About Ringback

Ringback is a history publication about the mobile-music era — roughly 2002 to 2012, with 2004–2010 as its center of gravity. Its beat is the industry that existed when the phone and the music player were still two different objects fighting over one pocket: the ringtone boom, the carrier download stores, the DRM wars, Japan's five-year head start, the iTunes phone that flopped, and the iPhone that ended the argument.

This domain has a history of its own

From March 2005 to February 2006, mobilemusicblog.com was The Mobile Music Blog, a one-writer industry weblog by Carlo Longino covering the collision of music and mobile phones — including the April 1, 2005 “iTunes phone” prank this site's first article documents. The blog closed in February 2006. The domain then spent nearly twenty years passing through parking services and unrelated storefronts, and was re-registered in 2026 by the publisher of Ringback. Ringback publishes new historical writing about the industry the original blog covered as daily news, and cites the Internet Archive's captures of that era as primary sources.

Method

Every article is written from period records: archived news pages and press releases, regulator rulings, securities filings, industry-body statistics, chart databases, and the Internet Archive's captures of the sites where this industry happened. Quotes are attributed to the outlet that obtained them. Each article closes with a Balance block stating what is still true, what is gone, what has since been proven wrong, and what the record does not establish — and with a numbered, access-dated source list.

Every factual claim on this site can name its source. Where the record is fragmentary — and for an industry that deleted itself, it often is — the article says so in the paragraph where it matters, rather than papering over the gap.

Corrections

The record deserves better than our first draft. If an article misstates a date, a price, a person, or a fact of any size, the contact form reaches the publisher, and corrections are made in the text with the change noted in the article's source block.