Something that’s occasionally fun to do as a pundit is to roll back into your archives a few years and see what the veracity of your predictions are.  Michael Sean Wright and I were on the phone this weekend chatting a bit about what he’s going to be doing at Blogworld Expo this year (he’ll be covering the event live for SiliconANGLE and recording video for Building43), and in the conversation, Jermaine Dupri came up (he’ll be sitting on a panel with Brian Solis as well as Soleil Moon-Frye and Anthony Edwards).

The name caught my attention, and I had to chuckle, because I wrote an editorial (as it turns out, almost exactly two years ago) entitled “Jermaine Dupri is a Corporate Tool.”

At the time, it didn’t get a lot of social media reaction because there weren’t a whole lot of places where conversation could break out over a post other than in the comments, but as I recall it did pretty well on Digg. The whole post was in reaction to a blog entry he penned over at the Huffington Post:

Today, he pontificates at Huffington Post on how completely unfair it is that iTunes offers consumers the abilities to purchase music as individual tracks, as opposed to entire albums. The blog posting is meant to be a rousing defense for Jay-Z and his decision to not let iTunes break up his new album American Gangster, but ends up showcasing much of what is wrong with the music industry.

In general, his original post read like a Luddite screed, railing against all manner of tech, but mostly at sharing on the Internet:

“All it’ll take is for Warner Music to say, “You know what, I’m with you,” for us to shut ‘em down. No more iPods! They won’t have nothin’ to play on their players! We can take back the power if we’re willing to sacrifice some sales to make our point.”

These days, though, it seems he’s much more at home on the Web, sharing not only his music freely via services like YouTube, but fully embracing almost all that is social media.

The best evidence of that is that he’ll be sharing the stage with social media PR star Brian Solis, but can also be evidenced by the fact he actively maintains a “Lifer Army,” the term he gives for fans of his frequent YouTube show “Livin’ the Life.”

Sounds a lot like a New Media enterprise we techies are mostly familiar with. Shades of the TWiT Army, anyone?

He maintains active conversations with the Lifers via YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and his personal blog.

It’s nice to see someone come out of the dark, particularly when they were such a vocal advocate a scant two years ago for the ‘dark side’ of the industry, even if it was out of an undeniable need to find another way to make feed himself now that the record industry has all but vanished.