$50,000 prize from on-line contest is music to alum's ears

Recent Penn alumnus Eduardo Belmont had expected to pay for the engineering classes he's now taking through the College of General Studies out of his own pocket. His life just got a little bit easier, though. Thanks to winning an on-line music-trivia contest earlier this month, Belmont is $50,000 richer. Belmont will also get other awards: a trip to New York to see the Beastie Boys on The Chris Rock Show, a song personally written and recorded for him by Sean Lennon, a 10-minute phone call from the members of the swing band Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and many more gifts personalized by music stars. "I usually never have any money on me," Belmont said. "But this year everyone is going to get great Christmas gifts." The 25-year-old Belmont, who graduated from the University in 1996 with majors in Psychology and Comparative Literature, came across the "What's That Song" contest on Amazon.com, one of the biggest on-line retailers of books and music, while surfing the Web one day. The game, co-sponsored by Capitol Records, asked players to identify brief audio clips based on artists' responses to questions about their musical tastes. Belmont knew all the answers, including Lenny Kravitz's all-time favorite song, what song Deena Carter wishes she had written and what song Robbie Robertson plays to cheer himself up. The contest ran from October 6 through November 2. One winner per day received $1,000 for answering correctly. Everyone who e-mailed a response, regardless of whether it was right or wrong, was entered in the grand-prize drawing. That drawing had only one winner: Belmont. Brigid Mangan, Belmont's girlfriend of two years and a Temple University graduate student, discovered his winnings on November 3 while checking an e-mail account they share. "I was looking at my messages and I saw one that read 'Eduardo Belmont of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, you are our grand-prize winner!' Of course, I didn't believe it at first. I ran downstairs to tell Eddie, and he didn't believe it either," said Mangan, 24. Luckily for Belmont, the message wasn't a joke. The day after Belmont read the e-mail, he was faxed an affidavit to verify his identification, and an announcement was posted on Amazon.com's homepage. "Every five or 10 minutes it comes back into my head and I go, 'Wow, wow, wow,' " Belmont said. Belmont first plans on paying off his and Mangan's school bills with the prize money. He then hopes to buy more musical equipment, travel around Greece and Turkey, invest in the stock market and visit his family in Peru.