I love Shazam but honestly, if they remove integrations like "Open in Spotify" which seems likely, I would probably switch to using SoundHound.
Will be annoyed if they break the feature inside Snapchat.
Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music
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Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music
#52The 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.
Forbes, or was it BusinessWeek, actual did an article on that (i.e., selling data to record labels) a year or so ago. If I get a moment I'll try to track it down later.
Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music
#53Wow, 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)
I suspect the hardest part of their business was not doing the technology, rather it was building relationships with the brands and artists. Making it frictionless to push a button on your iOS device to recognize a tune and then put it in your Apple Music playlist for many future billable plays would seem to be a better model than Spotify.
Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple is probably going to kill the app. They probably just bought it for the tech.
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y'all realise they run a music service too right? Having access to cross-platform data that gives them insight into bleeding edge emerging/trending artists and songs is priceless.
Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music
#55Earlier 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…
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This is a heap of nonsense. Not only does this summarily dismiss the enormous challenges in digital signal processing required for removing arbitrary background audio, it exposes some confusion associated with the ideas of correlated random variables, inner products, and affine transformations.
Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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 fo…
> 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.
That's actually the easy part. You already have the music. Distorting it by superimposing background noise is really not difficult.
Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music
#57I'm a bit shocked that they're paying $600M. Is Shazam even profitable? It feels like a clever tech demo from 10 years ago that's already been replicated in search engines like Google.
Yes, they became profitable in 2016 via mostly brand advertising [1][2]. The company has nearly 400 employees according to LinkedIn. With a very conservative personnel estimate of $125k/employee/year, that's $50M alone. Let's throw on another $25M for everything else and they need to be doing at least $75M+ in annual revenue.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2016/04/20/shazam-for-brands-user-...
[2] https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7526322/shazam-1...
Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music
#58Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple is probably going to kill the app. They probably just bought it for the tech.
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A tiny percentage of the time occasionally when a successful company makes a N-hundred million purchase of a technology and company and you don't understand why, it's because they have made a mistake.
The smart money, though, is on the main chance: you don't understand the purchase, or the problem domain, or both.
In this case I think you are overestimating the progress in NN and search, and underestimating the signal processing. Have you tried this with any significant corpus?
"Whack it through a FFT and do correlation " seems like one of the obvious solution to the toy problem version, but this is exactly the sort of thing that usually falls apart in practice.