Ipod generation

What does the ipod mean to you?

_ fashion statement – Apple re-branded a couple of years ago, and bought out the vector style adverts with the well known catchy songs. TBWA Chait/Day an American company were responable for apples re-branding, there took over from apples long-time ad agency BBDO.
The adverts were aimed at young, hip young people with the popular songs such as gorillzas, Feel Good inc song. They used at the time a new and unique vector style not often used in adverts.

_features- ipod advertisements that its not just a music player, it has a hard drive to store data, calendars, and the newer generation ipod are becoming more and more advanced first there was the photo ipod and more recently the ipod will now play video, and films, a “vpod” as it is being nicknamed. The ipod seems to becoming more than just a simple music player.

Last year apple launched a phone with iTunes in collaboration with Motorola, it combines the phone and the digital music player, but surely if this collaboration advances into something more advanced then could that not replace the ipod? At the moment it is not that advanced it only holds about 100 songs, Apple has said that this phone is never going to compete with the ipod.

As I mentioned before about the adverts I feel this is a major reason why Apple has a majority share of the digital music market and at the moment nothing seems remotely in competition with them. The adverts are cleverly designed and aired at the times when there target audience will be watching television.



Anti ipod

_ As I was saying the ipod has various features to offer a user but are these features what we really want from an ipod, who wants to watch a video on a 320 x 240 pixel TFT display.
_ Most of the ipod apple offer have a hard drive to store the songs on, as well as data, but apple have said that by storing a lot of data or over using the hard drive it will break the hard drive. So what is the point of having a hard drive then, why offer these features but tell the consumer not to use them?

_ The battery on a ipod has been a major problem for apple over the years, the first generation ipod battery would only work for approx 18 months, and at that time is that irreplaceable, Apple official policy at that time was to tell there could replace there battery and they should just buy a new ipod. Which seemed to angry a lot of customers

_ Artist – this evident with two brothers who live in America, they were so annoyed with Apple refusal to change the battery in their ipod. There decided to create a cleaver addition to their ipod adverts, they would go round the town and stencil over ipod averts in white “Ipod irreplaceable battery lasts only 18 months” as you can see in the images, the stencils looks almost real.

_ There are lots of websites dedicated to anti ipod, one interesting one was a person who hah a ipod and something went wrong with it, and this person decided to start a website to ask people to donate money to him, so he could go buy a ipod then smash it up in the shop as soon as he had bought it. People actually donated money to this person.

­_ websites: ihateyouripod.com, antipode.com, smashmyipod.com

ipod adverts

Apple is well known for its striking, unique adverts; this is shown in the latest ipod adverts. These adverts were created by TBWA Chiat/Day, they created the latest bright colored adverts with the black/white dancing people who are listening to ipods. These adverts use a vector graphic style with rotoscoping. I feel that these adverts are the reason that the ipod has control of the digital music market; these adverts are aimed to make the ipod like a fashion accessory, like it is something u needs to fit in. Which seems to have been achieved by apple, they aimed to be a global fashion commoditie.

Source for latest apple advertisements:

http://www.adforum.com/creative_archive/2004/AW37_ANDY/simglist.asp?agency=4821

I pod advertising

"Unlike 99% of campaigns, the creatives' job here is simply not to blow the product's cool.
The campaign is simple and iconic, a subtle evolution of Apple's tried-and-tested formula. The only innovation is that it uses neon hues, rather than the traditional white backdrop.
Apple supremo Steve Jobs - who takes a hands-on approach to marketing - needed a little persuading to make even this revolutionary step, according to TBWA agency head Lee Clow.
The idea, he has said, was to use the iPod as a "window for the whole world to come to an Apple product".

In other words, once you've shelled out for your (all white) iPod, which by Apple standards is reasonably priced, it is only a short step to the all white (but pricey) world of the grown-up Apple user."
(from- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3321943.stm)

Adbusters- images

Images from adbusters.org

Anti ipod

- As I have been researching for this project I have found many websites which say bad stuff about ipods such as the battery does not last, the connections on the headphones fail etc.

