Many people just stick to the old (and beloved)… You probably know many people that rarely change their ringback tone. This can be very annoying especially if they are friends that you call very often. But it can be also annoying for the mobile operators :) and that is, apart from being users who don’t download and pay for new content… The consequence of sticking to the old ringback tones (for the operator) is having a long tail of old content that each item has so very few subscribers. Obviously operators want to keep their ringback tone catalogue (and ringtones catalogue) fresh, under constant updates and have many subscribers for each item.
One of the ways to improve the described situation is exclusivity. Music labels give mobile operators exclusivity for new singles for a limited time. Users are attracted to the exclusive and hot ringback tones and happily leave behind the old (and unpopular) ringback tone. Thus they enable the operator to take the old songs from the system and make room for new content. Later on, after the exlusive ringback tone will expire, the most probable (and desirable) is that the users will get a new ringback tone and so on.
Implementing this strategy, American operator Sprint received the exclusivity for the first single "World Wide Suicide“of PEARL JAM's self-titled album to be offered both as a ringtone (Call Tone) and as a ringback tone. Sprint also offered their users a contest for live show and handsets that include PEARL JAM's special fans content. Also Orange France has used this marketing strategy and offered Johnny Hallyday's new Funtone "La loi du silence" exclusively to its users. For a snip check this video.
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