Who is in control of your brand?

The music industry and internet industry have been butting heads for years on the issues of music piracy on the internet and lost revenues for record labels and artists (not that artists get much of it anyway).

A few models have been put together, like the 3 strikes law and some other subscription models, however, neither industry has come to an agreement without a fight, and Australia is still to decide on a strategy.

It’s clear in my mind that the music industries old world model is quickly dying, someone needs to show leadership to bring forth some new ideas and ways to monetise the industry in an ever digitised world.

UPDATE (9.20pm) File sharing is perceived by the music industry as music piracy without exception, in this case it isn’t, but it’s something the industry just can’t get over.

I was therefore excited today to read that Bacardi and Groove Armada announced the launch of a completely new approach called B-Live Share which embraces music file sharing.

From Reuters UK

Mark Earls seems to agree with me on this one…

Bloggers write about things they think are important, and maybe other people will care or not. To help build a stronger more considered ‘story’ some bloggers link to external content, images, blogs, videos etc. This process involves searching to find high quality reference materials, in an attempt to make that process easier ‘Zemanta‘ has been developed.

Zemanta automatically recommends related articles and images based on the content of your blog as you’re writing it.

Its a great idea, however, the quality of the recommendations is key, and as this is my first post using it, I’m going to include all the recommended links – so you can be the judge.

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Right now it supports:

• WordPress.com
• Self-hosted WordPress.org 2.1+
• Blogger.com
• TypePad
• Ning
• MySpace
• LiveJournal
• MovableType
• Tumblr
• Drupal

Great idea, what do you think?

Although satisfying and distilling, Twitter’s 140 chars is no longer sustainable. More to the point I’m starting to realise that I should start dumping random thoughts somewhere.

I’ve also stumbled accross a couple of people’s ‘identity’ sites which basically link you off to everything thats relevant… Most notably Steven Noble’s http://snoble.net/, I love the simplicty.

So right now I’m setting up http://www.simontsmall.com/ - wish me luck.