Money-to-burn Gen Y’s waste it on “Caller Tones”

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 30 September 2008 10:52

Opinion and Analysis

With the global economic crises reaching fever pitch, will Gen Y’s desire to frivolously waste money on things like “Caller Tones” give way to the post “Great Depression” learnings of savings and thrift? Or will the need to look, and in this case, sound cool, trump economic reality, with Gen Y’s often still living at home and couched from stock market shenanigans?

Caller Tones, which play music along with a traditional “ring ring” tone when you call someone, are something that have been around since 3 Mobile first launched them a few years ago, are certainly a statement of individuality.

Well, unless everyone has the same “caller tone” as you... with the top chart from Telstra below revealing that lots of people must have the same tones, being nice and individual in, well... groups.

The appeal of Caller Tones is simple: why bore your callers with ye olde ‘ring ring’, when you can instead have the latest tune, or at least the chorus thereof, entertaining your callers instead.

A few people I call relatively regularly have applied the Caller Tones to their phones, and I have to say, despite my cheekily sarcastic... ahem... “tone” throughout this article, they do sound pretty cool, and I do enjoy hearing them.

Of course, just as with ringtones, the service is an opportunity for telcos to extract more money from their users, and in a free world, there’s nothing wrong with that. If you want it, you can have it, if you have the money.

And the price isn’t obscene if you only get one tone a month, unlike the US $700 billion bailout: Telstra’s “BigPond Caller Tones” are on an effective pricing par with ringtones, although there is one major difference: there’s a fee to continue using the tones on a monthly basis, something ringtones don’t subject you to.

That monthly fee is AUD $1.95, while caller tones cost $3.50 each. If you got one new caller tone a month and paid the monthly fee, that would be $5.45 per month or $65.40 per year.

Change your tones more regularly, and the price of being Gen Y cool does go up, however. Get two tones a month, at $8.95 per month, or $107.40 per year.

Deciding you want to be the hippest Gen Y lad or ladette on the block and getting a new tone every week would set you back $3.50 per week for 52 weeks at $182, and the monthly fee of $1.95 over 12 months would cost $13.95, for a total of $195.95.

Just under $200 per year, or $16.32 per month, or 54c per day – no wonder Gen Y’s with far fewer money worries than the general population think it’s a small price to pay for aural caller ecstasy, or if you’re not part of the Gen Y set (or the parent paying for all this musical frippery), a potential case of aural caller excruciation. 

So, just how popular are Caller Tones with Gen Y-ers, according to BigPond, and which tracks being piped through to callers ears in, er... glorious telephone quality, are most popular this week... while nevertheless being marred with an old skool “ring ring” through them?

The results could well surprise and amaze you... Please read on to page 2.