A saleswoman (L) loads a ringtone onto a customer’s phone at Lugyi Min Cell Phone Villa in Latha township, Yangon, on November 15. Of the billions of ringtones downloaded worldwide each year, an increasing number are heading to Myanmar handsets, pleasing youth driving the craze but raising fresh questions about piracy from the beleaguered music industry. Pic: Hein Latt Aung

“HONEY! You have a call,” a sweet voice said softly from a phone at Aroma café in downtown Yangon, alerting its owner that, surprisingly enough, he had an incoming call. A few minutes later 50 Cent was heard telling another diner he was going to “party like it’s your birthday”. He too had someone calling.

Ringones have exploded on the Myanmar handset scene over the past two years and it is difficult to spend long at one of Yangon or Mandalay’s trendy leisure spots or shopping centres without hearing the last beats from home and abroad seeping out of handbags and belt clips.

Tunes by American R&B and rap stars Beyonce, Eminem and 50 Cent are favourites with Yangon youth, while humorous intros, snippets from popular movies and the best of homegrown pop music are also being loaded into cellphones by the dozen – in some cases daily.

“A lot of girls like cute sounding ringtones of kids singing and stuff like that, but guys tend to use their favourite songs or something funny,” said Ma Noe Noe, a 28-year-old magazine editor whose Nokia Prism 7500 plays Phoe Kar’s Ta Nay Kone Htine Pyi Ta Saink Saink Kyi (“Staring you the whole day”) every time her husband calls.

“Two months ago, I was using ringtones of children laughing. Everyone loves kids so the sound of a child laughing is always good,” she said.

“I use something mellow so I don’t get annoyed every time my phone rings, otherwise hearing something constantly would make me angry.”

The use of ringtones – currently an unsupervised market in Myanmar – is however starting to anger the local music industry, who see the rapidly growing trend as yet another front in their exhausting battle against piracy.

Billions of ringtones are downloaded worldwide each year in a highly lucrative market that Myanmar musicians and producers are so far missing out on.

Delivered by the internet or text message, or in Myanmar’s case via scores of mobile phone shops in major cities, ringtones account for 80-95 percent of “phone personalisation” in a global market that will reach US$6.5 billion in 2008, according to London-based market research firm Ovum.

Internationally, this makes ringtones a bigger business than CDs and the local music industry is eager to protect their work and get a piece of this action. In some countries, record labels are demanding as much as 50pc of ringtone sales.

“Using local MP3 songs as ringtones is a big issue, but this will be handled by the Myanmar Music Association,” said U Zaw Htoo Aung of CMP Music Production in Yangon, which last week released a new album featuring Nwé Yin Win, Chaw Su Khin and L. Lunn War among others.

“The association will discuss the matter in a meeting about copyright at the end of this month,” he said, declining to give details about how the industry may go about getting a slice of the ringtone pie while little progress has been made combating pirated CDs.

Ko Zaw Phyo Linn of handset shop Mobile Fun Group, says he has a catalogue of more than 10,000 ringtones customers can choose from at a flat rate of K300 each – the standard price in Yangon – but insists he takes piracy issues seriously.

“We never sell local songs as ringtones because we care about copyright, but some people create their own (using copies of artists’ music at home) and pass ringtones to each other using Bluetooth. And of course, no one thinks there’s any copyright problem,” he said.

Ko Zaw Phyo Linn said Mobile Fun Group sources its ringtones from the internet or through ringtone collections sold for as little as K500 on copied disks at CD shops in downtown Yangon.

Most people though don’t use mobile phone shops to update their ringtones, according to handset retailers.

“Only a few people install ringtones at shops. They usually just swap them mobile-to-mobile or download them from the internet. It is very easy to do yourself,” said U Ko Ko Aung manager of Lugyi Min Cell Phone Villa, which is running an end-of-year promotion to highlight ringtones, screensavers and video clips.

“Everyone can get free services from Monday to Friday between 10am and 1pm,” he said of the company’s branch in Latha township, Yangon. “This free service is only available from November 1 to December 31.”

For most Myanmar users, ringtones are a perfect way to personalise phones that are becoming an extension of one’s fashion sense and identity. Having multiple ringtones assigned to different callers in a handset’s phone number list also lets users know who’s calling by the tune being played.

“Myanmar language ringtones like A Ko Phone Lar Nay Tae (“Honey! You have a call”) or the famous Thingyan song Myanandar are popular not only with youth but also people of all ages,” said U Ko Ko Aung.

Mobile Fun Group’s Ko Zaw Phyo Linn added: “Sound like water-dropping, glass breaking on the floor, whispering, pop, jazz, hip hop, punk and the Mission Impossible theme music are the latest hot ringtones for those aged 20 to 30.”

Myanmar has been a latecomer to the ringtone market, which emerged out of Finland in 1998 after a 26-year-old IT professional woke up hungover one morning and decided he could no longer stand the jarring beeps emitted by his phone.

Since then ringtones have evolved from monophonic rings that only played one musical tone at a time, to polyphonic ringtones that played several tones simultaneously, to “truetones” – also known as “realtone”, “mastertone”, or “superphonic” ringtones – which have been encoded with a high fidelity format such MP3, AAC, or WMA.

They represent the latest progression of the ringtone and it is this technology that has blossomed in Myanmar.

“MP3 ringtones are the most widely used here because now you can buy MP3 supported handsets at very reasonable prices everywhere,” said Ko Zaw Phyo Linn.

With Myanmar’s cellphone market expanding and handsets offering ever greater memory capacity, there appears only direction ringtones in Myanmar are headed.

“Today, the innovative and catchy beats of ringtones are in the minds and hearts of young mobile phone users,” said U Ko Ko Aung.

The question now is how to capitalise on the technology and turn those catchy tunes into the sweet sound of success.