Happy Birthday Mobile Project
A great charity project organized by the Japan Committee for UNICEF to raise funds via mobile music downloads
NTT Communications announced that its online music store, Music Ocean, is participating in “HAPPY BIRTHDAY DOWNLOAD for children,” a charity project organized by the Japan Committee for UNICEF through which musicians, recording companies and music retailers are donating money to improve the quality of life for impoverished children around the world.
People can visit a special web page created by MUSICO to download a recording of Happy Birthday to You as a ringtone for their mobile phones. Each day the site offers a new version of the song recorded by a different participating artist. Customers pay 105 yen per download, which MUSICO donates to UNICEF after deducting 5% Japanese consumption tax and the commission owed to the customer’s mobile phone carrier. Starting today, customers can give friends the ringtones as thoughtful presents.
The idea behind the project is to help more children celebrate birthdays. Of the children who die before age five every year, the largest group – some six million children – never even reach their first birthday. One of the goals established by the United Nations’ Millennium Summit in 2000 is to reduce child mortality by two-thirds, from 93 children of every 1,000 who died before age five in 1990 to 31 of every 1,000 by 2015.
More details about the project at http://www.unicef.or.jp/musicdl/index.html