BACH Signs Deals With Leading Chinese Digital Music Companies

· Aceway, Beeku, R2G & Cloud China To Benefit From Bach’s MusicDNA™ Technology
· China Mobile Appoints BACH Official Apps Store Agent

BACH, the leading provider of technology and applications for the digital music market, has struck deals with four of the leading digital music companies operating in China to integrate BACH’s MusicDNAÔ technology into their existing services:

Aceway, the music platform provider for China Unicom.
R2G who operate Wawawa, the default online music store for Microsoft’s Windows Media Player in China.
Beeku the new Chinese ring tone search portal.
Cloud China who provide music broadcasts for public spaces.

BACH’s MusicDNA™ audio analysers are able to extract a huge amount of data from media files, providing information on a track’s mood, tempo, density, instrumentation and even ‘colour’. This metadata is then used to build up a much more complete picture of the audio file which powers everything from sophisticated playlist generation and search and recommendation tools, to enhanced user profiles for social networking and intelligently targeted advertising solutions.

Whilst long viewed with suspicion by content owners, China’s emergence as an economic powerhouse has been mirrored by the rise of legitimate music services in the region. With potentially hundreds of millions of new consumers, the Far Eastern market has the potential to transform the fortunes of the music industry worldwide.

BACH’s MusicDNA™ technology will enable Aceway to provide their users with a better music recommendation service, as well as enhanced social networking features.

R2G, whose store Wawawa has a catalogue of more than 1 million music tracks, will integrate MusicDNA™ into their service to provide an advanced search and recommendation service that can unlock revenue from dormant repertoire.

For Beeku, BACH’s technology will form the backbone for providing China Mobile’s (MPEG-7 tagged) ring tone database and sales channel. Finally MusicDNA™ will enable Cloud’s customers, supermarkets, bars and other public spaces, to further refine the music they broadcast and generate playlists based on attributes such as mood, energy and even the electro-acoustic properties of music.

Furthermore China Mobile has appointed BACH Technology as the official reseller of their ring back tones and as an agent for their newly launched apps store. Unlike Apple’s Apps Store, developers can’t submit their programmes direct but must go through an appointed agent, such as BACH, instead.

Stefan Kohlmeyer, Bach Technology CEO said “China is an extremely challenging music market with great potential. We are therefore very happy to equip our partners with the latest technology in their effort to turn consumers to legitimate music services ”

Founded in 2007 BACH is a fast growing music technology company with offices in Norway, Germany and China. BACH’s technological successes are a result of a close strategic partnership with the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT), a proven and trusted technical research institution in the music industry.

Notes for editors

About Bach Technology
BACH Technology is the leading provider of technology and applications for the digital music market. A fast growing music technology company with offices in Norway, Germany and China, BACH’s successes stem from a team who have been involved with the development of digital music since 1986.

Company founder Dagfinn Bach is one digital music’s early pioneers, while Bach’s technology partner is Germany’s Fraunhofer IDMT (Institute for Digital Media Technology), a spin off from the Fraunhofer IIS (Institute for Integrated Circuits), where the MP3 was developed.

Investors include Karlheinz Brandenburg, who invented the MP3, and 247 Inc. the company of Shigeo Maruyama, former CEO of Sony Music Entertainment, while CEO Stefan Kohlmeyer is a veteran of German media giant Bertelsmann.

BACH’s core technology, the MusicDNA™ Analyser, employs a complex but completely automated process to create extensive and consistent music metadata, including analysis of a track’s mood, tempo, density, instrumentation and even ‘colour’. This metadata, in essence the MusicDNA™, allows for a much more detailed description of media files.

BACH has developed several applications that take full advantage of this metadata, powering search and recommendation tools, automatically creating sophisticated playlists, allowing users to compare music profiles on networking sites and enabling advertisers to intelligently target listeners based on parameters such as the mood of the music they are currently playing.

In contrast to collaborative filtering techniques, which tend to promote current releases, MusicDNA™ powered music services offer users a much deeper music experience, breathing life into back catalogues and opening up exciting new revenues streams for content owners.

Online music services already signed up to use BACH technology include Simfy.de, Catch Media, 1Boss, and People’s Music Store. Agreements with major international music services are set to be announced soon.

BACH is currently developing an offline version of their MusicDNA™ technology, which will allow listeners to enjoy the benefits of MusicDNA™ wherever they go, and expect to announce full details in early 2010.

The BACH MusicDNA™ Analyser is available as API Webservice that can be installed on the servers of the customer or used externally from the BACH server cloud. Unlike older technology, BACH technology is entirely based on the open standards MPEG-7 and XML. BACH is the only company offering full end-to-end MPEG-7 integration, ensuring seamless interoperability and compatibility with external programs and systems.

For more information on BACH please refer to www.bachtechnology.com