Rolling my own ringtones- Iz it stealing? Your opinions, PLEASE.

[rEVOLVE]

OK, i was wondering what you people think about this, since this is a forum with a lot of music lovers as well as some artists (Coz, Be, I don't know if there are any more of you).

What I've been doing for a while now is taking music (that I have purchased the CD's for BTW) and rolling my own ringtones out of them (my phone that I bought in Aug of last year takes MP3 ringtones). The reason why I do this is - (IMHO) the whole point of being able to customize your phone w/ mp3 ringtones is to have something different than others. BUT, most of the services that "sell" them only have the popular (heavy radio rotation=i'm already sick of hearing it by now) songs that other peeps are already rockin' on their phones.

So I made a bunch of old school (yup-wicki,wicki,wicki), movie/TV theme, and even some Schoolhouse Rock ringtones (one of my faves is the intro of that Figure8 song that PMDawn sampled on one of their albums).

Now let me restate that these all come from CD's that I have purchased and most of them aren't even available as ringtones to purchase from any service that I've seen. Also, I think that for a 15-30 second snippet of a song that is going to be like free advertising for the Artists whenever my phone goes off anyway - is it on the level of "stealing music"?

Your opinions, please!

[Cozmo D]

OK, i was wondering what you people think about this, since this is a forum with a lot of music lovers as well as some artists (Coz, Be, I don't know if there are any more of you).

What I've been doing for a while now is taking music (that I have purchased the CD's for BTW) and rolling my own ringtones out of them (my phone that I bought in Aug of last year takes MP3 ringtones). The reason why I do this is - (IMHO) the whole point of being able to customize your phone w/ mp3 ringtones is to have something different than others. BUT, most of the services that "sell" them only have the popular (heavy radio rotation=i'm already sick of hearing it by now) songs that other peeps are already rockin' on their phones.

So I made a bunch of old school (yup-wicki,wicki,wicki), movie/TV theme, and even some Schoolhouse Rock ringtones (one of my faves is the intro of that Figure8 song that PMDawn sampled on one of their albums).

Now let me restate that these all come from CD's that I have purchased and most of them aren't even available as ringtones to purchase from any service that I've seen. Also, I think that for a 15-30 second snippet of a song that is going to be like free advertising for the Artists whenever my phone goes off anyway - is it on the level of "stealing music"?

Your opinions, please!

No, it's perfectly fine. It's no different than recording your CD to cassette or backing it up to CD, your computer, your iPod, whatever.

Now, distributing those ringtones to other people is another story.

[Etherspin]

at this stage its like promotion.. whenever i recorded a unique ringtone in the past it made people i worked with wanna know more about the artist