In May 1996, the first commercial with customizable ringtones was released. The mobile phone is integrated with few preset songs. The ringtones come in MIDI format. On the other hand, the first mobile phone where the user can put in original tones rather than preset songs was released in September 1996. Because of this, the use of customized ringtones became popular to many individuals. It became very popular in Japan where it was first released to the market. Companies in Japan even published a mobile ringtone book in July 1998. This allowed users to integrate popular songs into their mobile phone. The book soled over 3.5 million copies.

On the other hand, the production and distribution of the first downloadable mobile ringtones was in Finland in the autumn of 1998. The users can utilize the product to fabricate monophonic ringtones with a mechanism that allows the users to send the ringtones to other users via SMS. Moreover, in November 1998, the same service in Finland was started in Japan.

Because many people are using mobile phones for communication, the service concept quickly spread in many areas in Europe and Asia. In addition, because the service is widely used by many individuals, it became a multi-billion dollar industry. After the success of the customizable monophonic ringtones, the truetones became popular. The service was first started in December 2002. The truetones usually come in audio format such as MP3, AAC, or WMA. Because most of the tones used are from popular pop songs, truetones became popular to many individuals especially the teens.

Because of the success of the ringtone market, different mobile companies use their own format of ringtone. Other mobile phone supports several types of ringtone format. On the other hand, there are mobile phones that can only support one or few format of ringtones.

Overall, the customizable ringtones became very popular to many mobile phone users. It started in Japan in 1996 wherein the tones are in MIDI format. Because of the popularity of the customizable ringtones, it is also distributed in Finland. Moreover, the use of customizable ringtones became popular in almost every country around the world. The ringtone market has become one of the largest industries.

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