From: Rohit Khare (Rohit@KnowNow.com)
Date: Fri Sep 29 2000 - 02:24:28 PDT
[You can see a GIF of their MSIE DHTML application (not realtime yet)
at http://www.uplister.com/web_images/playlist.gif --RK ]
For Immediate Release:
UPLISTER, INC. LAUNCHES SELF-ORGANIZING
ONLINE MUSIC COMMUNITY
Next Generation Sharing Platform
Promotes Music Exchange Through Playlists, Not Swapping MP3 Files
SAN FRANCISCO - September 27, 2000 - Uplister, Inc.,
(www.uplister.com), today announced a Web-based playlist sharing
community that provides music enthusiasts with a software platform to
create, showcase and trade their personal music tastes and
experiences in the form of playlists. Led by a team of Internet and
music industry veterans, Uplister has raised $6 million in first
round funding from Menlo Park, Calif.-based August Capital.
"The single track, mix-and-match nature of digital music is creating
tremendous possibilities and demand for playlists," said Uplister CEO
and Co-founder Toni Schneider. "Uplister is the first company to put
playlists front-and-center by offering a system that makes the
creation, sharing and finding of playlists fun, easy and independent
of the battle among competing music formats."
Uplister's Playlist: The Next Unit of Global Music Consumption
As music tastes fragment and digital distribution becomes ubiquitous,
organizing music, sharing music tastes, and finding new music will be
the key consumer needs. With these needs in mind, Uplister has
focused its business on making the playlist the next unit of global
music consumption. The Uplister playlist allows music fans to express
to each other what they are listening to, when they are listening to
it and why. Uplister's playlists are organized into easily selectable
listening choices, and constantly ranked and publicized via a global
community of music enthusiasts.
"Music has always been about community and shared experience, yet the
potential to use this fact to create a self-organizing online music
marketplace has been largely untapped," said Andy Rappaport, partner
at August Capital. "Playlists are the ideal vehicle around which to
construct such a marketplace, and thus to build a real and
sustainable business serving online music enthusiasts. Uplister is
well-positioned to lead this emerging market by providing a
playlist-based front-end platform that connects opinion leaders,
music consumers, and the plethora of new forms of music distribution."
Uplister is aggressively pursuing music fulfillment partnerships to
enable the legal distribution of digital music via playlists.
Uplister's goal is to work with these partners to aggregate the
existing music consumption options and provide users with the choice
to enjoy playlists on CDs, as downloads, or as streams. To further
this goal, Uplister has begun establishing relationships with
industry leading content and fulfillment providers.
For these industry partners, Uplister provides a valuable link into a
community that reflects the constantly evolving collaboration of
actual users and music experts. Music industry visionary and Uplister
Executive VP Jeremy Silver explained, "Uplister provides users with
more trusted, personal recommendations than they would receive from a
machine or software algorithm. The concept of exchanging music tastes
in the form of playlists places Uplister at the forefront of a new
generation of sharing platforms that presents a unique value
proposition to our users and partners."
Uplister Beta Features
Unveiled today, Uplister's beta release of its Web-based playlist
sharing community is geared toward those individuals who are already
making playlists or have a knack for sequencing tracks and an
addiction to making mix-tapes or burning custom CDs. They are DJs,
dedicated music fans and early adopters of digital music technology.
Uplister has termed these individuals "playmakers." By creating and
publishing playlists, these playmakers have a key role in
establishing the tone of the community and the best will gain
recognition for their insight and knowledge about music. With today's
beta release, users will have access to the following features:
* Create playlists using the easy-to-use Uplister custom
authoring software tool
* Organize user's own MP3s by dragging and dropping them into playlists
* Express what the tracks and sequence mean to the playmaker by
adding editorial about the playlist, as a whole, and/or for the
individual tracks
* Post playlists to the Uplister community and share music
tastes and opinions with other Uplister members
* Explore new music and discover what other people are
listening to by browsing through Uplister's database of playlists
* Search for playlists, playmakers, tracks, artists and tap
into the extensive background information about them contained in the
Uplister database
* Listen to music previews
* Add playlists, playmakers, music tracks, and music artists to
favorites lists to rank them in the community and to personalize
future visits
* E-mail playlists to friends
* Send e-mail to other playmakers to comment on their playlists
A Team of Internet and Music Experts
Uplister is a second-generation Internet music company that has
assembled an impressive team of individuals with prior experience
working at music industry leaders including Capitol Records, EMI
Recorded Music Worldwide and Virgin Records, and top technology
companies including Aureal, Bell Labs, Hewlett-Packard and Sun
Microsystems. In six months, the company has grown from its eight
original founders to 26 employees.
Uplister's executive team includes:
* CEO and co-founder Toni Schneider has held senior management
positions at several digital audio companies including Crystal River
and Aureal.
* Executive VP and Co-founder R. Michael Taylor has more than
nine years of digital audio experience with three Silicon Valley
startups and has chaired several subgroups of the Secure Digital
Music Initiative (SDMI).
* Executive VP Jeremy Silver, a former vice president of EMI
Recorded Music Worldwide, is widely regarded as an authority on the
challenges facing the music business as it migrates onto the web and
testified in the recent MP3.com lawsuit.
* VP of Engineering and Co-founder Ann Sera has held key
engineering positions at Aureal, One Touch Systems, Bell Labs, and
KLA Instruments. She is an active member in several technical
societies, and has taught Computer Science classes for several years
at San Francisco Bay Area colleges.
* VP of Communications Lisa Rodriguez has held executive
positions at Porter-Novelli and Manning Selvage & Lee, and was a
journalist for the Boston Globe and CNN radio affiliate WMVU.
Uplister's advisory board includes:
* Member at Dow, Lohnes & Albertson, PLLC, James Burger focuses
primarily on information economy clients, such as Microsoft, IBM,
Compaq, specifically representing them in the efforts to enhance and
establish their presence on the Internet.
* Charles Jennings is co-founder and director of TRUSTe,
chairman and co-founder of Geotrust, co-founder and CEO of
Supertracks, and co-founder of Preview Systems.
* Brian McClendon is chief operating officer and co-founder of
Intrinsic Graphics, a high-performance portable entertainment
software company.
* Philip Wiser is chief technology officer, director and
co-founder of Liquid Audio, a leading provider of services and
software that enable musicians, record labels and music retailers to
digitally-deliver professional-quality music via the Internet.
About August Capital
Founded in 1995, August Capital (www.augustcap.com) is a leading
information technology venture capital firm that invests in
entrepreneurial teams throughout the information technology market
spectrum. With more than 50 years of combined venture capital
experience and dozens of successful IPOs and public company board
relationships, August Capital partners have financed technology
companies with an aggregate market capitalization of more than
one-half trillion dollars.
About Uplister
Uplister's (www.uplister.com) mission is to transform the playlist
into the next unit of global music consumption. Uplister provides a
web-based playlist sharing community for music enthusiasts to create,
showcase and trade their personal music tastes and experiences in the
form of playlists. Founded in February 2000, the company has received
funding from top-tier venture capital firm August Capital.
Press Contacts
Lisa Rodriguez
415-369-9911, ext. 211
lisa.rodriguez@uplister.com
Suzanne Howard
415-613-5940
smhoward3@earthlink.net
© 2000 by Uplister, Inc. All rights reserved.
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