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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Biddle who wrote (30953)	1/9/2003 6:14:29 PM
From: John Biddle	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 197703

Ring Master Chris Dunn is living his dream as a musician -- through cellphones. By David Stevenson, Tech Live techtv.com San Francisco musician Chris Dunn has sold his soul, but not to rock 'n' roll. Instead, he's creating a new kind of music for the masses. If you've heard the distinctive ring of a cellphone lately, you might have noticed many rings sound like songs on the radio. Ever wonder where they come from? From people such as Chris Dunn. Meet him and see how he does it, tonight on "Tech Live." Dunn's day job is as the audio production manager for Modtones, a San Francisco-based maker and marketer of ringtones. "You don't make much money in a band these days unless you break to a certain, huge level," Dunn says. Instead, the 30-year-old guitarist for the band Red Planet spends most of his day holed up in his home studio with Britney Spears, Aerosmith, Ludacris, and Heart. Music man "I pretty much make music all day for cellphones," Dunn says. "I get a song list and a bunch of CDs, and I start going through it and I translate the songs into music for cellphones." By using software that converts CD sound into MIDI files, it can take Dunn up to three hours to create a 30-second version of a song. "Most people listen to their phone for maybe five, 10 seconds ringing," he says. "So what we do is, we try to pick the part of the song that's most memorable." Big business Selling these sounds is a billion-dollar business in Japan and Europe and is finally catching on in the United States. Gartner analyst Michael King estimates that downloadable ringtones will generate $100 million this year for wireless carriers, second only to revenues generated by wireless messaging. It's all because of the new high tech handsets that are making their way overseas, says Modtones Executive Vice President Carolynne Schloeder. "US-based wireless carriers are now starting to ship handsets that they've had in Japan for several years," Schloeder says. "It's a software-based sound solution that enables synthesized music on the phone." Modtones pays music publishers a licensing fee based on the number of downloads tallied each month. But the company initially had a bit of a struggle convincing the notoriously litigious record industry to cooperate. Everyone's tone-happy However, Schloeder says the industry is getting with the program. "We're finding that the artists are getting excited," she says. "The labels are getting excited about using ringtones as a way to promote new music." That goes for old music, too. Movie and TV show themes -- think themes from "Bewitched" or "Peter Gunn" -- sell almost as well as hip-hop. And though Dunn must sometimes put up with genres of music he dislikes, he says it's a thrill hearing his work ring out wherever he goes. He says, "You'll hear someone's phone ring and... I'll just go, 'Oh, dude, I did that!'" Posted January 9, 2003