Bundling And Marketing Ringbacks Increases Sales
By Dianne See Morrison - Mon 14 Apr 2008 03:40 AM PST
Are ringbacks just not marketed properly? According to a slew of analysts ringbacks are poised to pick up the slack in the declining ringtone market, but they’ve got to be marketed and packaged more aggressively, reports an in-depth feature from Billboard.
According to research firm M:Metrics, the number of mobile subscribers saying they’d purchased a ringback tone rose 69 percent from February 2007 to February 2008. Growth for ringtones increased only 4.3 percent in the same period. Ringbacks also hit another milestone when Alicia Keys’s song “No One” sold over 500,000 copies in ringback form in the US alone. But some labels, including Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG), have reported that ringbacks “remain soft,” and have yet to generate “meaningful revenue.”
RealNetwork’s CEO Rob Glaser touched on this at CTIA, and the article reiterates his position that ringbacks need to be pushed and packaged appropriately to see sales rise. The article cites Verizon (NYSE: VZ) as the only operator to bundle the two together. Verizon—whose ringback service is powered by RealNetwork’s WiderThan application--adds a prompt when user’s buy a ringtone that asks if they’d also like to buy the ringback of the song. With Key’s “No One” selling 2 million ringtones, it’s easy to see how bundling could increase the sale of ringbacks. RealNetworks (NSDQ: RNWK) says carriers that are bundling the two together have seen a 30 percent increase in ringback sales.
Sony (NYSE: SNE) BMG and Warner Music Group have also got their artists to create videos for AT&T (NYSE: T) explaining how ringbacks work and how to buy them, which were then placed on YouTube and AT&T’s mobile web site. After country artist Blake Shelton created an explanatory video, the ringback tone for his song “Don’t Make Me” became the No. 1 seller on AT&T for three straight weeks.
Posted in: Companies, Music Labels, SonyBMG, WMG, Nokia, Operators, Cingular-AT&T, Verizon, Entertainment, Mobile Music
