From Endorsements to Equity
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Sometime in the mid-2000s, when the mobile phone was still a novelty that rang rather than a screen that glowed, the singer Akon noticed that his music had escaped its usual channels.
It was no longer confined to radio stations and nightclubs. It came out of strangers' pockets in airports and hotel lobbies, a few seconds at a time, as ringtones that sold for $4.99 apiece. Most performers would have taken this as flattery. Akon took it as a question about property rights. He went back to his recording contract and looked for the word "ringtone." It was not there.
The contract governed the music; it said nothing about the new plumbing through which the music now travelled. Having found the gap, he proceeded to build his career inside it. Every record he made thereafter was engineered to survive compression and announce itself through a cheap speaker in the first few seconds.
"I didn't care about the singles," he said later. "Every record I produced, I made sure it was ringtone…
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