Shazam: The Story Of 70 Billion Song Discoveries
Music recognition app Shazam, originally founded in 2002 and later acquired by Apple for $400M, turned 20 years old last week
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Happy Monday everyone!
It’s been a while since I've written here, but if you’re still rubbing your eyes together trying to battle the Monday morning blues, I might have the perfect source of inspiration for you to get up and get shit done 😤
Last week, popular music discovery app- Shazam, turned 20 and Apple- which acquired the app back in 2018 for $400 Million, released a heart-felt note 📝
With stats and stories around how Shazam has impacted millions of users and propelled careers of artists around the world, the Internet was nostalgic of their favourite music discovery app.
Unless you live under a rock and ‘Shazam’ sounds like a corny magic trick from Harry Potter, you must have some idea of how it works 🧙🏻
The app lets users whip out their phone whenever they’re in doubt of which song is playing at a Restaurant, Club, Bar or literally anywhere and recognises the tune for them 🎼
But how does it actually work? 🤔
Shazam stores a catalogue of audio fingerprints in a database. Where does it get this data from?
When a user opens the Shazam app and a song is playing nearby and it creates an audio fingerprint and works by analysing the captured sound and seeking a match based on an acoustic fingerprint in a database of millions of songs.
What happens next?
If it finds a match, it sends information such as the artist, song title, and album back to the user. Some implementations of Shazam incorporate relevant links to services such as iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify or YouTube.
Pretty neat right?
You might be wondering at this point how did Shazam even come up with something so novel?
While I don’t use Shazam directly, ever since Apple acquired it back in 2018, it has integrated the service with it’s voice bot ‘Siri’
I can’t even recollect the number of times i’ve come across bangers at a club or a bar by simply asking, ‘Hey Siri, what song is this?’
It’s probably the closest i’ve felt to the inevitable reality of every human on this planet having their own Tony Stark’s Iron-Man styled personal voice bot 🤖
While that reality might still be some years away, here’s a video of their co-founder Chris Barton breaking down how they invented Shazam’s algorithm 👇🏻
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Early Founding Days
We might know Shazam as this uber cool music discovery app, but with most products of such scale and impact, I realise that its founding story is one full of grit, setbacks and pure passion for solving a problem.
Founded in 1999 by Chris Barton and Philip Inghelbrecht- MBA students at University of California, Berkeley and later joined by Chris’ friend in London- Dhiraj Mukherjee and a Stanford PhD- Avery Wang who joined the trio as the technical co-founder of Shazam.
The original vision of Shazam was to enable someone to use their mobile phone to identify the ambient music playing in any location.
The biggest hurdle? Like a lot of visionary projects, Shazam was way ahead of its time.
This is 1999 we are talking about and even the handful of people using a mobile phones back then were using it to install ringtones and send text messages 💬
For context, Shazam was so far ahead of its time in 2000 that it was actually three years before iTunes, seven years before the iPhone, and eight years before the App Store 🤯
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So how did the service actually work back when smartphones weren’t even invented?
Originally launched in London, Shazam was called ‘2580’ as the number was the code that customers dialled from their mobile phone to get music recognised 📞
The phone would automatically hang up after 30 seconds. A result was then sent to the user in the form of a text message containing the song title and artist name.
Pretty wild right?
Later, the service also began to add hyperlinks in the text message to allow the user to download the song online 🔗
Shazam Ever Since
It’s fair to say that both the product and the company ‘Shazam’ today is barely a shadow of what it used to be 20 years back.
⏯ 70 Billion Song Recognitions
⚡️ 2 Billion Lifetime App Installs
💰Acquired by Apple for $400M in 2018
📲 225 Million Monthly Active Users
However, beyond these numbers lies the massive cultural revolution and habit forming behaviour which the app has enabled.
It probably lies in the holy grail of a select few companies which have had their brand name become a verb-like synonym for a particular habit, with one expected to simply ‘Shazam It’, when they hear a song they don’t know 📲
What’s Next For Shazam?
With the product and the company now sitting comfortably within the Apple ecosystem ever since its acquisition, and the co-founders not involved anymore with the company, it still remains to be as culturally relevant as ever.
It’ll be interesting to see what the roadmap for Shazam lies as a product in itself, with Apple not revealing much for its future plans, however its impact so far has been insane.
Here’s a post we recently did on our Instagram page on some unknown Shazam stats of your favourite artists
Which was the last song you ‘Shazamed’? Let us know in the comments 👇🏻
That’s it for now, hope this story inspired you to get shit done this week 😤
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Definitely an active Shazam user, last search was Money For Nothing- Dire Straits
This is so good!! Great read