ARTISTdirect to Go Mobile

ARTISTdirect, Inc., a leading online entertainment provider, announced the future availability of its own branded mobile channels, following an agreement with Boopsie, Inc., a California-based provider of mobile search clients.

Via the Boopsie Mobile Platform, mobile users will have access to ARTISTdirect content, including music news and artist information, directly from their handsets. Boopsie currently supports devices running on J2ME, Windows Mobile, Symbian S60, Palm and BlackBerry (plus Apple's iPhone), hence there will be lots of users to benefit from ARTISTdirect's extensive catalog of entertainment content.

Dimitri Villard, CEO of ARTISTdirect, said about the new agreement, "This important partnership with Boopsie allows us to mobilize our content in a way that makes ARTISTdirect's vast multimedia content easily searchable and accessible on mobile handsets for millions of entertainment fans. We recognize that today, people use their mobile phones as the ultimate, always by-their-side discovery tool for entertainment and we want to give them the simplest way to experience our rich library of information wherever they are."

Greg Carpenter, Boopsie's Chief Executive Officer, added, "The significance of mobile indexing cannot be underestimated, particularly when you're working with a brand such as ARTISTdirect that provides some of the most searched content on the Internet, such as biographies and song lyrics. Now, entertainment fans will be able to easily find and browse through ARTISTdirect content while on-the-go. Unlike other search engines, Boopsie is designed for mobiles to instantly display specific information with just a few keystrokes as opposed to a list of Web sites. The Boopsie Mobile Platform delivers indexing in real-time so ARTISTdirect's entertainment news is constantly updated and fresh for mobile users."

ARTISTdirect offers a wide range of music and film related content, as well as continuous coverage on artists' lives, reviews, interviews and special reports. All these will soon be available to mobile subscribers, although ARTISTdirect didn't mention yet exactly when that would happen.