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It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with ring (telephone), ringing signal, ring tone and ringtone maker (Discuss)

This article is about music on mobile devices, for the musical form see aleatoric music.

Mobile music is music, which is downloaded to mobile phones and played by mobile phones. Although many phones play music as ringtones, true "music phones" generally allow users to import audio files from their PCs or download them wirelessly from a content provider (the latter is usually for a fee). In most cases mobile music is stored within the memory of the mobile phone, although many newer models feature removable storage.

Polyphonic ring tones are music which does not contain artists voices or instrumental performances. Usually ringtones are encoded using the MIDI or similar encoding formats, many of which have been developed for mechanical pianos, karaoke and other mechanical music delivery.

The mobile music market initially started with monophonic ring tones. With increasing market and technology development the number of voices was steadily increased.

By 2005, ring tones generating more than $2 billion in annual worldwide revenues.^[1] Real tones, which are often excerpts from pop songs, have become popular as ringtones. A recent innovation is the singtone, whereby the user’s voice is recorded to a popular track and then “tuned-up” automatically to sound good. This can then be downloaded as a ringtone or sent to another user’s mobile phone.

While ringtones do not include artists voices, truetones, chaku-uta and chaku-uta full are recordings of artists interpretation of music. Distributing them usually requires the agreement of record labels and other owners of artists rights.

1. ^ Mehta, Stephanie N. (December 12, 2005) Fortune Wagner's ring? Way too long. Musicians composing original works for cellphones strive for greatness in 20 seconds or less. Volume 152; Section: FirstNo. 12; Page 40.