EMusic.com And Listen.com Expand Strategic Relationship For Promoting Downloadable Music
EMusic.com Inc. (Nasdaq: EMUS), one of the Internet's leading sellers of downloadable music, and Listen.com, the Internet's comprehensive music download directory, Monday announced they have expanded their strategic business and marketing relationship. Under terms of the agreement, the two companies will work together to promote EMusic.com's quality downloadable music to users of Listen.com's Web site and services. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The announcement was made Monday morning at WebNoize '99, a leading digital music tradeshow being held here this week. ""As the starting point to finding and discovering downloadable music on the Web, Listen.com is pleased to tighten our relationship with EMusic.com,"" said Listen.com founder and CEO Rob Reid. ""This deal will help expose more fans to the quality MP3s available on EMusic.com -- from popular artists like Phish, Bush, Bauhaus, Joe Strummer and They Might Be Giants."" ""Listen.com provides users with a powerful and easy resource for finding the latest and most-popular downloadable music on the Web,"" said Gene Hoffman, EMusic.com President and CEO. ""With our catalog of content, EMusic.com is the premier source of legitimate, quality MP3s for sample, purchase and download - from today's leading artists. This partnership is a great, natural fit for both companies and all digital music fans."" Since Listen.com's launch in June, the two companies have worked together on featuring EMusic.com's catalog on Listen.com music directory. This new, expanded relationship covers additional content and technology integration to make it easier for Listen.com users to discover, sample and purchase music from EMusic.com. For example, Listen.com users will be able to preview audio clips of EMusic.com artist tracks prior to downloading them on the EMusic.com site. The agreement also includes cross-promotion, co-branding, reciprocal links and revenue sharing for the two companies. In addition to Listen.com, EMusic.com has partnerships with a number of leading interactive media companies and hardware manufacturers, including America Online's WinAmp, ICQ and Spinner.com properties, Yahoo!, RealNetworks, LAUNCH Media, Lycos, MyPlay.com, RioPort, Scour.net, UBL/ArtistDirect, ZDNet Music, Bolt, CNET, Crunch, Dimension Music, E! Online, IUMA, RealNames, eGroups.com, MusicMatch, Rampt, Creative Labs, Diamond Multimedia, Hewlett-Packard Company, IJAM and Sensory Science. About Listen.com Listen.com is the Internet's comprehensive directory of downloadable music. The directory includes original reviews and categorization of tens of thousands of artists and links to their legally posted work on more than 300 Web sites. The San Francisco company has partnerships with leading independent record labels and online music distribution companies, including Artemis Records, EMusic.com, Kill Rock Stars, Launch.com, Liquid Audio, Matador Records, Mjuice, MP3.com, Musicmaker, Riffage.com, Palm Pictures/Rykodisc, and Tunes.com. Listen.com's download directory is syndicated to Excite@Home, Lycos Inc., RealNetworks, shockwave.com, and Snap.com. Listen.com was founded in December 1998 by Robert Reid, a former venture capitalist and author of ""Architects of the Web."" The company is backed by the Barksdale Group, August Capital, Hambrecht & Quist, Sony Music and Austin Ventures. It was seeded by Altos Ventures and three prominent Founder/CEOs: Chris Anderson, Imagine Media; Halsey Minor, CNET; and Ted Waitt, Gateway Computers. Music industry visionary and Palm Pictures' Chris Blackwell is on Listen.com's board of directors. About EMusic.com Since it was founded in January 1998, EMusic.com has established itself as the leader in the growing market for downloadable music. http://www.emusic.com is a Web site for sampling and purchasing music in the MP3 format, which has become the standard in the digital distribution of music. Through direct relationships with leading artists and exclusive licensing agreements with over 150 independent record labels, EMusic.com offers an expanding collection of over 30,000 tracks for purchase -- entire downloadable albums for $8.99 or individual tracks for 99 cents each. EMusic.com features top artists in all musical genres, such as Alternative (Bush, They Might Be Giants, Frank Black), Punk (Blink-182, The Offspring, Pennywise), Jazz (Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Concord Records), Blues (John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Buddy Guy), Hip Hop (Kool Keith, The Coup), Country (Merle Haggard, Patsy Cline), Classic Rock (George Harrison, David Crosby, Frank Zappa), World (Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn, Lee 'Scratch' Perry) and Vintage Pop (Liza Minnelli, Eartha Kitt, Judy Garland). The company is based in Redwood City, California. Source: EMusic.com Inc. Web Site: http://www.listen.com http://www.emusic.com