Ringtones

I was reminded of an obsolete form of ephemera last week when I opened up a second-hand CD I’d ordered via Discogs – a copy of Erykah Badu’s awkwardly-titled 2007 album New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War). Inside it was a slip of paper advertising mobile phone ringtones based on some of the album’s tracks, and, on the reverse of the slip (shown above), others based on songs from Badu’s back-catalogue. The kinds of music I was buying ca. 2007 didn’t often overlap with the market for ringtones, but I’d certainly seen (and immediately discarded) a few such slips by then.

2007 of course was the beginning of the smartphone era. CD sales had already been declining for a few years, illegal file-sharing was rife, and the advent of streaming services was on the horizon. Meanwhile, the vinyl revival was in its early stages: by 2017, instead of ringtone slips falling out of one’s new CDs, download code slips were falling out of one’s new LPs.