Shazam's music-recognition app has helped millions of app users answer the question, "What song is this?" Rather than typing snippets of lyrics into Google, just hold up your phone to the speakers and within seconds, Shazam tells you what's playing.
In recent years, however, Shazam has shifted from music discovery to what Shazam CEO Andrew Fisher calls "media discovery." The service can now Shazam TV shows and accompanying TV commercials (What song is that American Idol contestant singing? How about a discount for Shazaming a particular ad?). "We're seeing success in moving into a broader media discovery experience," according to Fisher.
PCMag spoke to Fisher recently, who talked about embracing this new model, whether Shazam would start its own music service, and more.
PCMag: How did Shazam get started?
Andrew Fisher: There were four founders of the company, three of which came up with the idea to point a cell phone at a piece of music and for it to identify the name of the song. And, they went to a number of universities in North America and investigated whether somebody could build a technology that would work in real-world environments, meaning being in a bar or restaurant or nightclub, where there was background noise. The technology was actually invented within Stanford University by Dr. Avery Wang and Prof. Julius Smith, [but] they weren't able to secure funding in North America, so they raised angel investment in the U.K. And that's how the company ended up incorporating and actually launching in the U.K. Today, Shazam has 200 million users in over 200 countries worldwide, and every day we identify over 7.5 million peoples' content.
PCMag: Can you talk a bit about the technology involved with Shazam?
Andrew Fisher: The way we make a match on a piece of music is we look at the various sound waves that are created either by the vocal performance or the instrument. And if you can imagine a piece of music with a vocalist and queue instruments, there will be three sound waves going up and down, and we take a moment in time – we take a slice of that song – and we plot the sound waves and we actually plot the spatial difference between the peaks and the troughs in the music in the sounds waves. And that creates what we call a pattern or a fingerprint. And, what we do is, we take a sample of that music and create a fingerprint based on the sample of what we're listening to and we match it against our database that we've created already. It's pattern matching. So, every performance is unique and they'll be small, total differences between the same artist performing the same song but in two different recording studios. We can actually make an exact match on the song that someone is listening to and then bring that back to them so they can actually purchase that exact performance.
PCMag: How did you build the database?
Andrew Fisher: When we first launched the service, there was not digitized catalogue of music in the U.K., so we actually worked with Entertainment U.K., which owned Woolworth and we had teams of people working 24-7 actually taking physical, vinyl records and encoding them – actually putting them into a digitized format and putting them into a database, as well as creating the database of track names and artist names they'd match against that music. And that was a strategic partnership that we had with Entertainment U.K. at the time, and that actually created the first digitized database of music in the U.K. And that was 1.6 million songs. Today, we've got over 16 million tracks on the database, and that's continuing to grow very rapidly as we expand internationally.
PCMag: Lately, Shazam has moved from just music recognition to TV shows and ads. Can you talk a bit about that evolution?
Andrew Fisher: For a period of years, we've looked at audio recognition as a technology that can be used in direct-response marketing. And so whilst we were focusing on building our business through music, because it's a mass-market category and it's helped to build this global audience of a few 100 million people, we felt ready in 2010 to launch this in the context of TV advertising. Our first partner was actually Levis Dockers and we launched at the Super Bowl in February 2010, where people could Shazam the Dockers advert and Dockers gave away 5,000 pairs of chinos.
That was a very successful launch for us, and it created a lot of media attention. So we had the broadcast community approach us and ask if we'd thought of enabling people to interact with TV shows. We actually got started with NBC Universal on the SyFy Network with our first show and today we work with all the major broadcasters in North America and various television shows. The one that's highest profile for us is American Idol. So the experience is you can Shazam the show and then on your mobile phone or on your iPad or netbook, you can actually have an interactive experience with the show. For example, you can see which artist is performing, you can see their Twitter feed, you can find the original recording, you can go deeper into diary information or exclusive information behind the scenes or even the judges' deliberations. So there are a number of different experiences that we've built for the TV format. The important thing is that broadcasters have been putting the Shazam logo on screens to inform people that they can actually use Shazam with the television show itself and have an interactive experience.
PCMag: Is there a particular platform that's most popular among Shazam users?
Andrew Fisher: One of the things that differentiates us as a company is that we've been in the market now for nine years, and so our heritage is on mobile. So we support every major mobile platform and actually, what we saw when we launched on the iPhone was success across all the other platforms as well. Each week we acquire 1.5 million new users to Shazam and we've seen that consistently week after week over the past 18 months. And whilst 200 million people sound like a lot, there are 6 billion phones in the world, so there's still a significant opportunity to attract new users to Shazam. So we don't see that being focused on platforms like iOS and Android – we also see that coming from platforms like Microsoft, Symbian, Java, Brew, and RIM as well. And we're continuing to support those platforms, as our mission is to become as ubiquitous as we can.
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