No one told Jamster that the future happened.Star Wars is an epic space saga created by George Lucas in the 1970s. The future decided that ringtones weren't necessary. We're permanently affixed to our devices, forever attached to emails and dating apps. We're in the future now and the future is a depressing place. Back then our phones weren't quite so smart, and they felt fun and freeing and like the future. Back then it was charming, it was the vanguard, it was an explosion of mobile possibility.
They're still hawking the same old wallpaper bundles they were always swizzing us with. Which meant a lot of things, but in the context of this article, it predominantly meant leaving music behind.īut what of Jamster now? Where did their revolution take them? Well, sadly, Jamster never moved on. And leaving the house meant leaving your virtual life behind. Sometimes, though, you had to leave the house. That was a system that worked well when you were sat on your arse all night. Napster had been ruining careers for a few years now, and Kazaa had been swapped for Limewire, and evenings went by in a blur of incredibly slowly transferred, poorly tagged MP3s pinging from one MSN account to another.
YODA VOICE RINGTONES BLUETOOTH
What did bluetooth mean for music? That's simple: freedom.īy the time Jamster had firmly embedded themselves in the collective consciousness-and given that they were spending €90 million on advertising on German television by 2004, it's pretty fair to say that Jamster were a massive deal-most of us had got used to swapping music online. This, presumably, hadn't been why the Swedish boffins created the synchronization tool, but one of the joys of any new technology emerging from the wilderness is seeing how users test boundaries, and push limits. I still have fond memories of a (still shocking) video featuring a very bald man, and a very accommodating vagina doing the rounds. Provided you were sat close enough-the usual data-reach was around 10m-you could ping songs and videos to one another to your heart's delight. Invented by Ericsson employees in 1994, bluetooth was the easiest way to transfer files to people on the bus home from school. More importantly than that, the Jamster age was also the heyday of a technology that seems to have vanished, and one that no one's mourning now, but felt like a big deal then-bluetooth. Your ringtone-whether it was a self-composed marimba-heavy proto-moombahton banger, or a snippet of a Gary Barlow interview from This Morning, or "Point of View" by DB Boulevard-was a digital calling card.
Think about it: ringtones, as abstract and quaint as they may seem now, were a way of branding one's self before we earnestly started talking about our personal brands. Busses from Aberdeen to Anglesey became cacophonous cabins that tore through the provinces powered by petrol and "Put Your Hands Up for Detroit." Essentially what we were living through was one nation under a (polyphonic) groove. The nation's McDonalds' were a hormonally charged dens of iniquity that stunk of chip fat and thrummed to the sound of an 8bit rendition of "Thunder in My Heart" by Leo Sayer. In classrooms up and down the country, teachers fought to be heard over bleepy-renditions of "Is This the Way to Amarillo," Oasis' "The Importance of Being Idle," and "It's Now or Never" by Elvis Presley. We still left picture comments, Cameron still wanted us to hug a hoodie rather than price him out of his house before throwing him into a beyond-fucked socio-economic climate, and teenagers still downloaded ringtones.
So we keep our phones on silent and miss calls from our mum and PPI payment centres. Most of us sleepwalk through life in the kind of anxious state that means a phone call is about as welcome as a rounders bat to the face. Weeks, months, years ago? The ringtone, as it was, is dead. I'm talking about a polyphonic approximation of a pop hit, pinging it's way out of a battered and bruised handset on the back of a bus. Not just the standard purr of an iPhone or the puzzled bleat of one of the other devices available on the market. When was the last time you heard a ringtone? A proper ringtone, I mean.
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