musicmaker.com and Rimage Announce Strategic Partnership
musicmaker.com to Install More Than $1 Million of Rimage CD-R Equipment in New State-of-the-Art Custom CD Production and Fulfillment Center
Monday March 27, 10:03 am Eastern Time
Company Press Release
SOURCE: Rimage Corporation
MINNEAPOLIS, March 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Rimage Corporation (Nasdaq: RIMG - news) and musicmaker.com, inc. (Nasdaq: HITS - news) today announced a strategic partnership allowing musicmaker.com to install more than $1 million of Rimage's CD-Recordable (CD-R) equipment in musicmaker.com's new state-of-the-art custom CD production and fulfillment facility. The new 35,000 square-foot center, located in Reston, Va., is one of the nation's largest facilities dedicated to the production and distribution of custom audio CDs.
At musicmaker.com, customers can build their own customized CDs by selecting and organizing songs from a library that includes approximately 250,000 tracks from over 165 labels in a variety of music genres. Musicmaker.com currently uses Rimage's Producer 2000 Protege CD-R publishing systems, coupled with musicmaker.com's own proprietary software and patented technology, to quickly and efficiently record and label these CDs.
With today's announcement, musicmaker.com will expand its use of Rimage equipment to increase its custom CD production capacity, and to enable musicmaker.com to target additional markets through special custom CD promotions with major consumer marketing companies.
``Rimage's system represents the best-of-breed in CD-R publishing, and has already proven itself by reliably and efficiently supporting our Internet site,' said Bill Crowley, vice president of marketing and sales for musicmaker.com. ``When we decided to expand our capacity to create on-demand audio CDs, Rimage's CD-R technology was the obvious choice. Today's agreement lays the groundwork for increasing our use of their systems not only for our Internet site, but also for other commerce applications.'
Rimage's flagship Protege system features up to eight 8X CD recorders, has a 480-disc capacity and is able to simultaneously burn eight unique CDs every 10 minutes-all in an unattended environment. The Protege also features Rimage's Prism CD printer, a full-color thermal transfer printer that is the fastest and most cost-effective printer in the industry.
``Musicmaker.com is clearly one of the leaders in custom CD compilation business,' said Michael Ferguson, vice president of strategic alliances at Rimage. ``Their decision to expand their use of Rimage's equipment reinforces our belief that we offer the best CD-R publishing technology available, and we're very excited to build on our relationship with them.'
Rimage's automated CD duplicating and publishing systems are used in a variety of ways to distribute digital information on CDs. Kodak's PictureCD system uses Rimage CD-R technology to provide customers with an easy way to bring conventionally captured images into a digital format. Many game and software suppliers also employ Rimage systems for on-demand and customized CD production, and Rimage systems are used in a number of high-volume or just-in- time data distribution applications.
About musicmaker.com
Musicmaker.com, with offices in New York City and Reston, Va., is a leading custom compilation and secure digital download music retailer on the Internet. Musicmaker.com offers music lovers the opportunity to build their own CDs by selecting and organizing songs from a library of approximately 250,000 tracks from over 165 labels in a variety of music genres. Tracks can be sampled before selection. CDs include up to 20 tracks or 70 minutes of music and can be personalized with unique labels as well as imprints on the jewel boxes. The musicmaker.com site also offers over 100,000 songs for download in Secure MP3 and Microsoft Windows Media formats.
In addition to exclusive licensing agreements with EMI Recorded Music, Zomba Music Group, TVT and Roadrunner Records, musicmaker.com also has exclusive marketing agreements with Columbia House (jointly owned by Sony Music and Warner Music Group), Audio Book Club, Platinum Entertainment, and Woodstock.com, as well as marketing agreements with AOL (and their Netscape Netcenter, Spinner, Winamp and ICQ brands), Musicland, Transworld Entertainment, Wherehouse Music, and others.
About Rimage
Minnesota-based Rimage Corporation has operations in the United States, Europe and Asia. The company's major products include digital publishing and duplication systems for CD-R media serving many diverse markets, including music, video, photography, finance, health care, software manufacturing and government. |
