ANNOYING OTHER people is an important criteria for the ringtones Lauren Smith has chosen to load, like weapons of social war, on her mobile phone. Needless to say, the 16-year-old has a version of Crazy Frog, probably the most irritating of the current crop, with its repeated “beh-ding ding-ding” tone set against the Axel F music from the film Beverly Hills Cop.

“I really like it that ringtones get on people’s nerves,” she says as she plays the music mix in Baker Street, London. “Isn’t it great?” But better than Coldplay? A single of Axel F is outselling the hugely successful British band, a rock edifice on which the fortunes of EMI are said to rest. It is Crazy Frog, not Coldplay, which will be No 1 this weekend, with Axel F outselling Speed of Sound by more than four to one.

So a ringtone created by fusing a Swedish teenager’s mimicking — on a computer in his bedroom — of a moped engine with an old film score is now the biggest-selling piece of music in Britain. It is tempting to dismiss Crazy Frog as just another novelty act. But it represents what pop music is when it goes through necessary reinventions: subversive, wildly popular with young people, and nearly incomprehensible to anybody else.

And Crazy Frog has a huge advantage denied to rock‘n’roll when it emerged. The tune is already part of a very lucrative, serious and sophisticated business. Informa Telecoms & Media, a specialist research group, estimates that the ringtone market in Britain will be worth about £160 million this year, part of a £2.4 billion global industry. The company behind the Crazy Frog ringtone, Jamster, is itself owned by VeriSign, a £4.3 billion US corporation with shareholders and a stock-exchange listing.

Jamster has been marketing the Crazy Frog on the internet since before Christmas and, probably with an eye to success in an already softened market, then allowed a small cult German record label, specialising in dance records, to mix it with Harold Faltermeyer’s Axel F as a single.

“We’re about giving access to anybody,” insists Robert Swift, Jamster’s 26-year-old marketing manager, when pressed on what the decision to market a ringtone as music implies. He thinks it’s about blowing down the gates of an exclusive, often out of touch, industry. Others might say it’s a very good way to market ringtones.

“There are a lot of musicians who can’t get a recording contract, but are really cool. We’re saying, if it makes a ringtone for us, it might make a single, too, and we’ll release it.”

He isn’t joking. Jamster and dozens of other similar companies could reshape pop. The mainstream Suga-babes hit Round Round, for example, made more money for the music company, Universal, as a ringtone than through single sales.

Jamster expects that Gut Records will sell 150,000 Crazy Frog singles by the weekend. The single is also going to be released in the US and over most of Europe within weeks.

The success of Crazy Frog, apart from shrewd business, is evidence that young people want music to work for them in different ways these days. Pop has always been disposable, now it’s got to be useful too.

The success is, in addition, a rather deft raspberry to the recording industry. Like early rock‘n’roll, Crazy Frog owes nothing to any musical establishment. The tune has marched to the top without the involvement of either a traditional record company, a slot on Pop Idol or a single DJ.

Instead, the almost viral speed with which teens now spread trends through communications technology, has produced the modern equivalent of Sam Phillips recording an unknown Elvis Presley, and, in 1954, piling records in his car before driving around the southern US, always dressed immaculately in a dark suit, to distribute them personally.

To say Crazy Frog is lousy is to miss the point. Early rock‘n’roll was lousy: hesitant, stiff and derivative. But it was different, exciting and, importantly, irritating to older people.