Remember when people paid good money for a cell phone ringtone?
In 2003, a Swedish animator created a 3D frog character to accompany “The Annoying Thing,” which caught the attention of ringtone maker Jamba!, who eventually combined “The Annoying Thing,” the 3D frog character, and the theme music from Beverly Hills Cop, rebranding this conceptual Frankenstein as “Axel F.”
At its peak, Crazy Frog captured 31% of the UK ringtone market, generating over £40 million in sales in 2005, driven by an extensive advertising blitz where the song was featured up to 26 times a day on British television (per channel), reaching an estimated 87% of the population. The ringtone was so ubiquitous that it later spawned a full-length single, which climbed to #50 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Crazy Frog’s meteoric rise is a perfect encapsulation of the 2000s ringtone craze: a grating 30-second meme that started as a phone alert, morphed into a charting single, and is now a forgotten relic—practically unknown to Gen Z.