I tried so hard to figure that shit out but never managed to actually make anything good (I have zero musical talent), but we had this one friend in the group who had, so they'd always have one of our phones, composing our ringtones lol.. I feel old 😂
I used to have the Monkey Island intro midi as a ringtone. It would start real quiet giving me time to either go somewhere I can talk or if I just wouldn't notice it would become loud enough to notice later.
I actually made some cash in 8th grade making ringtones. All i did is looking up what buttons to press on the 3210 on the internet. The weird part was that pretty much strangers would just give me their phone over night because i was too lazy to print it out and do it in school. Rumours were around that i had some weird ass set-up at home like deadmau5 to turn axel f into a midi. I was just using altavista and pressed buttons.
That pre internet era was amazing ... that sweet spot where the internet was just starting to grow but not everyone had it yet.
My brother had a thriving business at around 1997 1998 1999 ripping custom CDs for people. He kept a library of 40 GB hard drive of mp3 and everyone thought he was a god that could make custom music CDs. I played a few of them a while ago and they are absolute crap but at the time no one cared what they sounded like as long as it was new and customized to what they wanted.
The amazing thing was, his business appeared and disappeared in a matter of about two years. One moment everyone wanted him .. then everything and everyone moved on and his business was done.
Those were the days. I impressed people in my high school by being able to switch between music really fast... They were used to CDs, and here I was rocking winamp on win98 with 60gig of mp3s. Most of them poorly produced "weird al" songs with obscene lyrics I had gotten on napster and kazaa.
Crazy thing is... that's what Trevor Noah did as a youth in South Africa. Had a whole bootleg CD burning business until his setup died and they couldn't get the files back.
So he turned his life around and became extremely famous in the US.
