MSN Teams with Monterey Jazz Festival To Deliver Online Music

REDMOND, Wash. -- Sept. 17, 2004 -- MSN® Music and the Monterey Jazz Festival, a three-day celebration of the best in jazz, are giving music fans something to sing about. MSN has teamed up with the world's longest-running jazz festival to offer new and archival recordings not available anywhere else -- online or offline -- of live performances by some of jazz's biggest names, including Blue Note Records' Don Byron Ivey-Divey Trio, the Terence Blanchard Sextet, the Bill Charlap Trio and other famed artists.

Six live performances from the above Blue Note artists recorded at this year's festival will be available to purchase as downloads beginning in October at http://beta.music.msn.com. the fully functional preview version of the new music service that debuted Sept. 1 in the United States. In addition, nearly a dozen more tracks from the Monterey Jazz Festival archives will be available over the coming year from artists who have performed over the past 46 years at the festival.

"The relationship that MSN has with The Monterey Jazz Festival is a great example of our commitment to delivering the best music content to our customers," said Rob Bennett, senior director of MSN Entertainment. "We will continue to add new and exclusive content on a regular basis to help ensure that fans of all types of music can find and discover music they love on MSN Music."

Forty Years of Archival Performances Coming to MSN Music

MSN and the Monterey Jazz Festival have struck a three-year deal to offer six exclusive tracks from each year's festival, along with six to 12 exclusive archival tracks from the past 46 years of festivals. Each will be available exclusively on MSN Music for 12 months. The first six tracks will be from this year's festival, which takes place Sept. 17--19, and will consist of two tracks each from the following:

• Terence Blanchard Sextet with Jon Faddis, Slide Hampton and James Moody
• Don Byron Ivey-Divey Trio with Jason Moran and Jack DeJohnette
• Bill Charlap Trio with Clark Terry and Frank Wess

"This exclusive relationship with MSN Music allows us to share the music of the tremendous performers who appear each year at Monterey Jazz Festival with the massive MSN online audience," said Tim Jackson, general manager of the festival, who will select all the Festival tracks available through MSN Music. "We can't think of a better way to help bring an art form conceived in the 20th century into the 21st century."

Buy a Piece of Musical History for Less Than a Buck

The Monterey Jazz Festival tracks will be available to download for 99 cents each. The sound quality of the Monterey Jazz Festival tracks also should be music to the ears of audiophile jazz fans, especially those who have avoided online downloads because of questionable sound quality. All MSN Music downloads are encoded in the Windows Media® format at an average rate of 160 kilobits of information per second (Kbps) and a peak rate of 256 Kbps, offering the industry's highest-fidelity audio in a compact file size.

About the Monterey Jazz Festival

The Monterey Jazz Festival is the longest-running jazz festival in the world. The festival features more than 500 top-name jazz artists playing on seven stages for three nights and two days of nonstop jazz entertainment. The Festival takes place on the 20-acre Monterey Fairgrounds site, which has been home of the festival since its inception in 1958. Founded as a nonprofit educational corporation, the Monterey Jazz Festival invests its proceeds in a world-renowned series of jazz education programs.

About MSN

MSN attracts more than 350 million unique users worldwide per month. With localized versions available globally in 39 markets and 20 languages, MSN is a world leader in delivering Web services to consumers and online advertising opportunities to businesses worldwide. The most useful and innovative online service today, MSN brings consumers everything they need from the Web to make the most of their time online. MSN is located on the Web at http://www.msn.com . MSN worldwide sites are located at http://www.msn.com/worldwide.ashx

About Microsoft

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