Our para­noia is often worth revis­it­ing decades later. Here is, in sev­eral parts, Orson Welles (who knows a bit about para­noia after all) and a fas­ci­nat­ing, for mostly the wrong rea­sons, doc­u­men­tary ver­sion of Alvin Toffler’s mas­sive ‘70s seller, Future Shock, now largely forgotten:

This week I’ve uploaded (or to be exact, asked to have uploaded) a 2009 remas­ter of the, if I say so myself, clas­sic 1982 Scream­ing Meemees album, If This Is Par­adise, I’ll Take The Bag . We’ve added a few extra tracks, the sin­gles and one off bits that helped define one of the biggest New Zealand bands of the 1980s, includ­ing See Me Go, the first NZ sin­gle to go to num­ber one.

It’s avail­able on Ampli­fier, and shortly on iTunes and eMu­sic. And maybe in a phys­i­cal for­mat at some stage, but that’s increas­ingly unlikely.

There is a bit of a his­tory of the band and my involve­ment with them here.

When I first looked at remas­ter­ing this album some three years back (and talked to a cou­ple of band mem­bers about doing it, with a very pos­i­tive response) I con­sid­ered that this album would come out in some sort of rather attrac­tive CD pack­age, with a sec­ondary role for the dig­i­tal release on iTunes, Ampli­fier and eMu­sic. Even, I, a rea­son­ably, I hope, informed observer of the record­ing indus­try nat­u­rally assumed a phys­i­cal for­mat would be the pri­mary format.

How things change. Today, the CD for­mat is really only loosely required on a pack­age like this..ask any­one who’s done one a reis­sue of recent..even the beau­ti­ful and highly desir­able ones like the New Order or Buz­zcocks re-masters if they sold any appre­cia­ble quan­tity (and the reis­sue mar­ket is the one niche where CDs might still have legs) and the answer will likely be pre­dictably depress­ing. You are more likely to see a return from a rev­er­ently pack­aged and pressed vinyl edi­tion in 2009 than a CD.

In the US this week EMI announced that the new Rob­bie Williams album will only be avail­able in dig­i­tal for­mats. There will be no phys­i­cal for­mat release at all, which, even if Rob­bie is not the star in the US he is every­where else, is quite a thing. No phys­i­cal. No requirement.

Indeed the forth­com­ing Bea­t­les remas­ters are widely being spo­ken of as the format’s last gasp, it’s last major release, in the US at least, and even if that’s over­stat­ing things a lit­tle, the fact that it’s increas­ingly hard to even buy a CD in many big Amer­i­can cities means that it’s rel­e­vance to the mar­ket­place is shrink­ing at a faster rate than even the hard-format opti­mists predicted.

It’s almost over, or at least you can see over the hori­zon to a land beyond it, and with it goes the album and thus the last ves­tiges of any hope the major record com­pa­nies have of sur­viv­ing as they are. With­out the dol­lar value of the album, the record com­pa­nies are, to put it politely, rather fucked.

Which brings us to the CMX, the new wunder-format that the record com­pa­nies have spent god knows how much money invent­ing over the recent years. Not only is this sup­posed to be the sav­iour of the for­mat the record labels, or at least the big ones with their bloated infra­struc­tures and rather hun­gry share­hold­ers, need to sur­vive, it’s also, and one must assume rather arro­gantly (who, the majors? arro­gant?) and unwisely, tak­ing on of the few growth areas the record­ing indus­try has left for it’s recorded mas­ters, the dig­i­tal store owned by Apple, which we all know as iTunes, as Apple have their own pro­pri­etary for­mat in the wings and are unlikely to roll over in response to what is clearly a power re-grab from the big four.

Yep, every­body is try­ing to rein­vent the album.

And you can’t help feel­ing that’s like try­ing to give CPR to a stuffed Dodo. It’s another don’t you bloody well get it moment? Like Nap­ster, like the law suits, like the rise of iTunes.

Well clearly no, they still don’t.

They album rather rapidly died this decade, pri­mar­ily because that’s the way the buy­ing pub­lic wants it. They want tracks, they want songs, they want the dig­i­tal equiv­a­lent of the old 45rpm sin­gle, but instead of being told that ‘this is the sin­gle’ they like the abil­ity to choose which per­sonal sin­gle they want. Which is why, despite the much touted gloom, which really just trans­lates to ‘our dol­lar sales are down’, unit sales of tracks and, yes, CD albums..i.e. The sale of one unit, as desired by the cus­tomer, are up last year dri­ven by mostly non-album sales.

And the UK music indus­try was up 4.7% in 2008. Which is prob­a­bly a more impor­tant, and vastly more cred­i­ble, fig­ure than the bil­lions of lost sales touted by indus­try bod­ies year in and year out.

So back to the CMX. Boy does this feel last ditch and des­per­ate, almost like a sui­cide note from a bro­ken and largely unfix­able busi­ness model whose only answer is to try and quickly rein­vent the past. Bang­ing a bit of art­work and a whole album in a sin­gle file is really not going to fix any­thing, nor, I think is it going to prove exceed­ingly attrac­tive to a gen­er­a­tion who is now accus­tomed to get­ting their add-ons to the music they are lis­ten­ing too from a web site, or via their wired held-held device as they may choose, with­out hav­ing to lis­ten to the extra­ne­ous tracks they really don’t want.

Of course peo­ple of my gen­er­a­tion, myself included, still crave long play­ers, and bemoan the loss of the enjoy­ment of delv­ing into an album to find that lost gem, but I feel our time is almost passed. And now you find those gems on blogs, on a myr­iad of sites or from word of mouth. Which is where I mostly get my music from now and I very rarely want or need to play an album despite the need of the record com­pa­nies for us all do do so.

Tom Yorke agrees.

In the mean­time, The Scream­ing Meemees sound rather won­der­ful again right now. Any track you want, or the whole damned album…

Fas­ci­nat­ing piece on the decline of the mono­lith from Redmond:

Today that is sim­ply no longer the case. Microsoft has lost all but a sliver of this entire mar­ket. Peo­ple who love com­put­ers over­whelm­ingly pre­fer to use a Mac today. Microsoft’s core prob­lem is that they have lost the hearts of com­puter enthu­si­asts. Reg­u­lar peo­ple don’t think about their choice of com­puter plat­form in detail and with pas­sion like nerds do because, duh, they are not nerds. But nerds are lead­ing indicators.

[From Dar­ing Fire­ball: Microsoft’s Long, Slow Decline]

Can Win­dows 7 halt the decline, does any­one care about Office 2010? The answer to both those ques­tions seems to be s fairly strong no (and I’m writ­ing this on a Mac, but think the iPhone is a pretty toy when put next to a Black­berry or a Pre so I’m no iDisciple).