The web is changing the way musicians are marketed, and the way artists and fans connect. If you are in a band or into music merchandise, you need to check out Tunipop. Currently in beta, Tunipop bills itself as “the online source for discovering all forms of music-related fan gear and interacting with other members.”

Tunipop is not a retail outlet or a source for CDs, DVDs or digital downloads. Rather, Tunipop strives to help fans easily find official sources of available music merchandise like T-shirts and posters. It also helps artists market their fan gear more effectively.

The Merchandise Resources section directly links artists to apparel printing, on-tour merchandise and fan club management services, just to name a few.

The site will soon have about 5,000 pages of content which will mainly consist of artist listings within Tunipop’s Go2Merch directory. Coldplay, Elvis Costello, Alicia Keys and the Beastie Boys are some of the artists represented. Tunipop will eventually grow this directory through user-generated artist listings.

Future site enhancements include a syndicated blog, news, links and feature sections. A mobile version of the site is also in the works.

Tunipop wants to be a player in a $6 billion global market. They appear to have some traction, having beaten MySpace to the punch thanks to MySpace’s decision to delay their music merchandise push until later this year.

Tunipop has an interesting angle worth exploring, so check out the site or watch for it on your favorite band’s MySpace or Facebook page

Our friends at Two West have a great podcast called the Brand Show. Every week, they explore the brands people love, hate, and love to hate. Their guest list includes some of the best minds in the biz, including some familiar names from Hanson Dodge Creative. This week, our own Dawn Finnegan and Marty Ellery discuss our Active Insights research initiative. You can check it out here.

(Their segment starts about three quarters of the way through.)

So as not to be accused of taking ourselves too seriously, we thought we’d share a fun little internal project that debuted at our Annual Holiday Party this past weekend. It’s a short film that parodies filmmaker Ken Burns’ style of documentary. There are a few insider jokes, but overall it pokes some fun at the industry we’re so blessed to be a part of. We give you: American Industry: From Ironworker to Knowledge Worker.

Here I am introducing Hanson Dodge Creative’s first blog. I started HDC out of a spare bedroom about 25 years ago, the same time that Apple introduced the computer that would change everything. At the time, our mission was simply stated as creating “Design that works.” We’ve believed from the start that great design has to serve a higher cause. For us, that cause has always been defined as serving the best interests of the end-user while making things better for our clients. This simple mission combined with an abundance of talent, passion and hard work, has brought us to where we are today – the infinitely provocative convergence of four major forces: design, business, marketing and technology.

Today I am proud to say, Hanson Dodge Creative is 90 of the most talented people in branding, design and technology. We continue to serve the same mission: to make things better for our clients. As we have grown, so have our ambitions. Beyond our passion for branding, design and technology, we have sharpened our focus to brands that want to reach the Active Lifestyle Consumer. This has enabled us to grow our expertise and provide greater insights and value to our clients, a list that includes many of the leading active lifestyle brands in the world. Serving Trek Bicycle, Horizon Fitness, Old Town Canoes, CycleOps Power and many others has given us a unique vantage point to study this consumer. It is this experience, combined with our time-proven expertise and growing research efforts that establishes HDC as America’s foremost brand experience designers focused on the Active Lifestyle Consumer.

This blog is an effort to turn Hanson Dodge Creative inside out and provide a platform to explore this dynamic and wildly convergent landscape. Thanks for reading. We invite you to share your ideas and explore with us a rapidly evolving world that we find infinitely exciting and challenging.