Taking a break for SxSW

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I’ll be headed down to the music festival at South by Southwest next week -- as a fanboy, not a reporter -- and probably won’t lengthen this blog while I’m there. Still, the pending trip to Texas’ capital gives me an excuse to bash Verizon Wireless for clinging to a service strategy that should have died in the 1980s.

Given that my wardrobe is likely to land me on the wrong side of the velvet ropes, I decided to create a ringtone that would certify me as one of the 10,000 coolest people in Austin. So I flipped through my collection of warping vinyl until I found ‘Texas Fever,’ an EP by the great Scottish band Orange Juice. Soon, I had ripped and truncated the song ‘The Day I Went Down to Texas,’ focusing on the portion that waxes rhapsodic about drinking and riding Cadillacs in the Lone Star state.

Then I tried to load this most perfect of ringtones onto my LG VX8100, a phone ostensibly built for playing music. As it turns out, it could play the snippet -- just not as a ringtone. Verizon had done its best to force subscribers to buy ringtones from a limited selection of partners, rather than creating and loading them on their own. My rational response was to comb the Web for a work-around, and there may be one from bitpim.org. We’ll see what happens when my new data cable arrives (from a store not affiliated with Verizon).

Regardless of how that works out, though, I’m counting the months until my Verizon Wireless contract expires. I don’t mind the contract -- it’s an acceptable exchange for getting a free phone. But I do mind being trapped in a walled garden, with so many features of my phone being disabled (including much of its Bluetooth capability). By trying to extract all of my business, Verizon will wind up with none of it. It’s a lesson the entertainment industry needs to bear in mind as it tries to build businesses around products derived from items they’re already selling. Better to offer things consumers can’t make themselves than try to deny them the ones they can.