By Mehka

When I was a young man just coming up in the hip-hp culture, the distributor of all the music I purchased was Mattapan Music. It was a closet sized store covered in posters of EPMD, Kwame and Shabba Ranks and always smelled like incense. Those were the days.

Today, even the moms and pops stores have gone digital. Many physical stores and becoming virtual as the ease and cost effectiveness of selling on the net makes more and more sense to business owners.

Newartistsonline.com founders saw that trend and decided to build a platform that could accommodate new artists and labels who want to sell their own music.

"We started about three years ago," said Harold co-founder of Newartistsonline.com Along with is partner Carlos, newartistsonline.comis an online store that allows independent artists and labels to sell their music on their own terms.  In a short three years,

newartistonline.comhas blossomed into over a thousand artists and labels all sharing space on the shelf.

"It's an easy sign up process. Log on and check out our agreement. You get a web page with a picture and a bio, you can show your CD covers and have one minute samples of all the songs on the CD played. We do all the shipping and handling and pay you, the artists. Its a 70/30 split,"said Howard

Not just stuck to hip-hop, the site features everything from rappers to gospel.

"Our background is hip-hop and R&B, but being on the web, we could offer a platform for everyone can participate. If there's a rock artists, or a gospel artists. When we first started, we didn't know a lot about the different genre's that we sell. We let the artists show us how to do it."

And you can sell you rmixtapes out there for all you up coming Dj's. "W have an service agreement for artists who have mixtapes. We have a category for dj's and they sell their music on there."

Its the personal contact that Newartistonline shows to the customer is what keeps people logging on. "Been up for a little over two years and we have over a thousand artists of different genres. We a two man operation. Most of our contact have come through the internet, or myspace.

Fortunately for artists, its another site to sell their music. Usually, an artists is set-up with other websites that do what we do, but Newartistsonline.com we give that personal attention to all our artists and customers. We give out our phone numbers, we're a customer friendly market"

And being a customer friendly company, they know that they have to give the customer what they want. So expect big updates to the site in 08.

"We're going to be selling Digital downloads and ringtones. There will be a

newartistsonline.comDVD coming out and we'll be selling the independent films on the site too," said Howard. But he wouldn't let all the plans out the bag. Some stuff you just have to find out for yourself by logging on.

"We got other big plans, but that's the first phase, but we got a lot of opportunities for new artists," laughs Howard "I just can't tell you all of them just yet."

Go see what you might have been missing and log onto newartistonline.com