THE ORCHARD HOLDS FOURTH INTERNATIONAL SALES CONFERENCE AT MIDEM

Representatives From 25 Orchard Regional Offices In Attendance

Orchard Announces Slew of Groundbreaking Deals and Further Expansion of European Operations

London and New York, February 1st 2007 - The Orchard, the world’s leading digital distributor and marketer of independent music, held its fourth international sales conference, in Cannes on the eve of MIDEM 2007. At the day-long event, The Orchard’s global leadership team reviewed 2006 progress, and looked to 2007, reviewing regional release schedules and priorities for the year and planning for the implementation of new marketing tools and programs, and a series of sales operations investments that will transform the logistics of local content ingestion and delivery.

During MIDEM, The Orchard announced a slew of landmark agreements, including the signing of an exclusive sales and marketing agreement with Sanctuary Records Group and the distribution of the renowned classical label, Alia Vox, founded by the internationally feted “viola da gamba” virtuoso and conductor Jordi Savall. A partnership was announced with Aquamedia, Spain's largest mobile service, where The Orchard will dramatically expand Aquamedia's product offering across the E.U. and Latin America. The Orchard also announced an agreement with Ericsson to distribute full track downloads and master tones from Orchard distributed labels across Ericsson's global network and via its hosted white-label content offerings outside the U.S. Other announcements included groundbreaking deals with services company Musicane and industry stalwart Muzak.

Claes Ödman, Vice President, Multimedia Solutions at Ericsson, commented, “This partnership enables Ericsson to distribute music from thousands of independent labels. Ericsson strives to offer operators and their subscribers a great music experience and we are delighted to have signed this contract with The Orchard since it will both broaden and deepen our content catalog.”

In a unique deal with Musicane, the digital media marketing company, Musicane will build individual stores for Orchard distributed labels and artists to enable the sale of full album downloads, videos, ringtones, and merchandise. The customised stores will operate globally and can be placed on any social networking site or website.

Under a groundbreaking marketing alliance with Muzak, The Orchard will provide a turn-key music licensing, publishing administration, song research, and programming solution to Muzak and provide Muzak’s 100 million daily listeners in more than 400,000 locations access to The Orchard's unrivalled repertoire of independent and international content.

Muzak CEO Stephen Villa commented: “Over the past decade, we have broadened our Audio Architecture services to reflect the increasingly varied nature of our clientele. Our alliance with The Orchard takes this effort a major step further by partnering us with the leading marketer of independent music in the world. Orchard will provide us with access to hundreds of thousands of masters from the industry’s richest and most diverse independent music catalogue and will be a key partner for us in evolving our own product and service offering. We feel this is a historic deal for Muzak and, over the course of 2007, expect to share exciting new developments as we expand the nature of our Orchard relationship.”

Underlining The Orchard's commitment to continued European expansion and ongoing refinement around localizing its offering, Miki Tunis has been appointed as general manager (Europe), Chris Tams is appointed UK marketing manager and Sanctuary label manager and Simon Lait has assumed responsibility for European press and communications. New regional manager appointments include Jiri Stilec in the Czech Republic and Digger Elias in Nigeria. In New York, Jaclyn Ranere takes the helm as head of worldwide Integrated Marketing, managing a team of professionals developing online and offline programs to support Orchard’s retail sales and merchandising efforts.

About The Orchard
The Orchard is the world’s leading digital distributor and marketer of independent music, with a catalogue of more than one million tracks representing 73 countries, thousands of labels, and every music genre. This catalogue includes titles from multi-platinum acts such as Green Day, Coldplay, Ray Charles, and Ice T, as well as from breaking bands like The Hold Steady, Bedouin Soundclash, and Immortal Technique. The Orchard supplies all the leading legal digital music stores and mobile operators throughout the world and markets its labels’ catalogues for sync song placements in films, commercials, and television shows. The company is owned by Dimensional Associates, the private equity arm of JDS Capital Management, Inc. whose portfolio companies also include eMusic and Dimensional Music Publishing. The Orchard is headquartered in New York and London, with offices in 23 countries and six continents.