To be ridiculed as the ‘Lord of the Ringtones’ in the music industry was a painful experience for me in 2000 and the reason for the ridicule, was because of my involvement in the early development of ringtones.
Even though the early 2000’s were good to the little record label I’d co-founded with Neil Claxton in 1997, the chart hits Faith & Hope Records had, did nothing to appease the dismissive major label music executives who saw my ringtone work as a joke and an embarrassment.
Little did these major label bods anticipate was their companies would eventually be wanting to do deals with Monstermob, the mobile entertainment content company I was involved with between 2000 and 2005.
My early work in the development of monophonic ringtones, would lead me and my colleague [Neil Gowland] to build one of the largest ringtone catalogues in Europe. It all started around mid-December 1999 when I was at a Christmas party at my friends Martin & Maggie Higginson.
Martin mentioned that his ‘new venture’ was going to be a business involved with mobile phone ringtones, wallpapers and games.
Martin Higginson and I had known one another a long time at this point [1999] and I liked him and trusted him. He had been a good friend over the years and he’s a ‘true’ entrepreneur, has an unbelievable work ethic, and is one of the brightest people I’ve ever met.
I knew immediately that I wanted to be involved, partly because it all sounded very exciting, and partly because I knew that Martin was capable of pulling anything off anything he set out to do. Martin and I totally trusted one another, we never had a wrong word (still haven’t to this day), and I liked him and his extended family.
As a teenager, Martin played drums (but I don’t think he ever really fancied himself as a drummer) and had a little job at Hobbs Music Shop in Lancaster. Martin seemed to love art and creativity, did a photography course, which led him to work as a photo journalist for ‘Trials and Motorcross News’, a paper run by Morecambe Press.
After Morecambe Press started its new publication, ‘BMX Weekly’ in the early 1980’s, Martin worked on it, and when Morecambe Press pulled the plug on it, Martin felt that BMX would be a big thing, gained some investment from his dad Arnold, and ran the paper from a caravan on the family drive.
Within no time, ‘BMX Bi-Weekly’ was selling over 100k copies per issue, and Martin eventually sold it out to ‘IPC Magazines’, but stayed working for them for quite a time.
By the mid 1980’s, I’d started a small Morecambe-based recording business and Martin was very much on my radar. He’d established a publishing and telecoms company called ‘Megafone’ – which was a premium rate entertainment business based around competition prizes – based above the Battery Hotel in Morecambe.
Martin invited me to get involved with creating voice-over productions [voice, music, sound effects] for the telephone responses and I was able to supply him with excellent quality work, on time, and at a price that worked for us both.
Martin later sold Megafone to Scottish Power PLC and went on to become the Managing Director of their Internet and Interactive division of Scottish Telecom, overseeing Demon Internet.
My personal adventure with monophonic ringtone began in mid-1999, after I bought myself a new Nokia 3210 phone. The 3210 had Nokia’s new monophonic / monotone ‘ringtone composer’ that allowed me to make my own ringtones via the phones screen.
Adjusting notes of the scale, different octaves, and length of notes was done via a simple mathematical music quantizing system, but it was a very slow and laborious task. Although the ringtone composer was fine for an individual to create ringtones for themselves, it certainly couldn’t have be used for the mass production of thousands of ringtones, that I’d need to be doing a year later.
By early January 2000, I knew I wanted to be involved in Martin’s new ringtone venture – the wallpaper and games never interested me in the slightest – and he was happy for me to head up the supply of ringtones on a freelance basis.
As I had other plates spinning – with my Promenade Music Shop, and Faith & Hope Records – Martin was happy for me to bring in my friend and collaborator, Neil Gowland, who had already worked with me on other projects, including Martin’s ‘Megafone’ business.
I never really knew why Martin allowed me to get involved with Monstermob so deeply. Possible reasons have gone through my mind over the years like it was because: I’d worked for him in the past and had never let him down, I shared the belief that the future success of mobile phone ownership was the consumer personalisation, I was into tech and could deliver recording projects, I’d had some success with Faith & Hope’s initial chart hits, and I had a great Mint Royale ‘Tequila’ ringtone on my phone. I’m really not sure of the reason, maybe it was just a combination of them all.
