It would be tacky to ask friends to bid on what I use as their ringtone. But is there a plausible business in asking strangers to bid on the privilege of, say, the guitar intro to “Don’t Take Me Alive,” as their ringtone when they call me? It seems like an odd experiment that a psychology/business major might propose: would someone be willing to pay a small fee to give someone else a small pleasure at random intervals (to hear a 20 second snatch of a cool song)?

This seems both obvious and counter-intuitive, so I suspect that others have had this weird idea.