PRESS RELEASE
October 16, 2003
Apple and America Online Announce Online Music Alliance
25 Million AOL Members Will Have Instant, One-Click Access to the iTunes Music Store for Windows & Mac
SAN FRANCISCO—October 16, 2003— Apple® and America Online, Inc., the world'sleading interactive services company, today announced an alliance to provideinstant, one-click registration to the iTunes® Music Store for AOL's morethan 25 million U.S. members starting later this quarter. America Onlinewill integrate links to iTunes artists, albums and songs throughout itsleading music site, AOL Music, which will give members the option to linkdirectly to the specific iTunes Music Store page to preview and buy music asthey browse and read music news and reviews.
“Apple and AOL are making it easy for AOL's 25 million U.S. members tolegally buy music online,“ said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. ”With just oneclick, AOL members will be able to legally preview, purchase and downloadmusic from the iTunes Music Store's catalog of more than 400,000 songs.”
“Apple's iTunes Music Store is a runaway hit,” said Jonathan Miller,chairman and CEO of America Online. “Today, Apple and AOL are uniting thenumber one music destination site, AOL Music, with the number one musicdownload site, Apple's iTunes Music Store, to bring customers the mostcomplete online digital music experience.”
Apple's iTunes Music Store revolutionized the online music industry with itsgroundbreaking personal use rights and one-click download directly intoiTunes, Apple's integrated digital jukebox software—all for just 99 centsper song. Since its launch six months ago, music fans have purchased anddownloaded more than 13 million songs from the iTunes Music Store, making itthe number one download music service. Apple today launched its secondgeneration iTunes Music Store for both Mac® and Windows users. With musicfrom all five major music companies and over 200 independent music labels,the iTunes Music Store catalog is growing every day and will offer more than400,000 songs by the end of October.
AOL Music reaches the largest audience of online music fans in the world,with more than 16 million monthly unique users, through a rich array ofprogramming, products and services that make it easy to discover,experience, listen to and buy music online. Among the groundbreakingprograms on AOL Music are advance previews of songs and videos before theyare available anywhere else, live concerts and much more. AOL Music'sofferings are available at the number one Internet music destination, theAOL Music Channel, and throughout the AOL and AOL for Broadband services andAmerica Online's family of Web brands including Netscape, CompuServe, AIM,ICQ, Spinner, Winamp and SHOUTcast. Apple will offer selections of AOL'spopular, original content such as Sessions@AOL and BroadBAND Rocks! throughthe iTunes Music Store.
America Online, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX). Based in Dulles, Virginia, America Online is the world's leader ininteractive services, Web brands, Internet technologies and e-commerceservices.
- © 2003 Apple. All rights reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh, Mac,Mac OS and iTunes are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Apple.Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respectiveowners.