So, early 2000 came, and Neil [Gowland] and I got stuck in, but first we had to work out how to create them on an industrial scale, where the ringtones would work on whichever phone was released. There’s no doubt that this ended up being much trickier than we first thought. The trickiest thing we needed to solve, was how to actually write the ringtones on a commercial scale.
The biggest problem was there wasn’t a ‘standard language’ for ringtones so as well as writing the ringtones in a system Neil and I developed, we had to also future-proof Monstermob, by making sure our ringtones worked on ‘all’ the different brands of phones that were released, and would be released in the future, from the likes of Nokia, Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, NEC, Samsung, Siemens, etc. This was ‘the’ crucial ‘cog in the wheel’ and was part of Monstermob’s early ringtone success.
Although this will be hard to believe for the ‘Gen Z’ generation, in the UK in 2000, monophonic ringtones were delivered by 2G technology, which supported limited data services via GPRS and EDGE. Although 3G mobile services were first launched commercially in 2001 by NTT Docomo in Japan, and in 2002 by SK Telecom in South Korea; it wasn’t until early 2003 when 3G was commercially launched here in the UK by Hutchison 3G, using their ‘3’ brand. Let’s not forget also that this was the early days of mobile phones, the game changing Apple iPhone wasn’t even released until June 2007, long after I’d left Monstermob.
The early days of MonsterMob were exciting, and Martin was a brilliant head honcho! Although I can’t remember why, the company had a different name right at the beginning [Telezones], but by the end of January 2000, Monstermob Limited was incorporated as a private limited company and we were away.
Martin quickly built a fantastic team, and we all shared the feeling that we wanted to do our best for Martin, our colleagues, and for the business. We all totally believed in Martin, loved his concept and vision, and embraced the 2G technology, even though it had massive limitations.
Although I can’t remember everyone involved in those very early days of Monstermob, the early team members I do remember include: Maggie Higginson [Martin’s wife] who was a director and company secretary; Emma Stanyon [Martin’s step-daughter] who was Martin’s PA and HR lady; Louise Goddard, my wonderful dad-to-day contact who looked after all the ringtone content, and was brilliant at it; Jon Hill, an incredibly talented software architect, programmer, and developer who was the systems and operations guy; Mike Watt, the creative director, but I can’t quite remember when Mike joined because he had worked with Martin for years and the timelines have merged into one; and of course, Kenneth Baker – aka Baron Baker of Dorking / The Right Honourable Lord Baker of Dorking – who was one of Monstermob’s first directors and the first Chairman.
Other early MonsterMob team members included: Sarah Mason, in marketing; John Freeman, the web editor who wasn’t with us long but went on to become one of the greatest figures in the world of British Comics; Alan Denyer, our amazingly talented sales guy who drove the Monstermob sales; Gavin Whyte, the really bright strategy and operations guy; Isaac Allison, an excellent designer, and Peter Armer, the early finance guy and company secretary.
As time moved on, some other wonderful people joined us, including: Lee Dudack (finance), Chris Tomic (tech guy), Steve Worsnip (B2B), Mick Mcvey (web designer), Eamonn Watson (multimedia), Adrian Hardy (developer), Dan Wortley (stats analyst and accounts), Adam Yendle (graphic designer), Steve Longbottom (content manager), Chris Mayne (product manager), Graham Binns (software engineer), Pete Kewley (group accountant), Jan Walker (communications manager), and David Marks (group finance director).
There were others who joined towards the end of my involvement in Monstermob including: Niccolo de Masi (operations and product strategy guy), and the former Orange CEO and Carphone Warehouse chairman, Hans Snook, who was Monstermob’s second Chairman.
Monstermob grew at a dramatic pace in those first three years, and Martin and everyone at Monstermob had high hopes for the business. I still find it unbelievable to think that for the 27 month period, from the 1st of October 2000 to the 31st of December 2002, our turnover was over £23 million [circa £19 million ex VAT]; and for the following 12 month period, from the 1st of January 2003 to the 31st of December 2003, our turnover was over £16.5 million [just less than £14 million ex VAT] with a retained profit for the year of just over £1 million, and a head count of 39 employees.
Monstermob Group PLC was incorporated in September 2003 and the company joined London Stock Exchange’s growth market known as the Alternative Investment Market [now known as AIM] in the November of 2003 via a placing at 135p per share which valued Monstermob (under the ticker MOB) at a circa £32 million market capitalization at floatation.
