John Lennon turns in his grave

Money can't buy you love, true, but it can buy you ring tones for your mobile phone.

More to the point, it can now buy you ring tone renditions of your favourite Beatles tunes after Sony Music this week signed a licensing agreement with Premium Wireless Services (http://www.silicon.com/a45205 ).

The fab four's back catalogue will now be turned into the kind of noise pollution that plagues offices, trains and most of the western world. As if the annoyance of mobile ring tones didn't go nearly far enough, the two companies have contrived to add musical heresy to their list of sins.

The kind of throw-away pop that people currently have on their phones - the faceless and fleeting successes from the dance charts and the occasional mainstream missive - is bad enough, but there is something inherently wrong about reducing the Beatles to this level. Isn't there?

Granted this level of recognition proves their continued relevance and popularity, but it is a very backhanded compliment.

Sony has assumed it is acceptable to do this, but does the Japanese giant really appreciate what it's done? Selling off our popular music heritage is like selling off the family silver or whoring out your grandmother - you just don't do it, you respect such things and keep them on a pedestal upon which they can remain pristine and deified.

The bigger picture shows an upstart technology that has come along without a care in the world and taken it upon itself to trivialise as much as possible in as short a time as possible.

Consider the figures that show more and more people are getting dumped by their partner via text messages. Something that should ideally be done with some dignity has now been engulfed by the entirely flippant attitudes of the modern mobile phone user.

'Old-fashioned' values like taste and respect must enter the equation somewhere, and while it is too late in the day to stop the proliferation of ring tones and the excessive use of mobile phones, we should draw a line in the sand. On the other side of that line will be things like Beatles songs, untouched by the hand of ring tone composers, and relationships not terminated in 160 characters or less.

Sony. Please. Let it be.