Apple has acquired the popular Shazam service for $400 million. If you don’t know already Shazam allows users to identify songs, movies, TV shows etc by listening to them. Shazam is already a very popular service and is supported by a wide range of devices including Siri, which uses Shazam’s database to identify songs when you ask “what song is this” or a similar query.
Without going into much detail Apple spokesperson announced the acquisition while noting that they have exciting plans in store for the service. On this occasion Shazam has also issued an official statement saying “Shazam is one of the highest rated apps in the world and loved by hundreds of millions of users and we can’t imagine a better home for Shazam to enable us to continue innovating and delivering magic for our users.”
While $400 million is a big amount it is only a fraction of $1 billion valuation that the company got during its last funding round. The low acquisition price tag is most probably due to Shazam only pulling in $54 million in revenue in 2016 and failing to find a business model.
It will be interesting to see how Apple uses Shazam to its advantage, in a world where it already dominates the music world. It can also be a blow to Spotify, Apple Music’s main competitor, since Shazam reportedly sends 1 million clicks to both Apple Music and Spotify. Apple could decide to remove Spotify as an option to listen to the recognized song.
An even deeper integration for Shazam in iOS could also be on the cards with iOS gaining Google Pixel smartphone like song recognition feature, which automatically listens to now playing music and displays song title to the user. (TheVerge)