- American guy, who stenciled over ipod advertisements,in a none obvious way. Ipodsdirtysecret.com- He was annoyed that the battery only lasted 18 months and are not replaceable, so he stenciled this over the posters.

- Apple says that the ipod have loads of features such as the hard drive to store data, but yet they discourage this because it breaks the hard drive. So they are saying it has these features but yet u can really use them.

- Adbusters.org – anti advertising company they do a similar thing to the American guy but with lots of major adverts and companies.


Fashion ipod

- Fashion commodities – you feel part of something when you have an ipod, but it’s really just a bit of plastic that plays music.

- Why do people want to purchase an ipod? Mainly because of there major advertising re-branding, they did this so they could become a global fashion commodities. Basically so they could interest people with there bright advertising and take over the digital music market, because everyone wants this latest fashion accessory.

Anti ipod

- As I have been researching for this project I have found many websites which say bad stuff about ipods such as the battery does not last, the connections on the headphones fail etc.

- American guy, who stenciled over ipod advertisements, in a none obvious way. Ipodsdirtysecret.com- He was annoyed that the battery only lasted 18 months and are not replaceable, so he stenciled this over the posters.

- Apple says that the ipod have loads of features such as the hard drive to store data, but yet they discourage this because it breaks the hard drive. So they are saying it has these features but yet u can really use them.

- Adbusters.org – anti advertising company they do a similar thing to the American guy but with lots of major adverts and companies.


Fashion ipod

- Fashion commodities – you feel part of something when you have an ipod, but it’s really just a bit of plastic that plays music.

- Why do people want to purchase an ipod? Mainly because of there major advertising re-branding, they did this so they could become a global fashion commodities. Basically so they could interest people with there bright advertising and take over the digital music market, because everyone wants this latest fashion accessory.

Look into people choosing ipod as a fashion accessory rather than for its function. how much does advertising influence your perception?

Look into how and why people are anti ipod

also look into adbusters and how they work.

i-pod generation - topic of interest

Commodities – what is people’s most prized possession? Most people’s possession is often a material thing, such as I-pod or mobile phones.

Possession – as in who owns peer to peer files – some people buy the files then they are passed around to other people, often the music files are broken up and different sections are downloaded from different sources.

The internet is fast becoming the place where people discover new music, a lot of recent artists are now releasing there music first on the internet, where many people download their music. This means that most people have heard of bands before they even release their first song. Is this the way forward for music? It seems that way as now we have a download chart as well as the normal music chart, this shows that downloads are been recognized as the real chart of the latest music.

Minitasking by German duo Schoenerwissen

Minitasking is a graphical browser for surfing the Gnutella network. Relying on the peer-to-peer standard Gnutella, this application provides a visual manifestation of the properties of dynamic and temporarily created networks. After connecting to the network, Minitasking represents other Gnutella servents it encounters as bubbles that vary in size and color depending on the amount of content they are hosting. When you enter a query for a file, the query is color-coded, and Minitasking then graphically “zaps” other servents, visualizing how many matches that servent has with another bubble that matches the color of the query. At the same time, queries received from other servents float around the screen. (http://www.transmediale.de/03/en/03/awardnom_detail.php?sect=2&id=11)
(http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?3459)

http://minitasking.com/
http://sw.ofcd.com/

'Siren's Voice' by plinq

This is some information that i found out about the project, but the main website doesnt exist anymore so there wasnt a lot of information to be found.

