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Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music
- sctb 9y agoRecent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15881896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15881896
- grep4master 9y agoIt would be nice to have the song identification feature on iOS while on standby like the Pixel 2 does.
- whoisjuan 9y agoI still can't understand how that feature works. They stated that everything is done locally on the device, so privacy is not an issue. But how can they host a huge catalog of songs fingerprints without blowing the storage? Are they only saving the top charts?
- laken 9y agoMy understanding is that song fingerprints are tiny, so it's not too prohibitive to store an entire catalog of them on the device.
- icebraining 9y agoThat's weird, because the AcoustID database is over 160GB: https://acoustid.org/database https://acoustid.org/database Then again, it does have 48M fingerprints, so that's only ~3.3KB/fingerprint. Maybe Google has a decent subset in a reasonably-sized package.
- pwinnski 9y agoReports on the Pixel library have it at either the 10k or 20k most popular tracks only. That makes for a reasonably small library.
- abritinthebay 9y agoat 3.3kb it's only about 64mb to store 20,000 songs. If they periodically update that (in the background, on wifi, etc) you'd likely never know. It's basically noise when OS updates are multi-gb.
- warrenmiller 9y agoYeah it misses out on a lot of indie stuff
- indy 9y agoThey only store a catalog of the most popular songs. (Where 'most popular' is determined by your geographical location). This catalog is periodically updated.
- neves 9y agoIsn't the use case to find obscure music? Weird to have just popular ones. To "discover" a top 10 hit I can just ask someone nearby.
- jlardinois 9y agoNot necessarily. Everything is "obscure" to you the first time you hear it.
- mjlee 9y agoI think the Pareto principal kicks in hard here. If it stores the top 20,000 songs as the other comments suggest then I expect that would include the vast majority of music you’d come across.
- neinzero 9y agoTop 10, yes, but not top 10,000.
- kornish 9y agoAccording to a friend who works at Google, they only store a catalog of ~20k popular songs that updates periodically. Fingerprints are small, so an archive of that size isn't too big.
- cma 9y agoSucks for the little guys: http://www.thwink.org/sustain/glossary/CumulativeAdvantagePrinciple.htm http://www.thwink.org/sustain/glossary/CumulativeAdvantagePr...
- bluedino 9y agoThe Shazam thread from the other day said it was only 60MB worth for like 10 or 20k songs
- Eric_WVGG 9y agoFor what it's worth, here's a bit (and discussion) on how Shazam actually works. I'm ashamed to admit I understand hardly any of it. http://coding-geek.com/how-shazam-works/ http://coding-geek.com/how-shazam-works/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870408
- mdc2161 9y agoIt's definitely not just the top charts. Notably it has picked up when someone near me was playing Chopin on a piano as well as the occasional KPop tune my girlfriend is listening to. My guess is it supplements the data with songs from your Google Music and youtube history.
- cma 9y ago> The 18-year-old company, which has required twice the average time to deliver an exit for backers, was valued at about $1 billion when it closed its last funding round in 2015. If the last round had a strong liquidity preference then it wasn't really valued at $1 billion, and those investors might have even come out ahead.
- spike021 9y agoI've used Shazam for years but lately for some reason I've been running into more music that it can't identify from two separate phones (so it's not possibly a bug limited to one device). Hoping this doesn't mean there service is degrading because I've really benefited from it over the years.
- fossuser 9y agoMy issue with it was that it got too good. I used to use it to identify music in shows or soundtracks, but it started just saying "Breaking Bad Episode 4" which while more accurate was less helpful. Shortly after that everyone else had music discovery natively anyway.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoWow, that is an unusual exit after 6 rounds of funding. Crunchbase has it at $143M in funding up to that point. It goes to show how the switch from radio (station directed programming) to streaming (user directed programming) has put a huge crimp in music discovery and music promotion. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/shazam https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/shazam
- rjett 9y agoQuestion from a non-Silicon Valley professional: Where does all that money go? Obviously, some [likely big] portion of it is still on the balance sheet, but does an app like Shazam really cost that much in engineering talent to update it and iterate it and server space to keep it running?
