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Next Generation Sharing Platform Promotes Music Exchange Through Playlists, Not Swapping MP3 Files

``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 playlist 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.

SOURCE: Uplister, Inc.