*A story in sound made up of 5 scenes and 1 song. A musician on tour hears the voice of a female fan in his head. She claims she is from the future, he thinks he is going mad.
Siren's Voice was originally distributed on Napster as mp3's disguised as existing song titles. People were encouraged to rename downloaded scenes into other existing song titles, creating in effect new 'entrypoints' to the story. In retrospect, Siren's Voice was probably the first 'legal' entertainment content on a p2p network. (http://www.brnrd.net/pages/brnrd_work.shtml#)

* There is a story hidden on Napster. Five soundscape scenes in MP3, disguised as existing song titles. Once you find the first, you can collect them all. You can listen to them in any order. And if you like them, be sure to help spread them further. Siren's Voice is the first story distributed via file sharing technology. It is an experiment aimed to show the potential of file sharing as a distribution channel. Siren's Voice is created by plinq (http://www.plinq.nl), an Amsterdam based digital entertainment company, with support from NetlinQ Framfab (http://www.framfab.nl). Inspired by the legendary radio plays from the Mercury Theatre and Under Milk Wood as well as modern electronic music (Scanner, Biosphere and the likes), we have tried to create a story world in sound that will grab the global audience of Napster users. ( info from:http://www.laslett.info/music/)

* This project is a call to participate in a sort of auditory »paper chase« or Klang-Schnitzeljagd, and shows how Napster & Co. can be used creatively for Hoerspiel and story telling. -The young techno musician Cyanide is haunted by a female voice which talks to him from the future, the year 2101. It promises him fame and fortune and even more. A mere imagination? - If you want to find out more about the voice and the woman you have to join Cyanide, immerse into the filesharing datajungle and search for the elements of the whole story. You will need a mp3-Player (for example Quicktime or Winamp). When you find a Hoerspiel-scene and play it back, you will get, in the window of your player, a hint under which title you can find the next scene on Napster. Anyway: The search is not easy and requires not only patience but also good online-connections. But the more users join the search and share their found scenes (under a slightly altered title) with the Napster-community, the more entrypoints into the Hoerspiel come into existence and help novices to jump in.( from: http://www.swr.de/swr2/audiohyperspace/engl_

version/audioart/projects/sirens_voice.html)

Atau Tanaka

The potential of Internet sound art is immense. It is allowing composers to have direct interaction with audiences. It usually necessitates that composers collaborate with artists of other disciplines. It breaks down geographic boundaries. It redefines the roles of composer, performer and audience.

Currently though, Internet sound art is plagued with a variety of problems. The net is still not good for live interaction due to time delays. The low bit rates required for streaming deteriorate sound quality. Interactive instruments only allow multiple-choice-type mouse-clicking by the audience, with no opportunities for creative subtlety. The audience is limited by their amount of computer memory, Internet connection speed, and availability of programs needed to participate in the piece.

Rather than trying to overcome or marginalize obstacles presented by the current limitations of Internet sound, Atau Tanaka's "MP3q" incorporates these limitations into the work. It accepts the current state of affairs and mirrors the social and time dynamic of the Internet. Tanaka calls his piece a "shared online sound space." The site itself avoids use of any graphics or other memory-hogging devices.

When a visitor enters the "MP3q" site he or she sees a track list. Each track is a series of URLs that link to MP3 files on other sites. The visitor selects a track and then sees the list of URLs inside a frame surrounded by images of stationary arrows. The visitor may click on one or more tracks at any time to begin streaming an MP3. The visitor glides the mouse around the screen to make the group of files move around the screen and become larger or smaller. These variants in the placement and size affect the gain (loudness or softness) of the files. Tanaka's concept allows participants to realize the mix in real-time on their own computers.
Anyone can contribute an MP3 link to the site by following simple prompts on the site. The contributed file must be low bitrate and available on a web server somewhere on the Internet.

Atau Tanaka was born in Tokyo, and was raised in the U.S. He came up in Silicon Valley in the 90's making music from virtual reality technology.
This interactive Internet soundsculpture can be kept growing by its users. Japanese composer Atau Tanaka designed a series of three-dimensional graphic-linear structures, consisting of web addresses. These lead to mp3-soundfiles, which exist on different servers worldwide.By gliding the mouse, the website's visitor can move the alphanumerical structure and experience it as a three-dimensional entity. The soundfiles appearing were composed and arranged carefully by the artist. By clicking on the selected web addresses, several streams are activated simultaneously and can be mixed to complex polyphony. The visitor of this site can keep the architecture growing in contributing with the web address of his or her own mp3-file, which Tanaka will then insert into the existing structure.

