The $4 billion hangover cure side hustle that's almost worthless

It’s side hustle month to celebrate 150 years of the telephone. This one is about scratching that irresistible itch.

Vesku Paananen, a Finnish software developer, was not a fan of far northern winters. “March in Finland is terrible, very dark and windy and rainy.” (Helsinki saw about 11 hours of daylight today and temperatures of about 40 degrees Fahrenheit—above the seasonal average.)

One Thursday morning in 1997, he woke with a terrible hangover. “My phone rang, and it was the standard Nokia ring.” In 1997, mobile phones rang with a simple melody, played one note at a time. The Nokia ringtone was the most played sound on Earth, so inescapable that wild birds in Denmark sang it. If you don’t remember it, here is an orchestral rendition to jog your memory. Paananen’s phone played a much reduced version—more like this—and it drove him nuts.

“I thought, my God, I want to change that thing.” Specifically, he wanted to swap it for Van Halen’s Jump. Paananen and his friends were doers, builders, so, in a new side hustle born out of something that looks like necessity if you’re Finnish, they created the means to compose and share polyphonic sound files to replace “de-de-de-de de-de-de-de" etc.

The hustle found an outlet. In 2002, the first mobile phone shipped with a polyphonic sound synthesizer onboard, and Paananen convinced Finnish telco Radiolinja to start selling “ringtones.” Not even AT+T at its monopolizing peak wrung extra cash out of making our handsets ring with chart music.

Boffin pop star turned tech entrepreneur, Thomas Dolby, explained: “For years we’d been struggling with the fact that nobody on the internet wanted to pay for anything, yet in the mobile phone world there were people who were willing to pay for their minutes and wallpapers and SMS and ringtones. Record companies couldn’t get young people to pay for downloadable music, but they’d be willing to pay for these bleepy versions of songs.” 

In 2004, ringtones generated $4 billion in global revenue⁠, with practically zero manufacturing and distribution costs, and the music industry enjoyed some brief respite from a growing consensus that the internet had made their intellectual property worthless.

By 2023 ringtone revenues had fallen to $10 million (that’s about the same as 5-10 good dentists).

So don’t sleep on your side hustle. And enjoy it while you can.