Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 163 posts

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#71

Post by JonFish85 »

meritt wrote: post #57
bsimpson wrote: post #43

I'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.billboar…

Is it actually profitable? "Profitable" is a fun term to throw around to make your business look good, but it can mean a lot of different things (net margin profitable, gross margin profitable, pre tax profitable, etc). I'd be surprised if they really were all that profitable (meaning they would end each year with more money than they started with).

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#72

Post by JonFish85 »

bsimpson wrote: post #43

I'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.

According to MacRumors, it's a deal "that could be worth $400m". If I were to guess (based on just public information which is almost nothing), the stock is not going to be worth much. Obviously Apple is going to pay the least they can, so I wouldn't be shocked if they're paying exactly what investors need to either get their money back or maybe a slight profit (if the recent investors had conditions for it). Employees will probably get nothing, except a new plan. The total sum of that new plan would depend on hitting some very aggressive numbers, that are unlikely to be hit (no idea what they'd put the metrics on). And the bulk of that is probably going to the CEO who has to stick around for 4 years to cash in.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#73

Post by throwawayfinal »

amelius wrote: post #56
vedant wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The easy part? If you're apple, google, or microsoft, maybe.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#74

Post by Sholmesy »

Shazam operates on my street! Was an interesting surprise...

This feels like a natural acquisition to compete w/ some of Googles offering w/ the latest Pixel 2.

The fact Shazam is 18 years old is crazy. Pre-dates "apps" with the "2580" service and was one of the first apps on the iPhone.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#75

Post by madeofpalk »

dsnuh wrote: post #62
wonderous wrote: post #24

>> “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 f…

I remember the first time I Shazamed a song. It was during the flip phone era and it was honestly the most magical thing to me at time. I had always wanted something like this, and here it was at my fingertips.

I remember using Shazam back in... 2008 on my whatever Nokia phone I had back then. It was pretty good.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#76

Post by fuck_google »

paulcole wrote: post #39
amelius wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

Building the service is not usually the hard part, but building the ecosystem around it is. There were/are countless services similar to Facebook or Twitter, but only a few of them can be really successful because of herd mentality.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#78

Post by oarsinsync »

amelius wrote: post #60
lavezzi wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple already had a music service too (itunes).

Different signals.

"What's that song?" is a different signal to buying a song. Especially when "what's that song?" isn't restricted by licensing agreements.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#79

Post by amelius »

throwawayfinal wrote: post #73
amelius wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The easy part? If you're apple, google, or microsoft, maybe.

Can you explain?

I mean, you can easily find thousands of hours of music online. Recording background noise is easy (just go to a random bar where they are not playing music). Now simply add the two signals (you can shift them randomly to generate more data). You can also add some linear filtering if you like (just imagine random settings of an equalizer for starters).

This should give you enough data to build a proof of concept at least.

Re: Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music

#80

Post by meritt »

JonFish85 wrote: post #71
meritt wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.billboar…

Is it actually profitable? "Profitable" is a fun term to throw around to make your business look good, but it can mean a lot of different things (net margin profitable, gross margin profitable, pre tax profitable, etc). I'd be surprised if they really were all that profitable (meaning they would end each year with more money than they started with).

Fair point, guess we'll see when Apple discloses more details on financials.

Given that Apple seems to compensate junior engineers with compensation packages north of $300k, it wouldn't be too surprising if they overpaid for Shazam too. Apple also has $74.2B in cash and short-term investments, so paying $0.6B for Shazam doesn't really move the needle.

Post reply on HN