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Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

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Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#21

Post by mjlee »

neves wrote: post #17
indy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They only store a catalog of the most popular songs. (Where 'most popular' is determined by your geographical location). This catalog is periodically updated.

Isn't the use case to find obscure music? Weird to have just popular ones. To "discover" a top 10 hit I can just ask someone nearby.

I think the Pareto principal kicks in hard here. If it stores the top 20,000 songs as the other comments suggest then I expect that would include the vast majority of music you’d come across.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#22

Post by [deleted] »

StephenMelon wrote: post #16

The data that Shazam can gather must be incredibly useful to record labels, in that many people wanting to know the artist/song is a strong signal that a track is a potential hit. Since Apple already have data about what people are actually listening to (by location), this gives them additional data about what people might want to listen to.

[deleted]

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#24

Post by wonderous »

>> “Shazam, the 18-year-old company...”

Fact that Shazam is 18-years-old made me curious, and found the following on Wikipedia:

>> “Initially, in 2002, the service was launched only in the UK and was known as "2580", as the number was the shortcode 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.”

SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(company)

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#25

Post by rjett »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #14

Wow, that is an unusual exit after 6 rounds of funding. Crunchbase has it at $143M in funding up to that point. It goes to show how the switch from radio (station directed programming) to streaming (user directed programming) has put a huge crimp in music discovery and music promotion. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/shazam

Question from a non-Silicon Valley professional: Where does all that money go? Obviously, some [likely big] portion of it is still on the balance sheet, but does an app like Shazam really cost that much in engineering talent to update it and iterate it and server space to keep it running?

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#26

Post by borski »

rjett wrote: post #25
ChuckMcM wrote: post #14

Wow, that is an unusual exit after 6 rounds of funding. Crunchbase has it at $143M in funding up to that point. It goes to show how the switch from radio (station directed programming) to streaming (user directed programming) has put a huge crimp in music discovery and music promotion. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/shazam

Question from a non-Silicon Valley professional: Where does all that money go? Obviously, some [likely big] portion of it is still on the balance sheet, but does an app like Shazam really cost that much in engineering talent to update it and iterate it and server space to keep it running?

Marketing, sales, legal (especially in the music space, though less so for Shazam), engineering (integrations with Spotify, Etc.). People cost a ton of money. :)

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#28

Post by mceoin »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #14

Wow, that is an unusual exit after 6 rounds of funding. Crunchbase has it at $143M in funding up to that point. It goes to show how the switch from radio (station directed programming) to streaming (user directed programming) has put a huge crimp in music discovery and music promotion. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/shazam

Perhaps. Impossible to know the inside info but I can conceive of a scenario where Apple said "we are going to build this, either by acquiring you, your competitor, or starting from scratch. ... so what will it be?"

Best outcome for all in that case would be acquisition. (Just ask Flux)

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#29

Post by amelius »

gorgonian wrote: post #27
kin wrote: post #23

I love Shazam but honestly, if they remove integrations like "Open in Spotify" which seems likely, I would probably switch to using SoundHound.

Apple is probably going to kill the app. They probably just bought it for the tech.

(removed)

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#30

Post by Eric_WVGG »

whoisjuan wrote: post #4
grep4master wrote: post #3

It would be nice to have the song identification feature on iOS while on standby like the Pixel 2 does.

I still can't understand how that feature works. They stated that everything is done locally on the device, so privacy is not an issue. But how can they host a huge catalog of songs fingerprints without blowing the storage? Are they only saving the top charts?

For what it's worth, here's a bit (and discussion) on how Shazam actually works. I'm ashamed to admit I understand hardly any of it.

http://coding-geek.com/how-shazam-works/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870408

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