- borski 9y agoMarketing, sales, legal (especially in the music space, though less so for Shazam), engineering (integrations with Spotify, Etc.). People cost a ton of money. :)
- jdavis703 9y agoJust because all you see is an app, doesn't mean there isn't more software they have running behind the scenes. A lot of consumer facing companies need to have DMCA copyright compliance software, explicit content software and various "big data" integrations, both to power better recommendations engines, but also for BI purposes. They also need a way to ingest content so they can identify new music. A good app looks like it only takes a few engineers to maintain, but in likelihood there's a lot of complexity, even that's outside of the core "platform" software going on.
- adventured 9y agoAn average of 50 employees with their all-in costs for 18 years, including all the other routine business expenses = $143 million.
- kgilpin 9y ago
- StephenMelon 9y agoThe data that Shazam can gather must be incredibly useful to record labels, in that many people wanting to know the artist/song is a strong signal that a track is a potential hit. Since Apple already have data about what people are actually listening to (by location), this gives them additional data about what people might want to listen to.
- wil421 9y agoI love Shazam for finding new music and this is really one of my favorites. A couple times a month I see what the top Shazam’s are and usually pick up a new song or two. Music is at my fingertips from a variety of apps. My biggest problem is discovering new artists or songs.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- chiefalchemist 9y agoForbes, or was it BusinessWeek, actual did an article on that (i.e., selling data to record labels) a year or so ago. If I get a moment I'll try to track it down later.
- nerfhammer 9y agoMaybe this? https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/12/the-shazam-effect/382237/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/12/the-sha...
- chiefalchemist 9y agoAh. Yes. Damn. I knew it was a mag I read on the regular but didn't think to think The Atlantic would cover such a think. Good catch. Cheers mate.
- greggman 9y agopersonally I've found Soundhound to be much better. Havent used Shazam in a long time though.
- kin 9y agoI love Shazam but honestly, if they remove integrations like "Open in Spotify" which seems likely, I would probably switch to using SoundHound.
- mwilliaams 9y agoApple is probably going to kill the app. They probably just bought it for the tech.
- amelius 9y ago(removed)
- coppolaemilio 9y agoIt is already working. It is not that simple to start from scratch and get it working properly + the DB and everything
- ghaff 9y agoYou'd need access to the fingerprints database but otherwise should be fairly straightforward. What's not straightforward is recognizing cover songs and the like. But that's not only non-trivial but AFAIK can't be done.
- amelius 9y ago> What's not straightforward is recognizing cover songs and the like. But that's not only non-trivial but AFAIK can't be done. Well, you could translate the music into actual notes (or musical intervals), and use Smith-Waterman (or any more advanced and more recent technique) to find the song with the lowest edit-distance.
- rhizome 9y agoConverting digital audio to notes is both not as easy as it sounds and not how Shazam works. https://www.toptal.com/algorithms/shazam-it-music-processing-fingerprinting-and-recognition https://www.toptal.com/algorithms/shazam-it-music-processing...
- wonderous 9y ago>> “Shazam, the 18-year-old company...” Fact that Shazam is 18-years-old made me curious, and found the following on Wikipedia: >> “Initially, in 2002, the service was launched only in the UK and was known as "2580", as the number was the shortcode that customers dialled from their mobile phone to get music recognised. The phone would automatically hang up after 30 seconds. A result was then sent to the user in the form of a text message containing the song title and artist name.” SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(company)
- dsnuh 9y agoI remember the first time I Shazamed a song. It was during the flip phone era and it was honestly the most magical thing to me at time. I had always wanted something like this, and here it was at my fingertips.
- madeofpalk 9y agoI remember using Shazam back in... 2008 on my whatever Nokia phone I had back then. It was pretty good.
- ams6110 9y agoAt that time, I wonder if there was any technology actually identifiying the song, or if it was a big mechanical turk sort of operation.
- dsnuh 9y agoPretty sure they had the algorithm first.
- guelo 9y agoAmazon's Mechanical Turk service launched in 2005.
