MUMBAI: Universal Music Group (UMG) has made an equity investment in Loud.com, which operates portals liek www.loud.com and www.battlerap.com.

The announcement was made by UMG vice chairman and CFO Nick Henny, Loud.com co-founder and co-CEO Joseph Safina and Loud.com co-founder and co-CEO and SRC Entertainment CEO Steve Rifkind/.

This agreement further expands UMG’s portfolio of strategic media investments while increasing commercial opportunities for its market-leading roster of artists and musical products.

“Universal’s strategy is to become actively involved in all areas of media where our artists and our music are present. Loud.com has created an incredibly vibrant and growing on-line hip-hop community that features not only compelling user-generated content, but also the means for users to create their own music and compete for a record deal. Loud.com is quickly emerging as one of the leading new online ventures that successfully reaches the new generation of international and multicultural youth,” said  Henny.

“We are delighted that UMG is joining the Loud.com family. When Steve and I started Loud.com, our hope was to create a virtual home for hip-hop fans around the world. To our delight, it has quickly evolved into an online community, competition, A&R site and marketing company all rolled into one. And with UMG now on board, we’ll be able to offer even more compelling services to our members,” added Safina.

The Loud.com portal is a free competition open to all registered users that offers the ability to download professional beats from some of today’s leading hip-hop producers at 99 cents apiece and overlay rap tracks while going head-to-head with other DJs and MCs from around the world. The series of battles will be judged by celebrity hip-hop producers such as Cool and Dre, David Banner, Midi Mafia, DJ Khaled and Sha Money, with the ultimate winner of the Showdown awarded $100,000 in cash and a recording deal with SRC Records, Steve Rifkind’s UMG-distributed label that is home to such platinum-plus, Grammy-nominated superstars as Akon and Wu-Tang Clan.