By day, Bryan Baker is an information technology expert at Iowa Legal Aid. By night, he’s a musician rocking out in the three-dimensional online world of Second Life.

The ability to play live music behind the face of a virtual character has been Baker’s opportunity to get back into the music scene after a 25-year hiatus from real-world performances. “I’m pretty relaxed when doing a full-hour show (on Second Life),” he said. “Hitting me up for four songs in front of real people clanking around, drinking coffee and trying to talk gets me pretty nervous these days.”

Baker is part of a growing group of musicians who have discovered that the virtual world created by San Francisco-based Linden Labs is a great platform on which to share their music talents, with more than 2 million users as potential audience members.

The online program is like an animated version of real life, with no clear mission or objectives. Instead, people who create avatars (virtual characters) and join Second Life for free can do things such as socialize with other players, create clothes, buildings and more, and buy and sell land and other items to fellow users.

Baker, who goes by the online name of Ka-Klic Martin performs every Friday night for about 15 to 20 avatars and also plays at other venues and group concerts as they come up. This fall he organized a benefit concert for Alzheimer’s disease research after Relay for Life raised $40,000 on the site last summer and he found out his mother has the disease. The concert, which consisted of 13 artists taking turns playing for an hour each, raised $600 for the charity.

Baker’s virtual concerts involve him standing in front of a virtual microphone, strumming his guitar. In reality, he is playing on a real guitar and singing into a microphone in his office at his West Des Moines home. “Luckily my wife and daughter can sleep through just about everything,” he said.

Internet radio software streams his music into the Second Life program and allows avatars who enter a certain unit of virtual land in the same simulator, or server processor, to choose whether to listen.

Though Baker also runs a side business in Second Life, selling concert equipment such as an adjustable microphone, he says “the concerts are one of the things I would say make Second Life special and worthwhile,” especially because he is able to communicate with audience members. Between songs, he can glance over to the screen and get feedback about what people are saying, and he sometimes responds.

Baker doesn’t charge players to hear his music, but he has a tip jar next to his stage. If he plays at other venues, some owners pay him a fee. “If someone asks me what the fee is, I usually say 3,000 Lindens (SL’s currency). At the current exchange rate, that’s a little more than $10 an hour. That’s not what you make at a lot of real-life places, but I’m also not schlepping around a bunch of gear.”

Although most of his concerts attract a small gathering, he has played for around 100 avatars, which is at capacity for a simulator. “It’s almost a badge of honor (if the system crashes),” Baker said. “A friend of mine coined the phrase a while back, it ain’t really a party unless the ‘sim’ goes down.”

Baker estimates he spends three hours a day in the program if he doesn’t have any other obligations after work, so that he can keep touch with the people he’s made connections with in the program. Many musicians who were involved with Mac Jams, a community of musicians that use Macintosh computer to create music online, have entered Second Life, and Baker said groups of music enthusiasts have formed to stay up-to-date on concerts going on.

“It’s been pretty amazing how fast the music scene has grown,” he said. “There’s a ton of musicians out there and a lot of them are really good.”