1990s Ringtones

The Bollywood sound of the 1990s

The 1990s contributed 40 ringtones to the ToneVault library, sourced from 20 Hindi films across the decade. The decade's most-represented voice in our cuts is Lata Mangeshkar, who appears on 8 of these tracks. Behind the scenes, the most-credited music director here is Jatin-Lalit with 12 compositions. The single film whose soundtrack we mine most heavily for ringtones from this decade is DDLJ, with 5 separate ringtone cuts.

The 1990s were Bollywood’s romance renaissance. Yash Chopra, Aditya Chopra, Sooraj Barjatya, and Karan Johar built the modern wedding-film template, and the music — Jatin-Lalit, Nadeem-Shravan, A. R. Rahman, Anu Malik — defined the soundtrack of an entire generation.

These ringtones are the most-requested category on ToneVault for Indians in their thirties and forties — these are the songs people grew up to.

Mood-wise, the 1990s in our catalogue leans retro — a fitting reflection of where Hindi film music's gravitational centre sat during this period. The 955,354 combined downloads on this page are a useful proxy for which moments of the decade still feel current on a 2026 phone. The high-download cuts tend to be the songs that have outlived the films they came from — the kind of tracks that play at weddings and family gatherings decades after release, and that feel right as a ringtone precisely because they've never quite stopped being part of the cultural conversation.

If you're building a ringtone collection that maps to a specific period of your own life — the years you were in college, the years your kids were small, the years you worked your first job — pick the decade that lines up and scroll. The right ringtone is almost always a song you already half-remember.