Is your ring tone in the Top Ten or are you constantly embarassed when your phone chimes with an out of date tune?You can check it out with Billboard, who will start publishing a chart of the best selling ring tones.
By
AP

5 Apr 2006 - 12:00 AM  UPDATED 24 Feb 2015 - 1:02 PM

Is your ring tone in the Top Ten or are you constantly embarassed when your phone chimes with an out of date tune?

You can check it out with Billboard, who will start publishing a chart of the best selling ring tones. The chart will be called Hot Master Tones.

The popularity listing will be based on data compiled by Nielsen Mobile and will represent the top 20 best-selling master ring tones for the week.

Included in the chart will be the song title, artist, previous week's ranking and number of weeks on the chart.

Billboard began publishing a chart for monophonic and polyphonic ring tones -- song samples based on synthesised versions of recordings -- in 2004.

But since then, master ring tones have become an increasingly important slice of recording industry sales, particularly in the United States.

That's good news for recording companies and artists who perform on an original track, because they reap royalties from master ring tones along with songwriters and publishers.

Recording companies and performers don't get a cut of the synthesised ring tones.

The US ring tone market is expected to reap A$840.75 million in sales this year, up from A$700.62 million last year.

Billboard estimates global ring tone sales totalled A$6.17 billion in 2005, up from A$5.18 billion the previous year with much of that growth was due to sales of master ring tones.