Napster Selects Gracenote(TM) to Enhance File-Filtering Process

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. and BERKELEY, Calif., March 13 Napster announced today an agreement to work with Gracenote (formerly CDDB(R)), the leader in music recognition services and related content delivery. This relationship will help Napster in its ongoing effort to exclude files from its file sharing service at the request of copyright holders. A preliminary injunction issued by the San Francisco District Court on March 5 ordered Napster to work together with the recording industry and music publishers to filter specific copyrighted musical works from Napster's file sharing service. The injunction requires copyright holders to notify Napster with artist and title names and at least one file name indicating that the musical work controlled by the copyright holder is available on the Napster index. After receiving such notices, Napster will turn to Gracenote's unparalleled CDDB Music Recognition Service to help identify possible user-defined variations in related artist and title names offered for sharing on the Napster index. Napster's partnership with Gracenote will greatly enhance its file-filtering process: Gracenote's database currently houses approximately 140,000 variations on 250,000 different artist names and approximately three million variations on more than nine million different artist/song title pairs. "This is a great moment for digital music. We're so pleased Gracenote could be a part of the solution that keeps the Napster phenomenon alive," said David Hyman, President of Gracenote. "We look forward to helping provide a solution where everyone wins -- Napster, the labels and most of all, the music fans."

"We've been exploring a partnership with Gracenote for months and the ability to quickly enlist their support in our file-filtering efforts will greatly improve our effectiveness," said Hank Barry. "We are leaving no stone unturned in our efforts to comply with the court's injunction."

Engineers at Napster and Gracenote have already begun working together, and artist/title variations supplied by Gracenote are on schedule to be integrated into Napster's file-filtering system within the next week.

Gracenote has developed sophisticated matching technologies to take advantage of the variants in its database. This includes exact matching, phonetic matching, recombinant string matching and text correlation, all of which provide unrivaled accuracy. The more popular artists have many more variants, for example 'N Sync' is referenced in more than 50 variants.

CDDB was created by user submissions of artist, album name, and track information. The submission process uses a variety of heuristic methods to determine the validity of submitted information. CDDB is currently utilized by most online media players, and can identify more than nine million song titles across 850,000 albums. The popular and scaleable service is accessed by over 24 million unique users each month. In addition to Napster, current partners include AOL/Winamp, MusicMatch, Kenwood, Sony, RealNetworks and Creative Labs.

About Napster
Napster is the world's leading person-to-person file sharing community. Napster provides music enthusiasts with an easy-to-use, high quality service for discovering new music and communicating their interests with other members of the Napster community. Napster's software application enables users to locate and share music files through a user-friendly interface, and features instant messaging, chat rooms, and Hot List User Bookmarks. Shawn Fanning, then an eighteen year-old freshman at Boston's Northeastern University, founded Napster in 1999. In October 2000, Bertelsmann AG and Napster announced the formation of a strategic alliance to further develop the Napster person-to-person file sharing service. In January 2001, edel Music and TVT Records joined the alliance. This year, Napster won several Wired Magazine Readers Rave Awards, including Best Music Site, Best Innovative Start-up, and Best Guerilla Marketing.

About Gracenote
Gracenote is a technology company specializing in music recognition, content delivery, and database management. Gracenote offers a suite of services for developers of media players and encoders, consumer electronic manufacturers, record companies, and on and off-line consumer brands, and its network of technology and services opens new direct interactive channels to online music fans worldwide. Over 1,000 partners worldwide, serving nearly one million consumers daily, rely on Gracenote's CDDB technology, which is the industry standard in Music Recognition Services (MRS). Gracenote was fouded in 1995 and is headquartered in Berkeley, California. For more information about Gracenote, go to http://www.gracenote.com.