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Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

bloomberg.com

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Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#31

Post by abritinthebay »

icebraining wrote: post #9
laken wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that song fingerprints are tiny , so it's not too prohibitive to store an entire catalog of them on the device.

That's weird, because the AcoustID database is over 160GB: https://acoustid.org/database Then again, it does have 48M fingerprints, so that's only ~3.3KB/fingerprint. Maybe Google has a decent subset in a reasonably-sized package.

at 3.3kb it's only about 64mb to store 20,000 songs. If they periodically update that (in the background, on wifi, etc) you'd likely never know. It's basically noise when OS updates are multi-gb.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#32

Post by coppolaemilio »

amelius wrote: post #29
gorgonian wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

(removed)

It is already working. It is not that simple to start from scratch and get it working properly + the DB and everything

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#33

Post by ghaff »

amelius wrote: post #29
gorgonian wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

(removed)

You'd need access to the fingerprints database but otherwise should be fairly straightforward.

What's not straightforward is recognizing cover songs and the like. But that's not only non-trivial but AFAIK can't be done.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#34

Post by pookeh »

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.

It's not the tech, it's the data.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#35

Post by amelius »

ghaff wrote: post #33
amelius wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(removed)

You'd need access to the fingerprints database but otherwise should be fairly straightforward. What's not straightforward is recognizing cover songs and the like. But that's not only non-trivial but AFAIK can't be done.

> What's not straightforward is recognizing cover songs and the like. But that's not only non-trivial but AFAIK can't be done.

Well, you could translate the music into actual notes (or musical intervals), and use Smith-Waterman (or any more advanced and more recent technique) to find the song with the lowest edit-distance.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#36

Post by mdc2161 »

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?

It's definitely not just the top charts. Notably it has picked up when someone near me was playing Chopin on a piano as well as the occasional KPop tune my girlfriend is listening to.

My guess is it supplements the data with songs from your Google Music and youtube history.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#37

Post by jdavis703 »

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?

Just because all you see is an app, doesn't mean there isn't more software they have running behind the scenes. A lot of consumer facing companies need to have DMCA copyright compliance software, explicit content software and various "big data" integrations, both to power better recommendations engines, but also for BI purposes. They also need a way to ingest content so they can identify new music.

A good app looks like it only takes a few engineers to maintain, but in likelihood there's a lot of complexity, even that's outside of the core "platform" software going on.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#38

Post by adventured »

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?

An average of 50 employees with their all-in costs for 18 years, including all the other routine business expenses = $143 million.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#39

Post by paulcole »

amelius wrote: post #29
gorgonian wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

(removed)

> isn't it possible to build this yourself in Python in an afternoon?

Is anyone keeping a running list of products that HN commenters have suggested could be built in an afternoon/weekend?

Ones I've seen so far: Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, and now Shazaam.

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