Stephen Vitiello

When Dia commissioned Vitiello to participate in its series of artists' projects for the web, he looked to the internet as a source and found himself thinking about non-musical sound archives. He soon zeroed in on physical, mostly natural sounds, which he then organized in accordance with the four elements: earth, air, wind, and fire. The resulting work serves as an interactive guide to these sometimes hard-to-find archives. Each site is represented by an audio sample that visitors can turn on or off by clicking as they draw on up to seventeen simultaneous tracks to devise a mix that might include a fruit fly courtship, an underwater volcano, poison frogs, and extracts from the fiery sounds of the Saturn 5 lift-off.

In addition, Vitiello created four new sound pieces generated in part from his collection of found web-based sounds. These compositions can be heard by clicking on icons taken from a Western representation of a Tibetan Stupa.¹ In this cosmology, the elements are ordered from the bottom as Earth, Water, Fire, and Air, with Ether as the fifth element. When a fifth element was included by ancient and medieval civilizations, it was usually described as space and often had a metaphysical dimension. In the nineteenth century, it was widely accepted in physics that a "luminiferous ether" existed-a theoretical, transparent, weightless, undetectable, and universal substance believed to act as the medium for transmission of electromagnetic waves. While this idea was ultimately disproved by Einstein's theory of relativity, it gave rise to the name "Ethernet," the standard for data transmission used by most networks, including the Internet. Bob Metcalfe, its accredited founder, explained "Ethernet was named, on May 22, 1973, for the luminiferous ether...an omnipresent passive medium of the propagation of electromagnetic waves, in our case, Internet packets.²"

Vitiello named his project after the ancient Western notion of four elements. The term Tetrasomia refers to the Doctrine of Four Elements written by Empedocles, the fifth-century BC philosopher, who first postulated that all matter is comprised of four "roots," or basic elements. A contemporary notion of "the fifth element" is also present in Tetrasomia: its content and context exist in the ether(net).

Music artists

The work of artists active on the net hinges on two concepts: the ramified spatial structure of sound information and the analogies between music files. 'Tetrasomia', for example, is a project by Stephen Vitiello: starting from four 'cardinal points' of sound Ð very short compositions of about a minute and a half each related to earth, water, air and fire Ð the surfer is guided to other sounds on the net, such as the frequencies from orbiting satellites or the twittering of certain birds that live in remote corners of the globe. The tracks do not cancel each other out during listening but can be layered and activated together form a small cross-section of sounds from the world put into a personal form. This sound panorama is possible thanks to a number of contributions outside the creation of the artist, who becomes a new point in a network concentrating the experiences of others.

A similar concept lies behind the sound sculptures of Atau Tanaka, who in 'mp3q' shows a file of addresses processed into a three-dimensional textual structure where the user constructs a form of polyphony by making the files sound in a certain order. The artist intends the user to contribute to the work by pointing to new addresses and this request for cooperation breaks down the traditional barriers between artist and audience. This direct interaction mingles the roles of 'creator' and 'user', thus enabling real development of ideas which draw their strength from the fact that they are created and approved by the public.

In 'Siren's Voice' by the media company 'plinq', the user is invited to take part in the plot of a story by locating its missing parts hidden in exchange networks. The story is structured so that some parts are located in tracks with apparently ordinary titles distributed on Peer-to-Peer networks and which can be recognized by working together, which enables the story to be completed. These search mechanisms have a structure of data flows which only materialize in the minds of those involved in the interaction. The antipodes of this approach is the art of constructing software showing real images inside the abstractions that are files and producing a sort of microscope showing the normally invisible processes of the formation of blocks of digital numbers.

'Minitasking', by German duo Schoenerwissen, follows this principle, working on a particularly large data flow generated by the Gnutella network. Coloured 'balls', as the artists call them, represent the content of the file in size and colour, bringing out their intrinsic instability by dynamically mapping the data involved.
(info from:http://www.neural.it/english/adonnammp3.htm)

* when users are sharing content there is no way to monitor who owns what. This makes it impossible to accurately figure out how much to pay the musicians and record labels--and the big music companies won't tolerate that.

