2005 was a memorable year at Springtones with over 500,00 visitors to the site which started in late 2003 when I checked out a friend's ringtone website and found a poor selection of football ringtones. Saying I could do better he bullied me into starting my own site and here I am today. I've not become a dot.com millionaire and don't think I ever will be but I'm working on the site every day to bring visitors the latest mobile content with the best support service in the UK. Thanks goes to all at axyswebs.com without whose help I would have be helpless. Thanks also go out to Jason Dowd whose period of self-enforced unemployment encouraged him to right some great articles including his best - Hip Hop Legends.

On to the ringtones of 2005 which I presume why you are here. It was one of my favourite songs of the year and helped in no small part to me seeing hip hop real tones and ringtones in a different light. Kanye West, with the help of Jamie Foxx takes the title of Most Listened To Ringtone of 2005 with his anti-money grabbing anthem Gold Digger. If you'd asked me at the start of the year who this rapper was I would have called him Kane West and said I'd never heard of him. Shame his follow up ringtone was so poor (Heard Em Say). Still, Gold Digger was a top song and deserved to be in at number one.

Black Eyed Peas were another group I knew little about at the turn of the year. (listen I'm getting on a bit and prefer stuff like The Who, The Jam, The Buzzcocks and The Stranglers - well anything starting with "The" and no self-respecting teenager has heard of them!) My Humps came in at number two in the charts proving very popular with visitors. It's not my cup of tea but as Pete Townsend said to misbehaving fans once - it's not a fuckin' tea party.

I like to think of the Pussycat Dolls as my discovery although seeing as they are a carefully constructed manufactured band by the pop industry. I'm probably wrong. They were the first band I wrote a profile on (and probably the longest). Their ringtones Don't Cha and Stickwitu came third and fourth respectively in the list just above the omnipresent Crazy Frog. Is it possible to write a sentence about the Crazy Frog without using the word annoying? I don't think so but hey, you lot voted his Axel F spoof the fifth most popular ringing tone of the year. You bastards.

Arsonist Sean Paul came in a number six with his We Be Burnin'. Once again not my thing but visitors found it popular despite him not having his own page until late in the year. Late in the year was also the time I tired of proper profiles and just got plain silly. See System Of A Down and My Chemical Romance for bad examples and Lil Kim is quite scathing and probably not funny.

Possible my least favourite entry in the chart is Akon's Lonely. I find this song tedious but catchy and I can see why it did so well. Cuteness. Thankfully the awful Belly Dancer did not even make the top fifty.

One of my favourites for the year based purely on poppiness!? was the Sugababes Push The Button. It's what I would call the classic pop song - catchy, happy,
meaningless and slightly hard to sing along to. The Sugababes are my babes this year and I don't care who knows it - shame about Ugly though.

That Crazy Frog comes in at numer nine with I Like To Move It - nearly wrote a sentence then without using the word annoying.

The only true tone in the top ten is Catherine Tate with her Am I Bothered. I think it's a great alert for anyone's mobile phone. So BUY IT!!

Til next year.

Dave Allan