April 6, 2000 - India's premier portal network, indiainfo.com, announced that it would acquire leading online music site, musicurry.com, in a cash and stock deal. By the terms of the agreement signed by Mr. Raj Koneru, Chairman, indiainfo.com and Mr. Mandar Agashe, Managing Director, Questionable Ventures Media Pvt. Ltd. musicurry.com will now be an affiliate site of indiainfo.com, and all music purchases will be effected through indiainfo.com's robust e-commerce infrastructure. Smt. Lata Mangeshkar was the Chief Guest at the press meet held in Mumbai today. "We are very excited about this acquisition. We believe that musicurry.com is the premier site for music lovers and loyalists. indiainfo.com will now have access to musicurry.com's database of 23,000 registrants and will benefit from its 1 million page views per month," said Mr. Koneru.

"indiainfo.com has a clear emphasis on revenue creation. musicurry.com's eminently workable revenue model is another reason why we chose them. With four different revenue streams - jingles, banner advertising, paid channels, and MP3 digital downloads of content owned by musicurry.com - this acquisition can benefit both of us in realising the indiainfo.com and musicurry.com revenue models more effectively," he added.

musicurry.com, promoted by Mr. Mandar Agashe, Mr. Gautam Godse and Mr. Adinath Mangeshkar, is an online web radio that also features content such as event listings, interviews with musicians and an option to learn music online. musicurry.com presently hosts 20 channels and is licensed by the Indian Performing Rights Society (IPRS), which is affiliated to the Indian Music Industry (IMI). The site features only Indian music, and has already launched its own label. 2 artistes have been launched, and plans are in place to launch close to a 100 more by the end of the year.

Commenting on the acquisition, Mr. Mandar Agashe said, "indiainfo.com is a wide horizontal portal with deep vertical websites, rich in content, and is run by a young and lean management. And the best thing about indiainfo.com is that they have a very sound business model. With this alliance, musicurry.com will be in a position to integrate with the e-commerce services of indiainfo.com and promote all our activities and consolidate our position as the Indian Music Portal of choice for the whole world."

Mr. Mandar Agashe, a third generation businessman, a Computer Engineer and a pop-artist brings the best of "three" worlds to musicurry.com. He is at home talking about his favorite subject: musicurry.com. "musicurry.com was launched with the objective of bringing everything related to music under one roof so as to form an online community of Indian musicians and music enthusiasts all round the globe. The focus is to make musicurry.com the biggest and the best vertical music portal in terms of its comprehensiveness, depth & quality of content, originality, and user-friendliness. musicurry.com has come a long way since its launch on 23rd November 1999. Today Musicurry.com stands tall as India's First Web Music Radio and also the country's First Web Record Company. Though we've yet to start an extensive advertising campaign, 500 new users, coming mainly through references, register with musicurry.com each day. musicurry.com is based on a sound and scalable 4-stream revenue model to make it commercially viable. Sources of revenue generation, namely, the highly targeted radio channels, digital music downloads and paid channels, besides the run-of-the-mill ad banners, make our business model more stable," said Mr. Agashe.

Mr. Agashe feels that besides their dedicated Linux-based technical team and experienced content team, all Indian record companies have played a very supporting role in our success. "From the first day of our inception, the various music companies have provided us their artists for exclusive interviews, latest albums for reviews and their catalogs at discount rates for our web radio," he said.

Smt. Lata Mangeshkar, Chief Guest at the event, said, "In my last fifty years in music, I've witnessed many changes in the way music has been recorded, released and distributed. I used to record directly on film with musicians playing live and the actors acting at the same time beside us. Then came the spools, records, tapes, CDs and now the Internet. Internet is the future and musicurry.com pioneered Indian music on the web. And today they merge with indiainfo.com to take their dream further to more Indians and music lovers worldwide. I wish both musicurry and indiainfo success."

About indiainfo.com

The portal indiainfo.com offers services that include search engines, directories, community products such as e-mail; chat; message boards, and e-commerce products. Affiliate sites, accessible through the flagship indiainfo.com portal, include careerindia.com, thatscricket.com, esharebazaar.com, easy2gift.com and evesindia.com. indiainfo.com also offers unique services that include comprehensive personalisation of all content on indiainfo.com, online purchase of an exhaustive range of office stationery through Office Racks, auction services, and also extensive content in various Indian languages through their linguistic portals.

indiainfo.com is a comprehensive Internet solution and service provider, offering a portal network, advertising network, e-commerce products addressing both B2B and B2C markets, and Internet services including hosting, connectivity and development services. Indiainfo.com currently employs over 800 people in both India and the US, including Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, New Delhi, Chennai, Ahmedabad, New Jersey and New York.

About Musicurry.com

Musicurry.com, India's First Web Radio and also India's first Web Record. Internet listeners can choose from a vast array of music genres, available on demand. Besides the 20-channel radio, Musicurry.com serves hot exclusive interviews with the luminaries of music through audio-clips and "Chat-Interviews". Then there are the latest releases, news, reviews, gossip, shows, events, cartoons, etc. Musicurry.com also has several unique features like Online Guruji for teaching music over the Internet. Musicurry.com aims to be the best vertical music portal by providing various other features like classifieds, yellow pages, a forum to feature new artistes, music software and hardware for distribution and musical contests.

Musicurry.com's online record label has already launched two new artists, who have received over 10,000 downloads for their single. Musicurry.com will be releasing many such singles in various musical genres of famous as well as upcoming artistes in the future. With two state-of-the-art digital music studios, and a team of talent scouts across India, consultants for imaging the artist, Musicurry.com will help the artists to achieve their dream.

Musicurry.com is not a jukebox wherein a user can select and play a song of choice. It's a true radio on the web where users can only select one of our many channels.

Musicurry.com uses the RealAudio format for broadcasting music, since it cannot be downloaded and pirated. RealAudio has an extensive penetration on the Internet since over 60% of audio is distributed on the Internet in RealAudio format.

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