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.

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

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?

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.

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

How bout us Windows XP users?

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.