Thumbplay

» see thumbplay.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

thumbplay was the kind of thing a us teenager on verizon or cingular used. that was not my demographic. i was twenty when it launched in 2004, in college in ankara, on ttnet broadband at home and a nokia handset i barely used for anything but voice and sms. carrier-billed ringtone subscriptions were an american market phenomenon. the us carriers had aggressive premium-sms billing pipes, the labels had a us licensing framework, teenagers on prepaid plans had exactly one way to buy pop content on a phone.

are traasdahl and evan schwartz launched thumbplay out of new york in september 2004. the pitch was a subscription bundle. ten dollars a month bought ten credits. credits went toward ringtones, wallpapers, java games where the phone could run them. by 2008 it was reportedly doing north of 100 million dollars a year, with roughly a million subscribers paying every month. traasdahl later described the model as "the sub-per-month economics that carriers loved and consumers did not read".

the iphone landed in june 2007 and the whole ringtone-subscription category started running downhill. by 2009 the founders were pivoting. they built a cloud-based music subscription on top of the thumbplay infrastructure, positioned it against rhapsody and napster (both already in the graveyard). it did not scale fast enough to matter. in early 2011 the whole company got carved up. clear channel radio bought the cloud music piece on 28 february 2011 for integration into iheartradio. sendme mobile picked up the ringtone-plus-games arm on 25 march 2011. neither buyer kept the thumbplay brand.

by then i was two years into my first engineering job in ankara, running an android handset that could download ringtones from any of a dozen free apps. the whole idea that you would pay ten dollars a month for a subscription bundle of small mobile content felt already dead to me before i had even heard of thumbplay by name. the us market had already moved onto free-tier streaming, and the walled-garden carrier bill was becoming a legacy pipe.

~ the dossier ~

~ the cramming era ~

thumbplay was one of the many ringtone-subscription outfits that ended up on the wrong side of us mobile-cramming lawsuits. either way, the pattern was the same everywhere: a small legal disclosure on a tv or web ad said the ringtone offer was actually a weekly-billing subscription. carriers billed the fees through the customer's monthly statement. federal and state regulators tightened premium-sms disclosure rules across the 2010-2013 window, which is one of the several forces that closed the whole category. the ftc's biggest ringtone-cramming settlements landed on jamba's parent (already in the graveyard) but thumbplay was inside the same regulatory bracket.

~ the split-sale ~

the interesting part of the thumbplay death is that the company did not really shut down, it got carved. clear channel wanted the music-subscription technology for iheartradio, which was then a free web-radio product that needed a real backend for on-demand tracks. sendme mobile wanted the ringtone-and-java-games catalog and the carrier billing relationships. clear channel paid on 28 february 2011. sendme picked up the ringtones about a month later. thumbplay the brand quietly stopped existing. the two halves were more valuable as inputs into other products than as a running business under their own name.

~ what got buried ~

the whole us mobile-content startup category. blingy competitors, sub-clip catalogs, exclusive artist deals for wallpapers. all of it had a five-to-seven-year window between roughly 2003 and 2010, then died on the app store. thumbplay was the biggest survivor in the category by revenue before it got carved. the clear channel cloud music half became part of iheartradio's on-demand service that later got renamed a couple times. the ringtone half at sendme mobile faded into whatever backend still gets used when a us prepaid carrier still charges for a legacy ringtone. neither is visible from the outside anymore.

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