When Phones Started Singing — Off-Key and All

Excerpt from a feature in GATRA, 2001.

In the middle of a heated meeting, every head suddenly turned toward a sound on the table. From the little device came music that resembled the folk song Rek Ayo Rek — slightly grating, because the pitch and rhythm were just a touch off. Someone quipped, “That's not Rek Ayo Rek, that's Rek Opo Rek.” Everyone laughed, and the meeting went on.

The phone belonged to one of the attendees. Into his Nokia 3310 he had loaded five well-loved songs from his hometown — Jaranan, Cublak-cublak Suweng, Lir Ilir, and Gundul-gundul Pacul. “It's not hard,” he said breezily. “You just copy them out of a songbook.”

Others preferred to tinker with their phones until they rang out tunes by Bon Jovi, Madonna, Ricky Martin, or Lou Bega — and plenty were happy to be called to the theme from Crayon Shinchan or Doraemon.

Phone owners had taken to hunting for little touches that set their device apart from everyone else's: a new faceplate, a custom ring, a logo on that tiny screen. Vendors offered dozens of ringtones, but once people tired of hearing the same ones, they started composing their own — and, as we saw, without the right ear, Rek Ayo Rek could easily slip into “Rek Opo Rek.”

There was really no need to write your own, though. You could just open the internet, where more than a dozen sites offered thousands of ringtones. Ringtone.net, launched in 1998, claimed 2,651,841 visits and a collection of 980 tones — for a fee. Phonatic.net had hundreds of Western ringtones, hits and oldies alike, free. Ringtone.co.uk charged. Yourmobile.com was among the most complete, able to send your chosen tone straight to your phone, also for a fee. Melodyland.net carried Western, Mandarin, and Japanese songs, though it was down for maintenance at the time.

For Indonesian songs, the most complete library seemed to be x-phones.com, with 1,458 ringtones. It carried whatever was topping the charts at home — Sephia (Sheila on 7), Hening (Chrisye), Malioboro (KLA Project), Jika (Melly Goeslaw & Ari Lasso), Dua Sejoli (Dewa 19), Kopi Dangdut (Fahmi Shahab), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai by Udit Narayan, Shalatullah Salamullah, and the Crayon Shinchan and Doraemon themes.

This community site for phone users had been founded the previous August by Mico Wendy and Ivan R. Lanin. Ivan knew phones inside out from poring over the manuals of every brand he could find. “But to this day Ivan doesn't even own a phone,” Mico laughed. Mico — a civil engineer and management graduate of the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), then 29 — was the CEO of x-phones.com.

Happily, Mico said, they had the backing of Rully Budisatya, head of Melsa.net.id (a Bandung internet provider) and a genuine phone fanatic with a collection of more than 150 wireless devices.

Although x-phones had been in the phone scene for a while, it had only added ringtones that June. “The Ringtone page became the favorite,” Mico said. Public appetite for personalizing phones was enormous: “People will happily pay Rp 5,000 to Rp 10,000 at Roxy or a phone shop for one distinctive ringtone.”

For now, x-phones still let people grab those tones for free. “We're thinking about charging,” Mico said — and given the demand, he reckoned Indonesian ringtones were already worth paying for. At the time, x-phones had around 1,500 members and roughly 50,000 hits a day, about 30% of whom dropped by the Ringtone page.

So which tunes were the favorites? Number one, Mico said, was the Crayon Shinchan theme (downloaded by 2,894 people), followed by Sephia (1,583), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai by Udit Narayan (1,327), the Doraemon theme (1,108), and in fifth place Shalatullah Salamullah (1,011).