They want us to play with their ding-a-lings

Just like that band who used to sell more of their T-shirts than they did of their albums, there is now a song that has sold more ringtones that it has singles. The honour goes to The Sugababes with their dire Round Round ringtone - sorry, song.

There was a bit of an industry PR flap recently to announce the arrival of the Official Ringtone Charts, which are now published on a fortnightly basis. The first-ever published chart revealed that Frankee was at number one, with Eamon at number two. That's great - but it is the exact same song.

No matter: the industry is firmly behind the chart, mainly because it's one of the few areas left that remains untouched by pirates. The other bonus is that ringtones are, in most cases, more expensive than the actual single, and already, in some European countries, ringtone sales are outstripping singles sales.

It's taken a long, long time for the industry and the mobile phone companies to get their act together on this. The phone companies always loved ringtones - all they had to do was to produce a horrible tinny noise that sounded like a drunk four-year-old playing an out-of-tune Casio keyboard. The original mono ringtones were so bad that a lot of groups had it written into their contract that their music could never be licensed out to mobile phone companies, citing "artistic integrity" and other such tosh.

Now that the technology allows polyphonic (two drunk children playing a Casio keyboard) and, more significantly, something called true tone - effectively a 30-second soundbite of the original recording - a lot of bands have dropped their objections. Which is nothing to do with the serious amounts of money sluicing around the ringtone market.

It's quite stunning that these migraine-inducing series of high-pitched notes are now being marketed as social identifiers - that the sound your phone makes is somehow an indication of your character. This is the musical equivalent of the coffee-table book.

The best thing about this new chart, though, is that it will never be played.

Can you imagine a DJ counting down the top 10 by playing these on his/her radio show? And if this chart is as official as they say it is, why don't the record companies award gold, silver and platinum discs as they do with the other chart.

The only reason the chart is there is to increase turnover. Without generalising too much, the majority of people who change their ringtones on a regular basis are the type of people who are actually influenced by what is hot or cold on any given chart. You really don't want to be heard with a ringtone that is so last month.

Now that a type of critical mass has been reached in the sales figures, there is already dark talk that bands at the poppier end of the spectrum are being pushed into releasing songs which are ringtone-friendly. It's an Orwellian dystopia.

There could be a very interesting vertical shift here. The traditional pattern is that songs pick up radio play, then make their way onto phones.

There is bound to be someone out there who is determined to reverse the process by composing a series of notes so ringtone-

friendly that a real band will have to make a real three-minute song based on it, so it can move backwards onto the radio.

This is the post-modern simulacrum gone mad. But then, if you take a long, hard look at it, everything new the music industry has laid out on its stall in the last few decades has been parasitically confined to reproduction. The CD, the DVD and now the ringtone: it's the same content being sold in a different package.

An already-experienced reality - at a new price.