Developing Our New Music Service

You heard it right: a new music service from LimeWire is coming. And, to say I am excited about it would be an understatement. Personally, I come from a background in building products that make the distribution, discovery and consumption of music more compelling, easy and fun. Before joining the LimeWire team I held various lead and backup player roles in such notable acts as TotalMusic, a joint venture between Sony Music and Universal Music, and at AOL Music where I got to work on products like MusicNow, AOL Radio, Winamp and SHOUTcast. I have been passionate about the convergence of music and technology since I first offered full-length streams of a friend’s band 15 years ago. Yeah, over 14.4kbps. Since I joined LimeWire, I’ve known a few things to be true about the Company. One, we’re a company that is passionate about developing new technologies. And two, we’re a company that loves music. The new service that we are developing draws on our years of experience in the digital distribution technologies and music services. Over the past two years, we’ve quietly cultivated a team with a strong background in the music industry – including folks that have worked at EMI, Apple, Netflix, MTV, Audible, AmieStreet, and more (check out Our Team). We also have harvested fields of industry and product knowledge first-hand via the LimeWire Store. The LimeWire Store was created in 2007 and since then it has grown into a digital music store that has over 5 million tracks; we work with 120,000 independent artists to promote, market and sell their music. Leveraging this experience, and much more, we plan to launch the first phase our new music service in late 2010. The new music service will be, essentially, an ecosystem comprised of a desktop media player, mobile applications and a web-based music experience for downloading and streaming. Users will have complete and instant access to their library and catalog across their desktop, devices, and in the cloud. Any content that you download will be automatically added to your iTunes library. So it will be easy for the millions of people with unconnected media players (e.g. iPod Classic) to automatically take their content mobile. There’s still a way to go, but we’re confident in our end goals. We’re excited to introduce a new music service that will make the enjoyment of music easier for users, and a business model has the potential to compensate the entire industry. Stay tuned.