Hello.

I am Laurence Simon, known in Second Life as Crap Mariner.

I wanted to share with you a project that I have been working on called the Tunes inSL Gallery.

I really like the live music scene here in Second Life. All around the clock, there's always someone performing, and so many different styles of music - folk, rock, country, classical, jazz.

If you're opening a new island or planning an event, the odds are you're going to have a live musician there to help promote it.

They are my friends, I respect them deeply, and I wanted to come up with a way to give something back.

Last year, I received an iTunes gift card. I'm not easy to shop for - kind of hard to imagine, right?

Well, I didn't want any new music out there - I wanted music from Second Life musicians.

So, I posted on my site a call for links to Second Life musicians on iTunes, and that's what I bought.

Others did so too, and it got me to thinking. Why not create a catalog of all that music for the next holiday season?

Sure enough, I've gotten the word out, and all these performers have agreed to appear in the gallery on Edloe Island. Every album cover is a link to their page in iTunes for listening to clips form their albums, reading reviews, and buying them.

Let those sites do all the grunt work, right?

You get their music, they get the royalties to help pay those holiday bills.

Not only do I have a catalog for iTunes, but also one for Amazon on the region called Selby, run by Hulaboom Voom

There's plenty of room for more performers, and I'm hoping that these places are packed with people using their gift cards to buy music to ring in the new year with.

And if you're not in Second Life, I created a web catalog of the links, too. riaa.isfullofcrap.com

I guess we'll see how well it works. Maybe we'll make this a permanent thing.

This is Laurence Simon, reporting from Edloe Island and Selby.