Sonic Solutions today announced a strategic partnership with MusicNet

under which the two companies will cross-promote field-proven digital music solutions that leverage Sonic's industry leadership in CD/DVD burning and take advantage of MusicNet's expertise in creating customized, engaging music sites with comprehensive downloading and subscription capabilities. The partnership positions the two companies for strong expansion in the rapidly growing online music services market and builds on their joint involvement in the development of two existing world-class music sites, Yahoo! Music and AOL Music.

"The better the online music experience, the more consumers will adopt online providers as their source for digital music," said Paul Greenberg, senior vice president, business development and partner relations, for MusicNet. "That means it's crucial that all the pieces work together as a single solution. With Sonic's AuthorScript(R) Music, we know we're offering our partners the leading CD/DVD burning technology, which meets the same high standards for reliability, performance, and ease-of-use that we build into our own suite of digital music services."

Under the agreement, MusicNet will promote Sonic's AuthorScript Music as the recommended burn engine for recording downloaded or streaming music directly to CD or DVD with state-of-the-art support for digital rights management (DRM), creating a best-in-class experience for customers of music sites developed by MusicNet for retailers, Internet service providers (ISPs), and other partners. By collaborating to offer a complete, top-tier solution for online music, Sonic and MusicNet will make it faster and easier for online music sellers to set up their digital music stores, adding to the sector's momentum and creating new opportunities for the growth of legitimate digital music services, whose market is forecasted to expand from $212 million in 2004 to $2.085 billion in 2009 (Parks Associates, Digital Music: Analysis and Forecasts, 2005).

"MusicNet is a natural partner for us in the online music space," says Jim Taylor, general manager of Sonic's Advanced Technology Group. "MusicNet has proven its strength in building unsurpassed music services for the world's largest, most demanding content distribution partners such as AOL and Yahoo!. Those customers have also chosen Sonic to help ensure the best possible user experience in their services, providing compatibility, speed, rich features, and virtually error-free results. Since Sonic and MusicNet have already integrated our technologies, we are ideally positioned to work together in this exploding market."