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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

#41

Post by dawnerd »

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)

I'd be more curious to see you try to build this in an afternoon.

Also, it works a lot better than being able to find "slightly distorted" versions. It can catch a song in a noisy room where you can barely make out the song to begin with. Couple months back it found a song when there was a very loud crowd yelling over it. They're also able to determine differences between versions of songs pretty well. Some remixes might sound very close to the original.

Other thing you might be missing is just how fast it is even on a slow mobile connection.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#42

Post by amelius »

dawnerd wrote: post #41
amelius wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(removed)

I'd be more curious to see you try to build this in an afternoon. Also, it works a lot better than being able to find "slightly distorted" versions. It can catch a song in a noisy room where you can barely make out the song to begin with. Couple months back it found a song when there was a very loud crowd yelling over it. They're also able to determine differences between versions of songs pretty well. Some remixes m…

(removed explanation because it seems not appreciated)

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#44

Post by azinman2 »

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.

Uhh isn’t creating the “fingerprint” the non-straightforward part? Keep in mind you could start listening at any point in the song as well.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#45

Post by Zenst »

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)

Some insight into the Shazam tech and article has a link to the algorithm being used.

https://www.toptal.com/algorithms/shazam-it-music-processing...

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#46

Post by rhizome »

amelius wrote: post #35
ghaff wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Converting digital audio to notes is both not as easy as it sounds and not how Shazam works.

https://www.toptal.com/algorithms/shazam-it-music-processing...

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#47

Post by ChuckMcM »

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?

It varies quite a bit from company to company. They were founded in 2001 so I expect most of it was salary and physical plant.

The business is/was connecting resale opportunities to brands and artists[1] so you'll have a fairly significant sales and marketing effort although typically you will pay sales people for performance so their compensation will track revenue.

But to give you some things to think about, if you have an engineering team of 15 engineers, median salary $120K, and an 'overhead' (office, health plans, insurance, etc of 60%) then that is $200K/engineer/year (or $3M/year or $48M for 16 years [2001 - 2017]) that is just integrating cost per engineer over time using constant engineering. You can put any function in you want for head count (does it grow exponentially? does it grow in chunks? etc) and then add a C-suite team (higher median salary) and an 'overhead' team (IT, marketing, HR, etc) and you can burn through that fairly quickly.

It is a useful thing to build models for this stuff as your 'pre-operationally-cash-flow-positive' costs are really the health and future of your company.

[1] https://www.shazam.com/company

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#48

Post by mmmmmbop »

amelius wrote: post #42
dawnerd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be more curious to see you try to build this in an afternoon. Also, it works a lot better than being able to find "slightly distorted" versions. It can catch a song in a noisy room where you can barely make out the song to begin with. Couple months back it found a song when there was a very loud crowd yelling over it. They're also able to determine differences between versions of songs pretty well. Some remixes m…

(removed explanation because it seems not appreciated)

So they're doing this vector correlation for every song in their database (40 million)?

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#49

Post by vedant »

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)

This has the smell of a comment written by someone with limited real-world experience. Simply writing down the list of problems you would have to solve to build Shazam would take an entire afternoon.

Yes, deep neural networks have proven remarkably useful for machine perception, but you would still need to collect a colossal amount of audio data, fingerprint all of it, build a low-latency processing infrastructure for making inferences, and convince a hundred million people to install your software to feed you copious real-world training data that you can use to improve model performance.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#50

Post by chiefalchemist »

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)

Yeah you can build the platform but you won't have any data; no history of searches. You also won't have any users.

I'm not disputing they overpaid. However, long to short, building the technology is the easy part, and just a fraction of the brand / product value.

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