The first commercial cellphone with ringtones sold in May of 1996 and it was the Digital Mova N103 Hyper. The ringtones were not downloadable and the phone had just a few preset songs in MIDI format, a high quality audio file format. Then in September of 1996, there was the Digital Minimo D319, the fist cell phone where a user could input an original melody for a ringtone, rather than just a few preset songs.

The first downloadable mobile ringtone service was created and delivered in Finland in 1998. A Finnish mobile company started a service called Harmonium that delivered monophonic ringtones, a series of notes, one musical note at a time.

Harmonium was innovative because it had tools for both individuals to create monophonics, and a mechanism to deliver them over-the-air via SMS to a mobile handset. On November 1998, Digitalphone Groupe started a similar service in Japan. Later came polyphonic downloadable ringtones that were more advanced than the monophonics because they were able to play about 40 notes at a time and sounded more like the actual song they were playing. Neither of these though was able to truly mimick the songs, and could not play lyrics.

This is an excerpt shared from an article here