Helping musicians promote and sell their music worldwide with music stores such as iTunes, Amazon etc

After working with Tina Bridgman (check out Tina's music on last.fm) to design and produce the artwork and packaging for her third album, In the Company of You, I really wanted to do more to help her to promote her music. I listen to all three of her albums (Hearth and Deep Sun Inside) a lot and, because I really like the music and because I wanted to see her become more sustainable with it, I really wanted to find other avenues for distribution and promotion.

Last year I was finally able to set up the networks I needed to effectively promote and sell Tina's music online around the world. Lucid Design now has the means to help musicians get their music onlne and into over a dozen electronic music stores including iTines (NZ, Australia, US, UK etc), Amazon (downloads and CDs on-demand), Napster and more. In an effort to further help Tina bring her music to the world, we have also made all three albums available on last.fm with full track streaming which is pretty cool. This allows people to listen to her music and share it with others who might like it. If users like it, they can purchase one or more tracks from iTunes or Amazon music stores and royalties go to the musician.

It's a pretty exciting period for self-produced musician because, while there are more musicians producing more music than ever before, there are also many more really neat ways to get the music out there.

I'm really inspired and excited by the options we now have available for our clients and am continuing to expand our networks to make it even easier to help with music sales around the world.

Some of the things coming up include:

• Streaming music players making it really easy to embed tracks (or whole) albums on a web site with links to the iTunes music store to buy and download
• Further networking and music sharing on the iPhone and iPod touch
• On-demand CD production (this avoids the hassle and expense of producing large numbers of CDs and packaging; not to mention the shipping and distribution costs to get them around the world)

If anyone would like more info on what we can offer, please feel free to get in touch.