Make it cheaper. Make it easier to find. Package it with another popular product, like chocolate.

We could be talking about chewing gum here, but the product is Hawaii-grown music.

As sales of conventional “;hard-copy”; compact discs decline, local recording artists and their record labels are turning to new gambits to spread the music around.

Raiatea Helm has a two-for-one deal with Hawaiian Host chocolate that pairs her new single, “;Where I Belong,”; with special sampler boxes of candy. Helm's manager, Guy Sibilla, sees the combo as an economical choice for Christmas gift-giving, and a vehicle for kick-starting worldwide sale of Helm's two Grammy Award-nominated albums.

One Right Turn—young singer-songwriters Connie Cruz, Tiffa Cruz Garza and Imua Garza—debuted as a recording act with the simultaneous release of a group album, solo albums by each member and a box set containing all four. That in itself is was a first for a local group, but the additional news is in the pricing: The individual albums retail for $9.99 and the box set for $29.99—which prices out to less per song than a tech-savvy music fan would spend to legally download them all.

The Mountain Apple Co. has expanded its reach by thinking beyond record-store sales. Go to your neighborhood Longs Drugs Store, for instance, and most of the check-out lines will have a small CD-rack holding an IZ album and the company's latest major release—easily available for impulse purchases.

“;We've found that being in nontraditional stores was very, very successful, and sometimes we were able to increase sales by as much as four times on a title,”; president Leah Bernstein says.

  In addition to being one of the biggest island-based record labels, Mountain Apple is also a distributor for its own releases and those of other labels. “;We started the distributorship because we wanted (our releases) to be sold in nontraditional ways,”; Bernstein said. “;At the time—16 years ago—the record industry was in a slump, a lot of people were going bankrupt, a lot of traditional record stores were going bankrupt.”;

Mountain Apple decided to go where the shoppers were. “;Big box”; stores such as Costco were one logical alternative. Longs was another. “;We opened (in) Longs Drug Stores, because we felt we wanted to be where people shopped.”;

After all, Bernstein says, there's no reason why Hawaiian music can't be a check-out line impulse purchase just like chewing gum, breath mints and magazines.

“;The traditional stores have always been good to us, but we just found that people shop where they shop, and we wanted to be able to provide them with our merchandise wherever they shop.”;