Ringtones have been around for a few years now and likely hit their climax last year, but for the foreseeable future it appears ringtones won’t die. The funny thing about the ringtone industry, aside from hip hop ringtones being the biggest sellers, is that ringtones are damn expensive, but prices have come down.

When ringtones first came out they were $3.99 per ringtone. Now companies are selling ringtones in packages like the biggest ringtone company, you know the one that advertises on BET, sells 6 ringtones for $10 bucks a month. So at the end of the year you’ve spent a whopping $120 bucks on 72 ringtones. This works out to $1.67 a ringtone. Even though it’s good to switch up the ringtone every week, cause I know I get sick of hearing the same ringer after a while, this price is still outrageous.

Think about it? Itunes sells a whole song in mp3 format for $.99 cents, a ringtone which is the same song in mp3 format but only 2 to 4 bars of that song, likely the hook, and your paying 66% more for it, it doesn’t make sense. What are you really paying for?

These ringtone providers would like you to believe that ringtones are some technological wonder that they have to use “special technology” to send to your phone and thus justifies the increase in costs. This is analogous to your cell phone provider making you pay a $5 access fee every month. It’s not going to cost you almost 70% more to send a ringtone to a cell phone, as its using the same “special technology” that allows you to receive text messages -which also should be free to receive too, which mine are. So then what should be the “fair” price of a ringtone?

If the average rap song has four bar intro, two -sixteen bar verses, three eight bar hooks and one four bar bridge (think 50 Cent song structure here), this ads up to 64 bars in one song. A four bar ringtone, which would be a mad long ringtone anyway, only makes up 6.25% of the song. If we use the Itunes price of .99 cents [sidebar: which many argue should be lowered to around .70 cents btw], we arrive at a price of about 7 cents a ringtone. Now these companies can’t make any money of 7 cents a ringtone, hence why they have moved to selling monthly subscription packages. But 7 cents a ringtone is a lot cheaper than $120 bucks for 72 ringtones.

Now before I end this rant, some people are going to excuse me for being bias as this site advertises ringtones. Keep in mind, we scrutinize our advertisers to the point where if we wouldn’t use their product/service, we are not going to promote it. The ringtone deal we promote for $1.99 a month for unlimited ringtone downloads is the best deal on the net, and one that I personally use. Think about it? Your paying $24 for the whole year to download unlimited ringtones, depending on how many you download, your costs could actually be a penny per ringtone.

Go here to get the best ringtone deal on the net.