The digital domain of Rick Curran
I remember watching tiny embedded video streams from news channels and reloading web pages over slow dialup internet in my old office. Strange to think that there was no Facebook then, no Twitter, no iPhones. News websites were still the way to find out about breaking news.
It was strange to see all of those events taking place somewhere I’d visited on an art college trip just a few years prior.
Apple had their September “It’s Glowtime” keynote event yesterday announcing updated products like Apple Watch, AirPods and iPhones.
The new iPhone Pro phones have a new cinematic slow motion filming mode which records at 120FPS 4K video, they demonstrated this mode with a music video for the band “The Weeknd” where they had them sing the song at 4x so that when it is played at the slow motion 24FPS rate the vocals are played in realtime:
(There’s also another behind the scenes video with a bit more about how it was shot).
It reminded me of the video for the song “Drop” by The Pharcyde which was directed by Michel Gondry. The whole video was shot with them performing everything backwards, so the band had to learn to sing the words as they would sound in reverse so that when the video is played in reverse it looks like they’re singing normally, kind of wild!
(Here’s a link to watch the Pharcyde “Drop” video on YouTube in case the embed isn’t working properly).
I’ve seen a lot of discussion online in the last few years about the increasing price of gig tickets. Huge tours by artists like Taylor Swift and the current (at-the-time-of-writing) buzz about Oasis getting back together for a tour in 2025 have seen massive ticket prices along with high demand for tickets. But even for not-quite-so-massive artists gig prices are way higher now than they used to be.
Inflation obviously affects the prices of products and services etc and gigs are no exception, but why have gig prices risen from an average of £15-20 in the mid 1990s to the now £100+ (or way more!) that we see now? If you look back over that same period from the late 1990s to now there are some key factors to consider.
Peer-to-peer file-sharing services like Napster allowed users to download and share music for free. This massively disrupted the traditional music business, lead to a significant decline in CD sales and revenue for artists and record labels.
Ok, it’s not 100% accurate to put the blame on Napster alone, but it is the poster-child of the peer-to-peer file sharing era. Within the two years after it was released in 1999 it grew to over 60 million users sharing files with one another. Napster technically was sued out of existence by the music industry by 20021, but by then there were many more P2P file sharing options available so the horse had bolted from the stable by that point.
With the spread of P2P file sharing and increasingly faster internet speeds consumers stopped buying physical albums as much, both artist’s and record label’s sales revenue plummeted.
In 2001 Apple released the iTunes music store and also the iPod. iTunes brought in a legitimate, easy way for people to buy digital music and was seen in many ways to be a much needed source of revenue for recording artists and record labels and a way to fight back against piracy with DRM protected audio tracks which were tied to people’s iTunes account and iPods.
iTunes definitely did help in many ways but even Steve Jobs recognised the futility of fighting against file sharing and published his “Thoughts on Music”2 letter in 2007 calling for the four big music labels to licence their music without requiring DRM. The main argument being that DRM was really only making a hostile environment for legitimate music buyers and preventing them from playing music on their various devices, whereas users of file sharing had no such restrictions. The major record labels eventually conceded this point, and in 2009 iTunes started selling songs DRM-free.
Income from recorded music was still declining, so artists increasingly relied on live gigs, tours, and merch sales to make up for lost revenue. Gigs became a more central part of an artist’s income.
Pay-to-own digital music platforms like iTunes received competition from newer subscription based streaming platforms like Spotify. Instead of buying music outright people could pay a monthly fee and get access to a huge library of music, this provided similar access to music that people experienced when using P2P file sharing services (“I can play almost any song I can think of!”). Sales of individual tracks and albums decreased, in 2015 Apple responded to this change in consumer demand with the launch of Apple Music.
These streaming services provided legal and consumer-friendly alternatives to piracy, but the revenue to artists compared to physical sales was lower as it was on a per-stream basis3. So for many artists this further reinforced the need to tour more extensively as a way to try and bring in revenue.
An interesting side-effect of such widespread access to recorded music through streaming services is that it’s easy for people to hear any music they want, but this in turn has actually helped to increase demand to see artists performing live4. As such live performances are increasingly the primary source of income for artists.
As people’s desire to see live gigs has increased, sellers of tickets for live events have often used dynamic pricing models where ticket prices change based on demand. Additionally, options like VIP packages and other exclusive experiences provide other opportunities to charge a premium for tickets to live music events. The rise of online ticket resale platforms has enabled a secondary market leading to some of the even crazier ticket prices we’ve seen for gigs by some popular artists.
You can draw a line from the de-valuation of recorded music that came with Napster / P2P file sharing to the present-day expensive ticket prices, it’s an interesting example of cause and effect / unexpected consequences. Napster set off a chain reaction that disrupted the music industry, transformed how artists earn money, leading to a greater dependence on live performances and the much higher ticket prices for concerts and gigs we see today.
I posted an image of this on my Dribble account the other day along with a similar bit of writing, but I thought I’d should really add a blog post about it here too as it’s one of my favourite devices, plus I’m trying to write a bit more frequently on my blog again.
The Nokia N-Gage is one of what I call the “Handheld Heroes”, these are 12 handheld devices that I consider to be icons of their time and are symbolic of a particular point of technological change in the last 30 – 40 years (ok, the pencil is quite a bit older than that ?). The N-Gage was released around 2003, so over 20 years old at the time of writing this(!).
