Over the past couple of months I have been working on a side project helping a local music producer, Russ Hawthorne, setup a website for promoting an artist and sell over the web. The producer is just a friend-of-a-friend that needed some help, so being the helpful guy I am I offered; besides, he offered to pay me some too, which is always great. The site, delagrange.tv, is nothing too spectacular and just uses a canned e-commerce app. He just needed to get something operational to make sales and worthy of telling people to visit. I was not sure what to expect at first, but I was surprised at the quality of the songwriting and production. It is consistently good pop/rock music. Please do check it out.

I want Delagrange to succeed commercially so they can continue to provide good music. They already have a CD, but just put together a band to play live. So they do not have a fanbase to sell to yet. Therefore, they need promotion, but Russ is not really a promoter. Meanwhile, I have recently been exploring the new trend of blogging, RSS, and more recently audio blogging aka podcasting. Last week, I listened to Adam Curry's Daily Source Code and heard his call for independent musicians to provide royalty free music for use in podcasts in exchange for the promotion. I was able to convince Russ to donate a song or two, so we will be responding soon with a podcast under the banner of his new web portal called cincinnatirock.com (not much to see there at the moment).

I really miss the access to independent music that mp3.com provided back in the gay old nineties. I have not really jumped on iTunes.com, which I understand has quite a bit of independenent music. I think this podcasting can turn into a great distribution channel.