By Burt Lum

While researching examples of local e-commerce sites for my class in Fiji last year, I happened onto the Web site for the Mountain Apple Co. at www.mountainapplecompany.com.

Surprisingly, the site doesn't sell products from the Internet. Most of its effort is to inform people and point them to retail outlets.

What the site provides is a comprehensive catalog of every record, CD, DVD and video produced by Mountain Apple.

It's amazing how many products are available. I never realized that the Kikaida videos (volumes 1 through 6) are available as DVDs from Mountain Apple. You can also find a series of Xotic Xtreme videos that is less about Hawaiian music and more about extreme sports, surf and the "x-girls." This is all accessible from the Artist and Info Search drop-down menu.

Another feature that piqued my interest was the Mountain Apple message board. Take a minute to read some of the postings and you will find a vibrant community of music lovers. Not all postings are about artists on the Mountain Apple label. One example was a recent posting for the lyrics of a group called Adeaze.

I had never heard of them. They weren't listed anywhere in the Mountain Apple catalog. It turns out they are an R&B duo from New Zealand. The person making the request, who was also from New Zealand, posted the message and got several responses fulfilling the request for lyrics.

To some that might seem a trivial matter, but to me it shows the strength of the community developed around Mountain Apple.

A music site, by definition, must provide opportunity to listen to the music. Mountain Apple provides samples of all its artists.

But the best site to get a sampling of Mountain Apple artists turns out to be Gov. Linda Lingle's site, at www.hawaii.gov/gov/music. It's not comprehensive, but you get full-length versions of about 27 songs. You can download MP3s of Na Leo Pilimehana, Willie K, Henry Kapono, Del Beazley and others. There are just enough here to burn your own music sampler and start your own Hawaiian music collection.

Mahalo, Guv. ;-)

Burt Lum is just a click away at www.brouhaha.net.