you a hell of a deal! Only a one-time fee of $1.98!”

    Yeah, right.

    That said, it’s pretty easy to Make Ringtones from songs you already own.

  8. arthurfreydin on 29 Aug 2008 at 5:38 pm #

    Even in the early days of the iPhone (1st gen), Apple has never been known to clamp down on subverting their charge to the users to “create” ringtones. If you remember, ever since they publicly announced the functionality, there were still dead-simple ways to get around actually paying for the ringtones.

    Also, remember how lax Apple was in correcting that flaw. Sure they sent out a few updates to fix that issue but it still left plenty of doors open.

    Even now, there is still one openly documented back door – Garageband. Surely Apple browses the web every now and then, so they had to have noticed this. Why hasn’t Apple closed that door?

  9. Synthmeister on 29 Aug 2008 at 6:38 pm #

    I don’t know squat about Windows. Doesn’t Windows media player or Movie Maker or WinAmp allow you to do those kind of things?

  10. Synthmeister on 29 Aug 2008 at 6:41 pm #

    GarageBand isn’t even a back door.

    The “Send Ringtone to iTunes” command is built into the program by Apple!

  11. Paul on 31 Aug 2008 at 3:45 am #

    If the artist doesn’t get a cut for ringtones, its their own fault. They shouldn’t have entered into an agreement that gave away the rights to their creation to others. But they can’t market, or won’t or don’t want to and then complain they get shafted by the music companies.

    I don’t like the music companies one bit, but you don’t have to sell your music to them. If you do and give away your rights its your fault and not the public at large that buys the music.

    So lets not make excuses for these bums (the artists) who basically want others to do the marketing and sales for them and yet have all the benefits.

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