Martin was excited at the prospect of acquisitions and had chosen to float, to give Monstermob the funds to acquire companies who built profitable companies through new and successful products which would accelerate the process of migrating customers to subscription-based services to deliver highly visible recurring revenues.
As high-profile investors became interested in Monstermob, the share price would often have a positive gain. As an example, after acquiring a circa 8% stake in Monstermob, our share price rose by around 30% in the week after the Barclay brothers – the British billionaire twins who were known for their vast business empire that included The Daily Telegraph, Littlewoods, and The Ritz Hotel – bought in.
By 2004, the industry norm of making money from mobile entertainment was to offer a subscription-based billing service, where the target audience [16 to 30-year-olds] were able to subscribe to a monthly-fee service which gave them to unlimited content.
For many reasons [Monstermob’s chat service, entertainment portal, weekly quiz, etc] their content offering – and the cost of developing and promoting the products – had pushed up expenses. Profits, which were expected to be around £3m, came in at around £2.25m, on sales of around £15m and there was tension in the air.
Everything had moved so quickly for me at Monstermob by late 2004 and I knew I needed help with the Monstermob Music channel. 3G was now widely available and customers had moved from monophonic, to our offering of polyphonic ringtones, and our next journey was going to be full length artist tracks and soundalikes.
This needed a top music industry lawyer to go out and sign up all the major labels and independent labels and Martin and I discussed possible people for the job, and the person we wanted was David Bloomfield.
David Bloomfield is without question one of the very best music lawyers in the UK music industry. He began his career at Granada ITV in 1996, before joining Decca Records in 1998. By 1999, he was head of legal and business affairs at Ministry of Sound, before becoming a senior manager of legal and business affairs for Sony Music Entertainment, where he looked after some of their dance music labels and joint ventures.
It was through one of these joint-ventures that I met David (as my label had a JV with a Sony label that David was representing) and I immediately realised how talented he was.
In early 2005, we approached David to see if he would leave Sony and join Monstermob as our ‘Head of Music Content’, and we were delighted when he agreed to join us. David’s role was massive, and these were going to be exciting times.
Over the next 12 months, David hit all the KPI targets that were set, and he did a brilliant job negotiating both the commercial and legal terms for Monstermob’s music licensing agreements with record labels, publishers and collection societies.
Problems in the ringtone and mobile content industry were brewing – outside of Monstermob – but there is no doubt that these ‘problems’ were impacting on us and had a rocky time post flotation. Ofcom and the premium rate telephone services regulator Icstis had intervened in the industry in 2005, because of complaints that customers, often children, were signing up to subscription services when they thought they were only buying a single product.
You must remember that ringtones were massive at the time and full artist audio tracks were well and truly on the way and would go on to dominate the ringtone market. The likes of the ‘Crazy Frog’ became a UK chart hit in its own right, but the industry was soon to change.
The company that supplied the Crazy Frog ringtone was fined £40k and told to pay back consumers who were allegedly ‘unaware’ that they’d signed up for a subscription service.
Through mid-late 2005, I didn’t like the way a few people within Monstermob were building an anti-Martin sentiment. There seemed to be a feeling brewing [wrongly, in my opinion] that Martin was too UK-centric for a business that had high hopes of international dominance.
What must not be forgotten is whilst I was there, Martin made lots of acquisitions! As well as Phunky Phones and Mediaprom in England, he’d acquired 9 Squared in the USA, Upper Mobile in the Philippines, Unrealmind Interactive in Malaysia, ATOP Century in China, Mobicon in Russia, and was just finalising a deal to buy M-dream in China. Now that doesn’t sound “UK-centric” to me.
In the August of 2025, we did our biggest Asia deal to date, when Monstermob acquired ‘ATOP Century’ in a circa £55 million deal. This deal made me nervous on many levels and my main worries were that I could feel a move in the company to undermine Martin; but the bigger and more immediate issue was that I never believed that the Chinese authorities would allow their Chinese citizens to be subject to the same business models that were happening in Europe, i.e. subscription models.
And sure enough, eventually, the ‘Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’ in China was created to regulate things like internet, wireless, broadcasting, communications, and software in China.