- coldtea 9y agoThe notion of a "mechanical turk" however, and of operations putting a facade on humans doing the work -- to which the parent alluded to ("a big mechanical turk sort of operation") and not specifically Amazon's variety , has been known and used for centuries.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bsimpson 9y agoI'm a bit shocked that they're paying $600M. Is Shazam even profitable? It feels like a clever tech demo from 10 years ago that's already been replicated in search engines like Google.
- meritt 9y agoYes, they became profitable in 2016 via mostly brand advertising [1][2]. The company has nearly 400 employees according to LinkedIn. With a very conservative personnel estimate of $125k/employee/year, that's $50M alone. Let's throw on another $25M for everything else and they need to be doing at least $75M+ in annual revenue. [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2016/04/20/shazam-for-brands-user-activity/ https://www.macrumors.com/2016/04/20/shazam-for-brands-user-... [2] https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7526322/shazam-1-billion-downloads-profit-advertising https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7526322/shazam-1...
- JonFish85 9y agoIs it actually profitable? "Profitable" is a fun term to throw around to make your business look good, but it can mean a lot of different things (net margin profitable, gross margin profitable, pre tax profitable, etc). I'd be surprised if they really were all that profitable (meaning they would end each year with more money than they started with).
- meritt 9y agoFair point, guess we'll see when Apple discloses more details on financials. Given that Apple seems to compensate junior engineers with compensation packages north of $300k, it wouldn't be too surprising if they overpaid for Shazam too. Apple also has $74.2B in cash and short-term investments, so paying $0.6B for Shazam doesn't really move the needle.
- charlesdm 9y agoPerhaps I have limited understanding of running a £40m a year business, but why does an app like Shazam need 400 employees? Even if selling data and/or advertising, do they need (say) a 200 people sales team.. ?
- Sholmesy 9y agoShazam operates on my street! Was an interesting surprise... This feels like a natural acquisition to compete w/ some of Googles offering w/ the latest Pixel 2. The fact Shazam is 18 years old is crazy. Pre-dates "apps" with the "2580" service and was one of the first apps on the iPhone.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- MrTomahawk55 9y agoHas anything replaced "Into Now"? I loved using it, and ever since Yahoo bought them up and then shut them down, I've always wondered why Shazam or Sound Hound hadn't integrated the audio from TV shows and movies into its database. (http://mashable.com/2011/01/31/intonow/ http://mashable.com/2011/01/31/intonow/)
- jccalhoun 9y agofrom now on it will only identify U2 songs.
- Aissen 9y agoProbably a way to pay less taxes; they won't have to bring EU cash to US, and get to cash it out before Brexit. It's also a nice acqui-hire; Spotify already snatched Echo Nest a few years ago, so they get to catch-up with Shazam.
- DoodleBuggy 9y agoSpotify remains a far better experience and product than Apple Music. Why not buy Spotify?
- yoz-y 9y agoApple does not seem to like to do big purchases. Even though they probably could. Spotify is not (yet) profitable so they would probably have to hike up the prices. At this point they are probably better off doing their deals on their own and slowly catch up.
- romanovcode 9y ago>and slowly catch up. I don't want to be anti-apple because I like most of their stuff but iTunes is complete garbage compared to Spotify. With the stuff they have now they will never catch up.
- yoz-y 9y agoI should probably try Spotify as so many people say it is better than Apple Music (which I do genuinely like). Spotify currently offers 3 months premium subscription for 1€ so it may be worth a shot.
- hb3b 9y agoA castle in the sky valuation, maybe?
- robmcm 9y agoThis is (unfortunately) a huge testament to patenting technology. I remember Shazam shutting down a lot of early iOS apps that provided music discovery services. The technology it’s self became relatively simple in the last 10 years, but their ownership of the patent has kept them on top. I suspect it’s due to end soon, and they realised once it’s gone they would just become a feature of music streaming services. Good to get out now while there is still some exclusivity for Apple to milk.
- dsnuh 9y agoCan anyone think of another brand that has become generalized as an action, the same way as "Googling" other than Shazamed? To me "Shazam it" is shorthand for use whatever music ID service you have.