My name is Kirk Lorange. I moved to Australia from Canada in 1975, living in Sydney for 20 years or so before moving north to Tamborine Mountain, inland from the Gold Coast, about 4 years ago. I am a fairly well known guitarist down here, specializing in slide guitar. If you live in Australia you hear me every night in various TV ads or sound tracks.

I also wrote a book a few years ago called PlaneTalk - The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book, which I have been self publishing -- with great difficulty and heartache -- until the Internet came along.

A couple of years ago I decided to try my luck marketing myself and my book on the net, seeing it as my last hope. I'm pleased to say that, for the first time in my career, I have found something that actually works, and for the first time, I feel like I'm in control.

The music industry has always been seething with middlemen, most of them inefficient, most of them greedy. One by one, the bastions of the industry are falling -- redundant in this new age of The Web. Big record companies, which have always been banks in disguise, loaning you the money to record, have lost their clout. Now for a small outlay, you can do all your recording at home straight to hard drive, or at least know somebody who has a studio set up you can hire for a reasonable rate.

The Internet is the ultimate publicist, a 24 hour, several page, full color ad promoting you and your products. You can point any interested party to your site for full bio, promo pictures etc.

Mp3 has made distributors redundant. People can now listen to your music at the click of a mouse. Even the pressing and printing of CDs and their artwork is no longer required, with services like Mp3.com's DAM CD.

Radio stations have lost much of their power and influence over what gets played -- nobody's really listening that much to the radio.

The playing field has been leveled.

We, my partner (ms) Clancy Mullins and I, have learned a lot about this medium since we hooked up to the Internet, mostly by trial and error, and we know from our own circle of friends and associates that most artists and bands have yet to take advantage of all the wonderful things you can do online. We have seen for ourselves the benefits of selling online, as opposed to hoping people will risk ordering by email; we learned the tricks of submitting to search engines, and come up with a few ourselves; we have seen the jump in the stats graph when a newsletter is delivered to the mail list, always a thrill. We now realize that the smartest thing we can do is offer our services to others for mutual benefit.

We have iMac computers and all the necessary software and hardware to deliver what we promise to deliver. We have recently re-invested in equipment because we know we can't go wrong, we know this internet thing ain't going away. Sales of my products continue to grow weekly, just through the millions more people coming on line. My book site gets thousands of hits a month, and growing. How do I know? I check my stats every day. Music lovers from all over the World download my songs and buy my DAM CDs. How do I know? I check my stats.

The fees associated with our services are really just for labor -- time put in by us -- and for the time we've already put in gaining the expertise. They are one off set-up fees (except for the maintenance option). The rest of it is free. Displaying a company's banner in exchange for a permanent web site, complete with guestbook, message board, mail list and online secure shop is not much to put up with. The mystery is how they can do it at all.

This project is only one of a few we will be working on in the near future, so bright we have to wear shades.