Bling Rings

While our democracy was hurtling toward the apocalypse (unless you are a Democrat) I was playing around with ringtones for my new cell phone. My business switched to Verizon - and thus the new phone. One of my first discoveries was that the standard ringtone options were a joke (I actually have been in mourning for years over the loss of the ascending Nokia default tone but that is another story). To say my default options were meager and wanting is an understatement. They were "cynically meager and wanting" is more like it. This is the dark side of Customer Relationship Management... give your customer so crappy of a default option that they are compelled to make an additional purchase.

Obviously Verizon wants me to buy some Bling Rings as they are taking a piece of that action. Well Verizon, and evil Dogbert marketing so and so's, I have an answer for you. If you can't beat em, join em! I found a very cool service at http://www.myxer.com/ that allows you to create your own Bling Rings, or download freebies from other Ringmeister Rachmaninoffs. They also have some rings for purchase - usually at much better prices than the $3.00 for 30 seconds you pay for major artist tunes (and why does it cost more for a 30 second ring-tone sample of a song then if I downloaded the whole mp3??). You can even create AND sell your own tones. The best thing for me was that the service is compatible with Verizon, although it appears that the developer's of this service had some special hoops to jump thru to make it work.

There may be better services than www.Myxer.com, and if anyone knows of better services please comment. I did play around with another service at www.musicane.com but it is more artist than consumer oriented and buying ringtones requires a credit card. Myxer allows PayPal and the whole purchase experience just seems more user-friendly to me.

Now if I can just figure out how to sample that old Nokia ringtone and put it on my new cell. Take that Verizon, Samsung, and all you evil marketing geniuses out there.