* Finally, many files being shared on peer-to-peer networks are distributed without the permission of the person or company who owns the copyright on that work. Downloading, or making available for download, these copyrighted works can be a violation of federal law. Many copyright owners monitor P2P networks to find infringers, and large industry organizations have stated that they will file lawsuits against individual sharers. If you are sued, the damages can be significant.

What does the I-pod mean to you?

Jonny says “its music that he can take with him on his journey through life”
Martyn says "it means loads of songs"

Paul's favourite possession >

““What is your favourite posession?"
Eventually though I realised that my favourite posession was my iPod. Now I feel really shallow and material for saying so, but it's not in a "I love my iPod, I want everyone to know I have one and I could never live without it!" kind of way. I know I could live without one, I managed it for 21 years after all.

In thinking about it though, I realised just how much my iPod has been through with me. It's travelled all across the UK, it's been there when I have been walking in the rain and it's been there when I've been lying in the sun.
The realy reason that I feel so... connected to my iPod is because it knows how I'm feeling dependng on what I'm listening to:
So, if I where to be listening to drum and bass whilst being sat at my desk then I am probably trying to stay concentrated and motivate myself to keep working at whatever I am doing.

If I happened to be on a bus listening to my "EMO, i think" playlist then I'm probably really happy about where I have just been and who I have been with
So my iPod probably knows where I am emotionally, more than most of my friends do. “ (quote from “http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.
view&FriendID=36904565&blogMonth=1&blogDate=6&blogYear=2006 by Paul Coffield.)

Possession n the i-pod

Possession often refers to the act of simple ownership but is there more to it, is it about control of your things. When it comes to the possession of an I-pod is the main reason that it is so popular in the teen market because it is a fashion item. Or is it because it is the best ?
Most teenagers want to own a I-pod often people cant afford them, that why apple in 2004 bought out the I-pod shuffle a cheaper version of the I-pod, so they could have even more the digital music player market.

When I ask some people about why they feel the I-pod is an important possession to them, they didn’t say its because its expensive, a few said because it hold all their favourite music which they cant live with out. But I feel that the main reason it is important to people is because it is the must have technology at the moment and everyone recognises the white earphones. The I-pod has be come a major fashion accessorise in today’s world.

I-pod

- Digital music players introduced in 2001 for the mac then in 2002 for windows
- Easy to use interface oringinally featuring a circular scroll wheel that later became touch sentive and clickable.
- ACC – apples features audio format
- i-tunes there own software only software that connects with an I-pod. It also ensures that downloads from the apple website are only played so many times n copyed to cd so many times.
-hottest electronics device on the market. not been rivaled by anything else on the market
- Third generation i-pod sales skyrocketed wit the combination of effective advertising and celebrity endorsement making. i-pod became the most desirable fashion item

Types of peer to peer networks

Three major types of P2P network are:
Pure P2P:
Peers act as clients and server
There is no central server managing the network
There is no central router
Hybrid P2P:
Has a central server that keeps information on peers and responds to requests for that information.
Peers are responsible for hosting the information (as the central server does not store files), for letting the central server know what files they want to share, and for downloading its shareable resources to peers that request it.
Route terminals are used addresses, which are referenced by a set of indices to obtain an absolute address.
Mixed P2P:
Has both pure and hybrid characteristics

Peer to peer music sharing>

There are millions of these peer to peer site. P2p computer network is a network that relies on the computing power and bandwidth of the participants in the network rather than concentrating it in a relatively low number of servers.
Some networks such as Napster use a client-server structure and a peer to peer structure for others things. whereas some just use peer to peer for everything.

Virtual environment brief

Research and critically evaluate issues deriving from a synthesis of the technology and the quote. This should result in a unique presentation with a personal agenda. Create a distinct piece of multimedia to house your research and your ideas.

Within this project you must also make and present a piece of work to supplement your perspective, this should be housed within the framework you design and build.