Shazam today announced a big update to its popular music-detecting app alongside an overhaul of Shazam.com that the company hopes "builds on the magic of Shazam to provide more immersive music discovery and uninterrupted listening."
One of the biggest changes in 8.2.0 is a new front-end user experience that is personalized based on the user's friends and music previously discovered within the app. The company has also introduced curated lists of trending music that can be specified to location or most popular discovered songs within the app.
“We want Shazam to continue to serve as a destination for music fans, increasingly becoming the center of their music world,” said Daniel Danker, Chief Product Officer, Shazam. “For years Shazam has identified music with just one tap. Now it’s just as easy to open Shazam and tap once to discover and listen to great music.”
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Shazam customers with accounts for streaming music services such as Spotify and Rdio will get even more out of the app's new update, which allows users of those streaming music services to listen to their full playlists and top charts within the Shazam app.
In addition to simple in-app access to Spotify playlists, the Spotify integration in the new Shazam app goes one step further, giving users the chance to automatically add every song they Shazam into a specified Spotify playlist, a feature Rdio users have had for a few months now. The integration between Shazam and Spotify is available for iOS in today's update, but Android users are promised to have the functionality in the weeks to come.
A new "Play All" button also lets users listen to full playlists of songs across the service, including top charts, personal Shazams, and songs recommended for them. The new music player then lets them rate tracks by swiping right to add them to My Shazam and left to skip them.
On the Shazam official website side of things, the company is adding a Hall of Fame that celebrates artists experiencing significant success on the service. Tracks are ranked in Platinum, Gold, or Silver categories for having surpassed 15, 10 or 5 million Shazams respectively. The service is also publishing the number of Shazams each song on the site has received for the first time ever.
Shazam can be downloaded for free from the App Store for iPhone and iPad. [Direct Link]
Top Rated Comments
Shazam struck me as a novelty... are there people who still use it? Is it still relevant?
Yep. Use it all the time, especially on the mac while watching youtube videos. Discovered many great artists/songs that way.
Yep. Use it all the time, especially on the mac while watching youtube videos. Discovered many great artists/songs that way.
Hm. Cool. People only ever talk about using it to discover tracks from the radio. Which isn't really useful because generally they announce what the song is before and after the song on the radio. But on YouTube videos... often I've wondered what's in the background of those. Indie games, too. Maybe I'll start using it to figure out what they are.But I use Shazam a lot for IDing tunes in podcasts. Not all DJ's make there tracklists available. Some tunes are difficult to ID so maybe SoundHound will have better luck.
Shazam struck me as a novelty... are there people who still use it? Is it still relevant?
I use SoundHound -which offers more or less the same functionality but works better for me- a few times a week. Very useful when you want to know what song that is playing in a movie, TV show, in a bar, etc...----------
Shazam is just one of those apps that you miss when it comes in handy. We've all probably been there, hearing a song somewhere, being curious about who the artist is and not being able to find out. I keep Shazam installed just in case. With 50+ MB in size however, Shazam is unfortunately fairly big.
If app size is a concern, SoundHound (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/soundhound/id284972998?mt=8) is under 20MB and I found it works better for me.I thought I wouldn't need it anymore now that Siri has Shazam built in. But I found it's implementation a bit weird. You actually have to tell Siri first to listen to the song, which, depending on the situation, may be very impractical. I think Google Voice listens in the background and shows you the song automatically.