Copyright 1999 PR Newswire Association, Inc.  
PR Newswire


December 15, 1999, Wednesday


SECTION: ENTERTAINMENT, TELEVISION, AND CULTURE

DISTRIBUTION: TO BUSINESS, ENTERTAINMENT AND MUSIC EDITORS

LENGTH: 1014 words

HEADLINE: Myplay Makes the Holidays Sing with a Donation to City of Hope Every Time You 'Share Music';
Email a Streaming Musical 'Cyber-Greeting' to Friends and Family;
Kid Rock, Willie Nelson, Aimee Mann, Ben Folds and Vernon Reid Contribute Special Playlists for Charity

DATELINE: REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Dec. 15

BODY:
   Myplay.com, the new online music service that helps you store, organize and manage your digital music files, has just made your holiday season even more festive with a way to send a musical holiday "cyber-greeting" to friends and family.  Starting December 15, every time myplay customers use the "share music" button to email a URL link to a personalized playlist to friends and family, myplay will make a $1 donation to City of Hope, a nationally recognized cancer research center. Just like the old-fashioned "mix tape," "share music" allows you to create and legally send individual music mixes (playlists of songs) to the important people in your life -- friends, parents, siblings, et al.  The promotion runs through January 7. 
    "Myplay provides consumers with a better way to store and organize their music.  The 'share music' feature gives our customers the opportunity to easily share the music they love with family and friends," says myplay Founder and CEO Doug Camplejohn.  "The holiday season has always been a time for giving; the perfect time to send a gift of music and support the City of Hope." 
    Sending musical holiday greetings has never been so easy.  Customers can create playlists from music they've added to their myplay locker from their CD collection, the Internet or from myplay.  Or they may select a playlist from myplay's public Browse Playlists area, or from a special City of Hope page that includes playlists created by Kid Rock, Willie Nelson, Aimee Mann, Ben Folds (Ben Folds Five), and former Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid.  As a companion to this holiday-spirited program, myplay will also add a new genre to Browse Playlists called "Holiday," featuring a selection of your favorite holiday tunes. 
    To "share music," customers simply click the "share music" button and fill in a form that asks for the email address of the recipient, the name of the playlist and a personal message.  The "share music" email will contain the personal message, a short holiday greeting that lets the recipient know that a donation has been made to City of Hope, and an HTML link that allows users to stream the playlist from their computer.  (The playlist is not downloadable and myplay observes all related copyright laws and pays the appropriate royalties that allow users to put virtually ANY songs from their CD collections into playlists and broadcast them to friends via streaming audio.) 
    "I created a great mix for my mom in Philadelphia filled with Simply Red and other contemporary soul music that I put together from my myplay locker," adds David Pakman, myplay Founder and Senior V.P. of Business Development. "With 'share music' we're allowing customers to give the gift of music and send a really personal message during the holidays." 
    City of Hope's mission is to prevent, treat and cure cancer, HIV/AIDS and the many other life-threatening diseases that continue to devastate lives around the world.  Their strength comes not only from groundbreaking research and clinical care, but also from the humanitarian values on which they were founded.  City of Hope believes these ideals will transform the medical landscape in the 21st Century. 
    Myplay is a web-based music service that makes it easy for consumers to acquire, store, and manage their MP3 and other digital music files.  Myplay is the first online digital music service to provide consumers with a virtual locker that allows them access to their music collections from any computer, anywhere in the world.  Like Hotmail and AOL's My Calendar, myplay uses the Internet to free the music lover from the problems of being tied to a single laptop or desktop machine, and from overloading their hard drive with music files.

Your myplay Locker 
    Upon signing up for the free myplay service at www.myplay.com, customers are given a digital storage locker with 250MB of space on the Web (the equivalent of 60-70 CD-quality songs).  They can then search for new music on the Internet starting from the Listen.com directory on myplay and simply click and drag a file URL into their your locker using the myplay DropBox; or "rip" music from your own CD collections for storage in their locker.  To further serve its members, myplay keeps them up-to-date on their favorite artists by providing links to liner notes and discographies, as well as individualized e-mail updates on free tracks and music news. 
    Once in their personalized myplay locker, tracks can be organized into playlists and downloaded onto a portable digital player such as the Rio. Users can also access the myplay site from any computer to stream tracks from their locker, or listen to one of any number of "public" playlists on the myplay site.

About myplay, inc. 
    Launched in the fall of 1999, myplay (www.myplay.com) is the Web-based service that simplifies the digital music experience for the consumer.  Myplay provides customers with a 'virtual locker' where they can store, share, organize and download their MP3 and other digital music files from anywhere in the world.  The Company has received funding from respected venture capital firms IVP and Integral Capital Partners, and investment bank Allen & Company. Based in Redwood City, CA, with an office in New York City, myplay can be contacted by phone at 650-620-6900 or by email at info@myplay.com.

For more information, contact Paula Batson, VP, Communications, 212-554-4122, or paulab@myplay.com, or Cathy Halgas, Director, Communications, 212-554-4177, or cathy@myplay.com, both of myplay, inc.; or Lauren Hackett, Middleberg + Associates, 212-699-2521, or lauren@middleberg.com, for myplay, inc.

SOURCE myplay, inc.
 
CONTACT: Paula Batson, VP, Communications, 212-554-4122, or paulab@myplay.com, or Cathy Halgas, Director, Communications, 212-554-4177, or cathy@myplay.com, both of myplay, inc.; or Lauren Hackett, Middleberg + Associates, 212-699-2521, or lauren@middleberg.com, for myplay, inc.
 
URL: http://www.prnewswire.com

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