Shazam is an app that is used worldwide to help people identify different songs just by playing a short sample of the track. One of the most popular apps in the world, Shazam has now surpassed 1 billion Shazams per month and 50 billion tags since their inception.
In 2002, Shazam first launched as a text message service and since then, its total number of recognitions has consistently grown every year. The platform saw an exponential growth in 2008 when the app was created for the App Store.
It took around 10 years for Shazam to reach its first billion tags and less than 10 years after that, the app has crossed 1 billion monthly recognitions and has successfully matched over 50 billion tags with over 51 million songs. The first ever Shazam result, which was received via text message, was “Jeepster” by T. Rex. The 50 billionth Shazamed song was the Mandopop song “框不住的愛 (不插電版)” by Evangeline. The most Shazamed song of all time is Tones and I’s “Dance Monkey”.
Shazam also takes users privacy into account and is designed to protect their users privacy. When a user initiates Shazam’s music recognition, a digital fingerprint of the audio is created and, within seconds, matched against Shazam’s database of millions of tracks. The digital fingerprint is generated on device, and raw audio is not sent to Apple. This ensures the whole recognition process remains secure and the users’ privacy is protected.
Apple’s Vice President of Apple Music and Beats, Oliver Schusser said that, “Shazam is synonymous with magic, both for the fans getting a song recognition almost instantly, and for the artists being discovered. With 1 billion recognitions a month, Shazam is one of the most popular music apps in the world. Today’s milestones show not only people’s love for Shazam, but also the ever-growing appetite for music discovery around the world.”
At WWDC this year, Apple announced ShazamKit which enables developers to integrate Shazam’s audio recognition directly into their apps. This makes it possible to match not only music to Shazam’s vast catalogue of songs, but also to match any prerecorded audio to custom results developers create. This could be used in the context of virtual learning by using the lesson content’s audio to trigger synced activities in student apps as content streams over video conference. ShazamKit will be released later this year.
Shazam is one of the world’s most popular and highly-rated music apps that helps people identify songs. The platform also pioneers innovation in music identification. Shazam helps people discover, interact with and share video or audio content across devices and mediums. It definitely will not be long till Shazam hits their next milestone.
