Apple today announced that music recognition tool Shazam has identified more than 100 billion songs since it launched. Shazam started as an SMS service in the U.K. in 2002, and it became one of the first iPhone apps available on the App Store in 2008.
Apple shared some fun comparisons for this statistic:
- That's equivalent to 12 songs identified for every person on Earth.
- A person would need to use Shazam to identify a song every second for 3,168 years to reach 100 billion.
- That's more than 2,200x the number of identifications of Shazam's top song ever, "Dance Monkey," with over 45 million tags.
- Shazam Predictions 2023 alum Benson Boone's "Beautiful Things" was the first track released this year to hit 10 million recognitions, and the fastest, doing so in 178 days. At that pace, it would take more than 4,800 years for it to hit 100 billion.
Apple acquired Shazam in 2018, and it now powers the Music Recognition feature built into iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Shazam is deeply integrated across Apple's software platforms, including in Control Center, Siri, as an Action button option on iPhone 15 Pro models and all iPhone 16 models, as a Smart Stack widget on the Apple Watch, and more.
The playlist below includes Shazam's top 100 most-identified songs, with the list currently topped by the 2019 song "Dance Monkey" by Tones and I.
