The Return Of The CD Single... This Time With Ringtones

from the uh,-good-luck-with-that-plan dept

The music industry has quite an amazing track record lately in misreading what the market is telling them. Their latest move is to reintroduce the mini-CD single -- a format that failed to capture much interest the first go around. The industry seems to think that now that people are getting used to buying single tracks at music download stores, they want single (or up to three) track CDs. Pricing isn't disclosed, but it's unlikely to be of interest to most people assuming it's over the $3 or so it would cost most users to just download those songs from a download store. The other part of the deal, though, is that each CD will contain codes to let users download matching ringtones, jumping on what the industry incorrectly believes will be the next big thing, when anyone could just take the tracks on that CD (or any other CD) and create a ringtone using Xingtone. Realistically, this is just the first (of many, most likely) attempts by the industry to try to tie ringtones more closely to CD sales, ignoring that what happened for music on PCs is just as likely to happen on phones as well.