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                                                      FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Robert Kaye      805.459.0815  (rob@musicbrainz.org)
Patrick Breslin  703.867.6736  (media@relatable.com)
Stephen Cass     415.550.0585  (stephen@agentarts.com) 


          MUSICBRAINZ LAUNCHES OPEN SOURCE MUSIC RECOGNITION SERVICE

               ANNOUNCES PROJECT SPONSORS & SEEKS NEW SPONSORS


SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. February 11, 2003 -- MusicBrainz (www.musicbrainz.org),
an open-source music meta-data service, has announced the formal launch of its
music recognition service designed to provide an open standard for recognizing 
and identifying digital music files, while providing an alternative to costly 
proprietary offerings.  Supporting this effort, the project announced a number 
of service sponsors including Relatable® LLC and AgentArts, Inc.

MusicBrainz and its sponsors are creating a "music information commons" where 
the online music community creates and maintains a public database of 
information about music, enabling definitive recognition of digital music 
files and audio CD's.  In development since 1998, MusicBrainz now contains 
over 650,000 music tracks based on contributions from its community of over 
2,000 contributors.  This coverage continues to grow as consumers use the 
MusicBrainz file tagger to identify their digital music files and grow the 
shared MusicBrainz database. 

"Currently there is no free and universally accepted digital music meta-data 
available to the online music space, and the very few commercial companies who 
provide this resource offer their services under highly restrictive and 
expensive licenses.  It is our belief that a universal standard for digital 
music recognition is simply too important and valuable to all online music 
services to be monopolized by any one company.  We also believe that online 
music consumers would much rather contribute to a truly open source resource," 
said Robert Kaye, founder of MusicBrainz.

"The goal of MusicBrainz is to provide a powerful music meta-database that 
will enable any party, commercial or non-profit, to access reliable and cost 
effective music meta-data. An open standard for music recognition and meta-data
will promote the growth of a whole range of really powerful online music 
services and features."

MusicBrainz has begun signing commercial and non-commercial sponsors to 
contribute the resources required to grow and maintain the service.  Potential 
sponsors could include entertainment software developers, OEM device 
manufacturers, and other online music services interested in helping to 
develop a viable, lower-cost alterative to current commercial meta-data 
services they may be licensing.  Support may take the form of financial or 
in-kind support, or access to a consumer audience base to help grow the 
MusicBrainz community.

MusicBrainz now has two active partners in Relatable® and AgentArts, Inc.  A 
long-time supporter of the MusicBrainz project, Relatable® provides the 
technology that enables MusicBrainz to recognize unique music files based on 
their digital fingerprint.  AgentArts, a provider of music personalization and 
meta-data datamining technologies, today announced it will contribute open 
source relational "recommendation" data to MusicBrainz based on its scouring 
and datamining of P2P data to support music discovery features for online 
music consumers. The contributed data will be released under the Creative 
Commons attribution- noncommercial-sharealike 1.0 license.

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More information -- MusicBrainz 
- Robert Kaye contact: +1 805.459.0815 (rob@musicbrainz.org)
- http://www.musicbrainz.org 
- MusicBrainz white paper - http://musicbrainz.org/papers/mb_nonprofit.html

More information -- Relatable® LLC.
- http://www.relatable.com 

More Information -- AgentArts Inc.
- http://www.agentarts.com