Cingular Teams with MySpace

Cingular Wireless is extending the ringtone market to emerging artists by teaming up with lifestyle portal MySpace. The companies, with the help of InfoSpace, plan to offer unsigned artists on MySpace a chance to turn their original music into ringtones.

The Cingular Mobile Music Studio will enable bands featured on the social network community to create and market personalized wireless content. Specifically, once licensing paperwork is out of the way, artists will be able to upload a short track of an original song and InfoSpace will then convert the audio file into a ringtone.

Australian garage band Shifter will be the first band to generate a ringtone, according to Cingular.

“The Mobile Music Studio offers incredible exposure for these emerging artists, who already have a MySpace following,” says David Garver, Cingular’s executive director, marketing, “by making it possible to have their original music turned into a ringtone and potentially have it played on the wireless handsets.”

Music ringtones are expected to generate $600 million in sales in the U.S. this year, up from $500 million in 2005, according to research from BMI, an American performing rights organization.

“We believe that the market will grow by 20 percent for the ringtone sector alone in ’06,” BMI Vice President of Business Development Richard Conlon said in a prepared statement. BMI began tracking ringtone sales in 2001.

Tags: Cingular, Entertainment, MySpace

This entry was posted on April 09th, 2006 and is filed under Brands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.