As seen on Motorola.com: “Delegates at this year’s VLF heard from, Gerd Leonhard, described by the Wall Street Journal as one of the world’s leading futurists in the world, and author of The Future of Content (2011). Gerd outlined his vision for the future of our industry over the next three to five years and, like us, he focused on the shift of power from corporation to the consumer and how we need to adapt.

Power has shifted to the consumer

The emergence of social media has given power back to the consumer to share, consume and, most importantly, influence opinion and behaviour. Twitter, for example, is the new CNN and, once Twitter adds video, it will become the main source for breaking news – 2 minutes compared to an average of 50 minutes to broadcast a new story on TV. Peer-to-peer news will drive the modern paradigm, solely driven by consumers – something that telcos and content providers need to figure out how to capitalise on. We’re in a data-driven, social economy – Facebook accounts for 10 per cent of all web traffic – and companies like …read on.”

As seen on Wired UK: “At the Spot music conference in Århus, Denmark, musician and futurist Gerd Leonard discussed a series of possible futures for the music business.

Leonhard isn’t a fan of how the record industry has been run over the last decade or so. “The whole economy of music is based on big companies owning the rights. It’s unsustainable,” he said, comparing the major record labels to big oil companies. “Do big oil companies represent nature?” he asked. “Of course not. Do the big record labels represent music? Probably not.”

Leonhard sketched out the reasons why people pirate music, blaming high costs and a lack of legal alternatives, and he also argued that cracking down on filesharing doesn’t benefit artists. “We had 52,000 people sued in Europe over copyright infringement,” he said. “That earned nothing for the artists. Only the lawyers.” But Leonhard is optimistic, arguing that music is simply migrating into something larger. “The business model of merely selling ‘copies’ of music is…read on.”