Apple's Shazam Music Discovery Service Surpasses 1 Billion Shazams Per Month

Popular Apple-owned music discovery app and service Shazam is celebrating a new milestone today, surpassing more than 1 billion Shazams per month and a total of 50 billion tags since the app was first launched.

shazam

"Shazam is synonymous with magic," said Oliver Schusser, Apple's vice president of Apple Music and Beats, "both for the fans getting a song recognition almost instantly, and for the artists being discovered. With 1 billion recognitions a month, Shazam is one of the most popular music apps in the world. Today's milestones show not only people's love for Shazam, but also the ever-growing appetite for music discovery around the world."

Shazam launched as a text message service in 2002, but started seeing significant growth when the App Store launched in 2008, and with it, the Shazam app.

Shazam hit its first billion tags at the 10 year mark, but now less than 10 years after that, Shazam has successfully matched more than 50 billion tags with 51 million songs. The first Shazam result ever was "Jeepster" by T. Rex, and that result was delivered over a text message.

The 50 billionth milestone Shazamed song was Evangeline's Mandopop song "框不住的愛 (不插電版)," and Tone and I's "Dance Monkey" continues to be the most Shazamed track of all time.

Shazam is built right into Apple devices so you can ask Siri to identify a song, or you can access music recognition functionality through the Control Center on iPhone and iPad. There's also a Shazam app available from the ‌App Store‌.

Going forward, Apple is making a ShazamKit feature available to developers, allowing third-party apps to integrate Shazam's audio recognition technology into their apps. Apps will be able to match music to Shazam's song catalog, but it can also be used to match any prerecorded audio to custom results. Apple plans to release ShazamKit later this year.

Tag: Shazam

Top Rated Comments

pinsquid Avatar
53 months ago
Shazam was and still is responsible for me finding out the names of a lot of songs that would've otherwise gone unknown. Glad to see Apple allowing devs to integrate with a bit more.
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
steevn Avatar
53 months ago
Integration into iOS has possibly been one of my favorite iOS features.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Unregistered 4U Avatar
53 months ago

Shazam was and still is responsible for me finding out the names of a lot of songs that would've otherwise gone unknown. Glad to see Apple allowing devs to integrate with a bit more.
Especially when it’s instrumental or the lyrics are unintelligible. :)
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Westside guy Avatar
53 months ago
"Surpasses 1 billion Shazams a month"? Marketspeak 1, English 0.

At least they didn't call them "Smurfs", I guess.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
CarpalMac Avatar
53 months ago
The funny thing is that Google had baked the same service into Android about 7+ years ago and worked brilliantly, linking to Google Play Music. A handy widget on the screen and two touches later I knew what a song was.

But, like so many things, they watered it down and then binned it off. At the very least buried it, I haven't seen it for ages, plus they killed Play Music for the dire YouTube Music.

When it comes to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, Google has it nailed. ?
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
MauiPa Avatar
53 months ago
Shazam is awesome!
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)