I know I'm not eligible to enter because I'm rocking the Smartphone Thoughts world but I still wanted to share some artist that I'm listening to right now.
Both of these artists are local Portland, Oregon artists and they're both just incredible. One of them even has both of their albums on Zune Marketplace!
They are the The Freemartins and Russell Stafford. If you search the Marketplace for The Freemartins you can view/purchase both of their albums (The Prime Directive Is The Groove and Scientifically Engineered To Rock). As for Russell, he isn't on the marketplace yet but is trying to sign a deal to be distributed on iTunes, Marketplace and other digital music venues.
If you would like to hear Russell Stafford's music, you can do that on his site (
http://russellstaffordmusic.com/music.html). After sitting down and talking with Russell yesterday and telling him about my Zune, he got super excited about people being able to beam his tracks to their friends and encouraged me to have people download his tracks from his site.
Personally, I see the Zune doing greater things for independent artists than the Internet ever could and I'm glad artist like Russell are embracing this new technology and encouraging people to download and beam his music to their friends.