The N-Gage was an amazing device and in many ways was ahead of its time. Long before Pokemon Go was a thing Nokia explored the idea of location-based / location-aware games, but mobile connectivity was very limited, very slow and very expensive at that time. I recall thinking about how amazing it would be to be able to walk around with a device and have a constant connection to the internet, but it was a long way off from the ubiquity of 4G / 5G today. So whilst there were a few location based games for the N-Gage this lack of affordable mobile data meant it had limited appeal.
Nokia Push was one of the coolest initiatives that they tried, basically there were two aspects, one for skateboarding and one for snowboarding. Both involved using sensors attached to the skateboard or snowboard and then tracking the telemetry such as rotations, flips, height, speed etc. For skateboarding the intention was that you could compete with someone in a different location in the world, both skaters could see from their phones which tricks the other had done:
For snowboarding the intention was to track telemetry such as height, speed, rotations, impact etc:
So the N-Gage wasn’t successful in location based gaming but it definitely had some of the seeds of what was yet to come, Nokia Push explored that even further. Yep, the N-Gage was a weird device to make calls on (especially the first version, see “Sidetalking!“), but talking was not what was really intended for, and I loved mine. What’s not to love about a phone that can play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater?
It’s interesting seeing the speed at which “AI” based generative media has been developing over the last few years, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion etc. OpenAI recently announced “Sora”, their new text-to-video AI model which can generate videos up to one minute long.
The example videos in their showreel video on YouTube are pretty impressive, go take a look if you haven’t done so already:
There’s definitely a bit of an “uncanny valley” quality about some of them though. They made me think of the Netflix series “Is it Cake?” where contestants have to make a cake that looks like a real object with the aim of fooling the judges who have to try and pick the fake cake-based item out of a lineup with three other real versions of the object.
These cake-versions of real objects most-often look incredible and are created using amazing cake-making techniques and edible materials, they really do look like amazing realistic edible sculptures.
In the show the judges are not allowed to go close up to view the objects but can only view them from about 15-20 feet / 4.5-6 metres away. At that distance it is much harder to notice the subtle inconsistencies, e.g. not-so-straight edges or odd surface textures (or smell!) that might give away the illusion. But if they were allowed to go close up then the illusion would likely be much more apparent.
It feels a bit like this with a lot of generative AI content too, looking at it broadly – especially on a small device screen – they do look incredible, but if you look closer and carefully you can spot some of the same not-so-straight edges and / or unusual textures (and sometimes extra fingers / legs!) that makes you think, “That’s a cake!“.
Over time though I’m sure it is going to get increasingly more difficult to tell the difference between these and real images / video as the subtle giveaways such as soft / fuzzy edges and extra limbs are reduced. However, even with the current issues it does already present a big challenge when it comes to evaluating the authenticity of the images and videos we see online.
OpenAI does make a clear statement when it comes to the “safety” of their tools and aims to prevent them from being used to create content that is hateful or contains misinformation, but the challenge will be when these types of models become more widely accessible by companies / organisations who don’t hold to these higher standards. It’s certainly going to be a bit of a wild west out there.
(Some of the AI stuff also reminded me of this old “Mr Soft” TV advert for Trebor mints too!).
This post by Steven Sinofsky about the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Apple’s changes to iOS in response to it is worth reading, it’s long but worthwhile.
He was at Microsoft when they faced a lot of regulatory impact from EU and others in the early 2000s so has some good insight:
https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/215-building-under-regulation
I first used a Macintosh when I went to college in 1989, I had just left school and started an art & design course. The college was a little behind in technology so even though it was 1989 and there were some more modern Macs these machines were a bit older so probably SE’s and SE30’s. Even though they were old these were amazing, I remember using MacPaint to draw with the various tools and then printing it out on the Apple LaserWriter printer. In hindsight it is obviously so low-tech compared to now but it was incredible.
Prior to using the Mac I had used computers at home, as far back as about 1981 we had a Commodore Vic 20 and then a Commodore 64. So I had tried doing things on those, entering programs in from computer magazines and attempting to write BASIC programs myself. I remember thinking at one point that it would be great if there was an easier way to work with computers, nothing specific but just that entering text into programs seemed hard and long-winded. So when I first used a Mac in 1989 it was a bit like a light came on and it all made so much sense that this is how computers should work.
Here is my annual “iPhone view” video for 2023, basically I compile all images either taken directly with my iPhone, screenshot or copied onto it in 2023 and then make a video out of it.. This year’s video is 3 minutes and 37 seconds long.
As with last year’s video I played around with GarageBand to make an audio track to go with it, this way I can make the video and audio whatever length I want it and get them to work, I kind of like the way it came out.
There are now 14 years of “iPhone view” videos in my “iPhone view…” playlist.
This was made a few years ago but “Webamp” is an awesome blast from the past!
Winamp2-js is an HTML5 / Javascript version of Winamp made by Jordan Eldredge:
If you’ve seen the new Martin Scorsese film “Killers of the Flower Moon” you might find these two podcast episodes on the “Cautionary Tales” podcast interesting: