JAKARTA – Ringback tone (RBT) continues to show promising potential in an emerging Indonesian market, helping homegrown indie artists widen their reach to existing fans and new audiences during the pandemic.
As a service offered by a telecommunication carrier, RBT plays a song of the subscriber’s choice in lieu of the standard ringing tone. Such entertainment and personalisation services were highly popular in the early and mid-2000s among subscribers around the world. However, the trend has tapered off significantly as users began taking advantage of the latest products and services incorporated in their smartphones.
According to a report by the GSMA Intelligence, which projected the country to be one of the largest smartphone markets globally by 2025 with 96.4% of users on prepaid connection, RBT as a Value-Added Service lays the foundation as a valuable platform for independent (indie) artists to market their songs.
“RBT is still in trend in Indonesia due to the high number of population in the rural areas where the prepaid connection is the go-to option for users. Our RBT subscribers are mostly populated from the East Java region, and Javanese songs are the most-subscribed genre,” said Megan Faustine, Marketing & Business Development Assistant Manager at Forest Interactive Indonesia. “Most of them are still not smartphone users, but their prepaid plan makes it easy for them to subscribe and gift RBTs. Plus, subscribing to popular songs in the region is closely associated with being in trend.”
“RBT provides a platform for indie artists such as Jihan Audy, Nella Kharisma, and Ustad Syafiq Riza to stand a fair chance in marketing their music in a competitive market. With the expansive number of prepaid mobile phone users, RBT serves as a better platform as most users prefer micro-amount purchases of services on pay-as-you-go plans,” added Megan.
Since mid-March, social distancing restrictions have brought indie labels to their knees. As things currently stand, Megan views that RBT is one of the practical ways for them to reach larger crowds with minimal costs involved. “There are a lot of online promotions done by the telcos. Some of them have also organised regular online concerts. On top of that, the artists would also promote their RBT codes on YouTube and social media channels,” clarified Megan.
“As a developer of scalable mobile platforms, Forest Interactive does its part to promote RBT through telco operator channel features such as RBT Copy, UMB, and Gift Data (bundling with internet packages),” continued Megan. “We hope to be able to help the indie artist community during these trying times by providing them a platform to market their music to the subscribers.”
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About Forest Interactive (as of July 2020)
Forest Interactive is an award-winning telecommunications platform provider with a global presence across 14 regional offices in 33 countries. Since its founding in 2006, Forest Interactive has been providing innovative and revenue-generating solutions for 50 mobile operators and is connected to more than 1 billion subscribers worldwide. The company enables enriched mobile experiences through highly-customizable platforms such as Digital Service Delivery Platform (DSDP), Mobile Games Publishing, and eVouchers. Forest Interactive is also the organizer for numerous Mobile Esports events in partnership with Moonton and Tencent.
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