Mobile phones have become personal items of note over the last decade or so, coming a long way from their former statuses as work or contact necessities and as status symbols for the rich and moneyed. Now mobile phones are blank canvases upon which users paint a unique and personal expression and extension of their personality, with visual and audible markers establishing their individualistic styles within that unique context. Wallpapers and ringtones have all become hot customizable commodities, which users may create by themselves or acquire from various other sources. Each of these provides the user with another means to apply a reflection of themselves onto the mobile unit, which may then be a marker to show the rest of their social circle what kind of person they are and what they’re into.
Mobile content providers have sprung up like mushrooms, providing wallpapers, games, apps, programs, music clips and full songs, and ringtones for the discerning user to acquire and install. Combinations of wallpapers, various settings, and ringtones form themes, which are themselves customizable and thus available for downloading from various sources in various formats, whether ready-made or available in parts that users put together to their liking. With the advent of more and more user friendly phones and more and more easily-navigable interfaces, users can manage and customize the way they access different files and folders on their phones. Mobile phones created with cutting-edge social networking access in mind also allow users to enter and log into social networking websites and services such as Twitter and Facebook from their phones, allowing for even more venues for individualization and sharing of personal style.
Mobile content has thus become a viable commodity all its own, and has formed a symbiosis of sorts with the music industry, which in its ever-shifting form and landscape provides the mobile content industry with plenty of material to fuel its users’ desires for individuality. Users identify with their favorite artists and see their own personalities reflected in the musical styles and lyrics used in their favorite songs, and as such are interested in wallpapers made from artist photos and album covers or inset pages, as well as ringtones and music clips from their favorite singles and album cuts. The music industry, of course, has top tens that change every week with artists making comebacks and debuts and following up hit singles with additional songs from their albums, keeping the trends changing and evolving and making new ringtones a continually available and marketable commodity.
Users may make their own ringtones in a practice called sideloading, which effectively makes the ringtone creation process as cheap as possible but comparatively work-intensive owing to the need to acquire a full song, trim it, and convert it to a format that works on their mobile phone. Generally users can also perform this process online, as some websites provide the same service with some steps automated by virtue of temporary server-side upload space for users to employ apps to trim and convert their song to the desired ringtone format. Finally, users may pay nominal fees to download ready-made ringtones of their favorite singles or sound clips from the many existing ringtone download services.