It is with sadness we heard that independent music distributor Pinnacle has closed down - sad for all those have lost their jobs, and of course the distributed indie labels that now have to figure out how to get product into stores in the most important season.

Digital distribution from the likes of AWAL etc will help bridge some of the gap, but the damage will be done to the CD business. AIM (of whom we are "Friends") are actively trying to sort the mess. Not good for a music biz already going through turbulence.

Facebook has announced that the company has seen users of its mobile site, m.facebook.com, jump from 5 million to 15 million this year. The most recent change made to the site, allowing comments to be posted on status messages from your phone, resulted in more than 1 million mobile posts in the first 24 hours.

While these numbers are still relatively small compared to the total number of Facebook users (under 10%), it's huge for mobile social networking. Facebook has a decent mobile site, and the success proves that its users are embracing the benefits of networking anywhere, at any time.

As New Media Age reports today, record label EMI plans to launch a portal for selling and streaming music before the end of the year. Had to read that twice.

The business-to-consumer service will reside on EMI.com and will feature a mixture of paid and free content. It may also include non-EMI artists.

According to reports the portal is not intended to be a rival to Apple's iTunes, Amazon.com or MySpace but will instead be used as an experimental 'consumer lab' for testing new digital media formats and collecting data.

Well let's see - a major label owned "portal" featuring only that label's artists - "not competing" - ok let's put this in other words: A waste of time and money.

If this sounds brutal, we know what we're talking about coming out of the major label landscape (admittedly before everyone found MySpace). It's been tried before: consumers won't "provide data" voluntarily for this offer, any decent retailer will have a multifold of quality data and understanding of consumers, and the worst will be the presentation: every artist is great, every track is wonderful, they'll have all equal web space and all cost more than usual to download - as to not "upset" real-world digital retailers.

Come on EMI, spend some of that budget on decent mobile campaigns and the rest to sign new talent!

Forrester Research's annual report (US) on interactive marketing finds that only 28% of marketers are using mobile marketing - and a full 36% say they have no plans to. Meanwhile, 15% said they don't know their goals for mobile marketing.

With all the talk of mobile advertising, content and overall mobile marketing, it's easy to see why.

On the one hand, there's "mobile advertising", i.e. simple banner or text ads on mobile sites - not likely to generate any excitement for marketers having a wide range of other creative channels available.

What most marketers (not our clients of course!) still don't realise is that mobile shouldn't be viewed as a marketing delivery platform.

It should be viewed as a direct response mechanism to the commercial messages they're running in other media - in print, broadcast, outdoor, direct mail, web and more. Response and effectiveness couldn't be easier to track. There are no privacy issues because interactions are consumer-initiated. And consumers are able to act on offers right at the point of impression, from anywhere, at the right time.

It should be more of a no-brainer than listing a URL. Yes it took a good decade until companies started putting their websites on marketing materials. but why wait another 10 to go mobile?

And marketers might realise this if there wasn't so much useless noise in the mobile space. Yet another barcode reader campaign, bluetooth spamming, mobile application that takes 10 minutes to download?

Let's focus on WHAT WORKS. Because then it DOES.

PS: If this sounds like a rant, so be it - on a day seeing the FTSE 100 swing up and down like a yoyo, the reality is we all still need to communicate and market and sell - or do you want to miss the Christmas season while watching the bankers doing their dance? Thought so.

Congratulations to our client SonyBMG who have just been shortlisted for the BT Digital Music Awards. This nomniation is for the Michael Jackson 25th Anniversay of Thriller online campaign, with the mobile content elements of this campaign running on STARtxt. Pleased we could be of help so far, and fingers crossed for the finals!