A ring tone is the sound made by a mobile phone to indicate incoming calls. There are three basic types of ring tones:

. Monophonic
. Polyphonic
. True tones

Early phones only had the ability to play monophonic ring tones. These are short tunes played with simple tones.

Polyphonic means that multiple tones can be played at the same time using instrument sounds such as guitar, drums, etc.

True tones play actual pieces of music, along with lyrics and entire song backing music. They are commonly contained in MP3 or Wav format used as a ring tone on many symbian, or smart phones.

Cell phone ring tones are now one of the most popular trends today. Ring tones have become a financial success for the record and movie industry.

Today's ring tones have come a long way from those monophonic and polyphonic tones. Now, they are called master tones or true tones, which are pure 15 to 20 second cuts of MP3s.

The ring tone market targets the youth. Record industries have an estimated sale of $4 Billion in 2004 world wide, and continually outsell all other musical sales online. This means the ring tone industry makes more money than any song downloaded in the internet.

The youth today are the number one customers of the ring tone industry. This is because of the need to be cool. This is one of their ways of expressing themselves.

If you have one of the latest mobile phone that allows true tones, you can avail of this trend. For starters, few ring tones come preloaded into your phone. They are usually categorized in your phone. First, you have those standard ring tones like beeps and buzzes and then there are the musical ring tones. Many phones today offer good selection of preloaded ring tones such as jazz classics and some Christmas ring tones.

For more ring tones, you can easily get one over the internet. There are thousands of web pages existing today that offers ring tone downloads.

To get a ring tone you simply just go to any site that offers this services, then search for the ring tone you want. After you find the ring tone, all you have to do is download it to your computer. After that, you connect your cell phone to your computer then upload the ring tone you selected to your cell phone.

Although some sites can offer these services for free. Most can charge you as much as 2 dollars per ring tone. Imagine hundreds or even thousands of people downloading at least five ring tones a day. The ring tone business is really one big business.

About the Author:

John Rivers is the webmaster of Ringtone Heaven. Get all the latests news on cell phones, mobile games and ringtones.