Not that this is news to regular readers here..we have been tracking the decline of aggregators and interest in the ringtone market for most of this year. NYT reports on some numbers from third party trackers, and says that former ringtone kings, like Jamba of Germany and Musiwave of France, are refocusing their businesses on other phones apps. What happened? Multimedia phones which allows users to make their own tones, and also, record labels promoting the master ringtones.

According to M:Metrics, in Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Italy, the percentage of subscribers buying a ringtone have fallen consistently over the last 12 months, to a low of 3.4 percent per month in Britain in October. In the U.S, it was 9.3 percent, higher than the 9 percent of last October but below its January 2007 peak of 10 percent. According to Jupiter, ringtone’s of the overall mobile content market in Europe was at about 29 percent this year, down from 33 percent last year.