Today MySpace announced that they are laying off approximately 2/3 of their international work force, which given the success of companies such as Twitter and Facebook and the lack of any notable changes in MySpace recently, is a bit alarming. In fact, I’m personally starting to wonder just how much longer MySpace can stay afloat, as are many other people on Twitter.

After scanning the blogosphere this morning, it became apparent that many musicians and artists are currently leveraging MySpace as a means to reach their fans and promote their material. Obviously, if MySpace were to fold, that avenue would disappear, which for a small artist could be rather catastrophic.

Given that Dale and I have a lot of experience in the music industry, namely with the previous work we’ve done on both Matthew Good and Jessie Farrell’s website (which caused us to both to be nominated for Country music awards last year), we thought maybe this might be an opportunity for us to get our feet wet again. So to that end, we want to offer a special deal to musicians looking to have their own personal websites developed.

At this point in time we’re looking at starting some new projects in the month of August. We figure that if we can get a couple musicians who would like to move to having their own websites, we could potentially merge some of the development together such that we can exploit some economies of scale, thus saving everyone a bit of money. Some of the cool things we’ve done in the past that are music related are:

• We developed one of the first iPhone integrations with the iTunes music store, such that music purchases could be made on the iPhone in real-time while viewing the site
• We’ve integrated lists of future concert dates into deployments
• We’ve done merchandise integration into a custom eCommerce solution
• We’ve integrated social network tools such as Facebook and Twitter into sites

In addition, we’re currently working on some exciting new projects in the realm of ticketing and touring, so obviously we can potentially tie all of that together as well, hopefully providing a really unique music experience catered to each individual artist.

So if you’re a musician and you’ve been holding off an setting up your own site, perhaps now is a great time to start planning the next phase of your online identify. If you’re interested in talking to us a bit more about this, please drop us a line via our contact form and we can go from there.