By the summer of 2005, I noticed an ‘anti-Martin’ sentiment by some people which undoubtably undermined him. These people seemed to believe that the future of Monstermob’s profits lay strongly in Asia, and those aggressive China acquisitions would ultimately come back to haunt them. Our share price had reached around 460p in the September of 2005 and in the October of 2005, a second acquisition in China was looking like it was on the cards. This time, the Chinese company called ‘M Dream’, and there talks of further acquisitions in South America, India and other parts of Asia. Everything was beginning to feel out of control.
Martin wasn’t just the founder and CEO of Monstermob, he was my friend. He did an amazing job of building Monstermob from nothing to what it had become, but by late 2005, I really didn’t like how things were going and hated how Martin was being undermined. So after a lot of personal deliberation – which was mentally agonising – I ended my involvement with Monstermob on the 31st of December 2005.
What a journey it had been! I learned lots, worked with the dearest of friends, made new friends, had wonderful social times, and made a few quid along the way. By the time I left Monstermob, we had over 300 employees worldwide, our content was reaching over 10 million monthly subscribers in 25 countries, we were selling over 20 million downloads a month, our turnover had reached around £58 million, and our share price was flying high at a market cap of around £190 million.
It was funny how quickly I fell out of the Monstermob news loop. Monstermob, along with the likes of Jamdat, iTouch, Jamster, Et al, had led the way in mobile content; But after I left, 2006 proved to be difficult year for Monstermob – which was in no way to do with me leaving – and the investors in Monstermob saw a decline in the share price.
Around June of 2006, I was shocked to hear that Martin [remember, he was Monstermob’s founder and CEO] was ousted out of his own business. Although I’d felt those Machiavellian moves against him in mid-late 2005, I couldn’t believe how badly he had been betrayed by some in the company. The broadsheet business pages reported that it was a disagreement over strategy and poor share price performance; but personally, I feel his ousting was probably about power, control, and I hated how public this was for him.
In my opinion, Martin had Monstermob’s strategy correct. He had a better understanding of the company and the wider market than anyone else in the company. He had a balanced view of the world market – where others seemed hell-bent on operations and interests in Asia – and some in Monstermob seemed to think that the majority of revenue could be generated from China in particular. As I said earlier, I never believed for one minute that The Communist Party of China would go easy on western mobile entertainment companies and their subscription services… and they didn’t.
At the time, China Mobile – who were China’s largest mobile phone company by subscribers – changed its policy on mobile content subscriptions in response to regulatory concerns about monthly contracts when the user only agreed to buy a single product. This change in Chinese policy, dragged Monstermob’s shares price down even further, and Monstermob’s new top brass – who took over after Martin was ousted – had a self-inflicted torrid time through the rest of 2006.
By late 2006, there were rumours in the UK that a takeover plan could be in the pipeline by Elaine LaRoche’s Linktone. It wasn’t Linktone who finally took over Monstermob, it was the Spanish company LaNetro Zed who took a majority shareholding and installed Javier Perez Dolset as head honcho. They ousted Monstermob’s board – including the chairman and new chief executive – and in February 2007, I was delighted for Martin when he returned to Monstermob and was given a seat on the board as a non-executive director.
Although Monstermob’s share price had fallen below 50p by this time [remember it was up at around 460p in the September of 2005], this “strategic investment” by LaNetro Zed seemed good for them, but more importantly, it felt good to see Martin back involved with the company he founded.
Post Monstermob, Martin Higginson went on to do amazing things. He was the Founder & CEO of NetPlayTV, Non-Executive Director of Cupid PLC, Co-founder & CEO of Immotion Group PLC, Director of IDE Group,
Founder & Non-Executive Director of Digitalbox PLC, Chairman of M Capital Investment Partners LLP, and the Executive Chairman of Huddled Group PLC
Post Monstermob, David Bloomfield went on to become the Senior Manager Legal & Business Affairs of Universal Music Publishing Group, Head of Legal & Business Affairs of Imagem Music [now Concord Music Group],
Media & Entertainment Lawyer at SSB Solicitors, and the Senior Vice President of Legal & Business Affairs at Kobalt Music.
Monstermob Group PLC itself was finally dissolved in August 2018.