The Orchard and Muzak Join Forces to Bring Cutting-Edge Music to 100 Million Listeners per Day

CANNES, FRANCE (The Orchard and Muzak) - MIDEM2007 - The Orchard, the world's leading digital distributor and marketer of independent music, and Muzak, the world's leading business music provider, today announced a comprehensive licensing and marketing agreement that provides new exposure opportunities for The Orchard's catalogue among Muzak's 100 million daily listeners in hundreds of thousands of locations. At the same time, the alliance vastly extends Muzak's offerings to include The Orchard's unrivaled repertoire of independent and international content, which spans every musical genre and encompasses established and breaking acts.

Under the agreement, The Orchard will provide a turn-key music licensing, publishing administration, song research, and programming solution to Muzak. The Orchard will ensure efficiency in the delivery of the right music to the right Muzak customers' locations, and accurate collection and distribution of royalties to performers and copyright owners.

Muzak CEO Stephen Villa commented: "Over the past decade, we have broadened our Audio Architecture services to reflect the increasingly varied nature of our clientele. Our alliance with The Orchard takes this effort a major step further by partnering us with the leading marketer of independent music in the world. Orchard will provide us with access to hundreds of thousands of masters from the industry's richest and most diverse independent music catalogue and will be a key partner for us in evolving our own product and service offering. We feel this is a historic deal for Muzak and, over the course of 2007, expect to share exciting new developments as we expand the nature of our Orchard relationship."

"Muzak is ubiquitous: In terms of scale, you can't top 100 million listeners per day in hundreds of thousands of locations," said Greg Scholl, chief executive of The Orchard. "But Muzak brings a lot more to the table than sheer numbers. The company's Audio Architecture and music industry savvy make it a great partner for The Orchard, with tremendous potential to provide new exposure avenues for our labels and artists. We're looking forward to using our programming expertise to work closely with Muzak and maximize these opportunities on behalf of Orchard-distributed artists, and also contribute to Muzak's continued evolution as the leading music provider to businesses worldwide."