16 ms·

Shazam turns 20

361 points by feross 4y ago

matt-attack 4y ago
For those of you who like a minimalist approach to apps, if you have an iPhone you don’t need any app to use the algorithm. Just say “what song is this” and Siri will employ the Shazam algorithm. Even more obscure is the list of all songs you ID is maintained. Launch the “iTunes Store” app (why is this still even a thing) then tap the upper right hamburger menu. Then select the middle “Siri” tab. It’s kind of neat. I use this feature when I’m out and about in restaurants, stores, etc. Again no need to install any app.
munchler 4y ago
TIL that Apple owns Shazam.
- raghavbali 4y ago
  +1 and also the fact that Google Pixel's "Now Playing" feature is such an amazing application of the same idea. Though I wonder how different are their implementations
  - jaypeg25 4y ago
    Google's now playing feature is somehow always offline (to relieve privacy concerns) and is somehow still incredible at recognizing even obscure songs. Really impressive. I also love that it just shows up on my lock screen.
    - tialaramex 4y ago
      Supposedly while building the backend, they realised the actual summary data for a reasonable breadth of tracks (say, anything you'd likely hear on the radio or on a jukebox) was tiny and so, why build a service at all when you can just ship the data to phones ? Recently for whatever reason I was listening to the twist/ cover "Stacy's Dad" and Now Playing recognised it as the rather more famous original Fountain's of Wayne "Stacy's Mom". So yeah, it doesn't know everything. It also doesn't recognise lots of obscure stuff I own that's like B-sides or special editions that never saw radio play, or bands that my friends were in (but everybody I know has read both Steve Albini's "Some of your friends are probably already this fucked" and the KLF's "The Manual" and so none of them signed a recording contract and thus you've never heard of them) but I've never had a situation where I heard something I liked at like a bar or somewhere and Now Playing didn't know what it is.
      - raghavbali 4y ago
        yeah packaging the data and updating it async does make a lot more sense. Also, I guess its fine that it doesn't know it all but covers a good percentage of requests
- wincy 4y ago
  Heck yeah! If you’ve got an iPhone you literally just have to say “Hey Siri, what’s this song” and it’ll start listening and give you the Apple Music link. The only indication it’s Shazam is a little understated badge at the bottom.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    It's also available as a shortcut in the Control Centre - you don't even have to install the app.
benjaminwootton 4y ago
20 years later and it still seems like magic. It’s incredibly impressive how it can identify a song in second even in noisy environments.
dominotw 4y ago
i feel old.
msoad 4y ago
Shazam loads so freaking fast and ready to listen on my iPhone I really want to read an article on how they did it. It loads as fast as an empty hello world app but the button is ready to press and listen!
- dylan604 4y ago
  Sadly, that is not my experience with the app. I would equate the time my Shazam loads and is ready to listen as roughly the same amount of forever that it takes to launch the native camera app and being able to take a picture.
  - whywhywhywhy 4y ago
    You can add it to Control Centre and it's seemingly instant, just starts listening as soon as you press the button.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      interesting. i've never messed with these options.
      - Jackpillar 4y ago
    - jimjambw 4y ago
      I'm a massive fan of Shazam in Control Centre. It let me have space for another app on the home screen, and they also sync with the iOS app now too.
    - yarabarla 4y ago
      Only problem with that is that it doesn't save the results in your list of Shazam'd songs.
      - beermonster 4y ago
bluetidepro 4y ago
Shazam is one of the very few apps in the past 20 years that STILL "wows" me. I have no idea how the tech works, and I even sort of like not knowing, to be honest. It's one of the very few apps out there that still in exist in a "magical" way to me. I am constantly impressed with how fast/easy it works, even with very obscure music. What an amazing app. Fun quick related story, about 10 or more years ago there was a back tracking song on a TV show (Scrubs) that I really liked that was only in the Netflix version. It was just an instrumental song with some French sounding words speaking in it so there was no easy way to search for it. However, it was distinct enough that it didn't seem like something made just for the show. It was also pretty quiet and under some talking in the tv show scene. I had posted on reddit asking if anyone knew it, and never got any responses. I searched all over the web, but no source had the track details. It drove me crazy every time I would hear the song in re-watching the show, and I still could not track it down every few years when I tried again. Back then, Shazam had no cataloging of it so it wasn't in there either yet. However, when re-watching it a few years back again, I tried Shazam again and to my surprise it finally worked. I was blown away that Shazam was finally able to solve this 10+ year mystery. It was one of the coolest feelings every to scratch that itch finding this rare French song and hearing it in full. It was truly magical. EDIT: Oh sorry, I didn't think anyone would actually care about the song itself lol It was called "Sans Hésitation" by the French-Canadian band "Chapeaumelon". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju4d3YQhByU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju4d3YQhByU - It's also interesting cause now the song does in the episode in tv music database sites. Very cool.
- cooperadymas 4y ago
  Well?
- adnanaga 4y ago
  What was the song ??
  - sexy_panda 4y ago
    You will get the result once $commenter is online again
  - 4y ago
nomilk 4y ago
> August 2002: Shazam launches as a text message service based in the UK. At the time, users could identify songs by dialing “2580” on their phone and holding it up as a song played. They were then sent an SMS message telling them the song title and the name of the artist. Incredible! Curious to know what exactly happened backend after it listened to the audio, and what hardware it ran on.
- ID1452319 4y ago
  Yep, I remember dialling that number and holding my phone up to the telly!
- mortenjorck 4y ago
  Just as amazing to me is that the algorithms could identify a song through the extremely limited bandwidth and spectrum of an early-2000s CDMA stream and a cheap Kyocera microphone.
  - manderley 4y ago
    GSM, not CDMA.
    - post-it 4y ago
      CDMA on Verizon and Sprint in the USA and Bell and Telus in Canada, at the time.
      - gridder 4y ago
        Yeah but we’re talking about UK here…. So GSM is correct.
      - sbuk 4y ago
        "> August 2002: Shazam launches as a text message service based in the UK." AFAIR, we never had CDMA in the UK, so what Verizon et al. were using is irrelevant.
  - 4y ago
yannis7 4y ago
Shazam belongs to that class of iPhone apps that when they were released I was like "wow, the future is here" -- this alongside the first accelerometer and AR ones
nicofcurti 4y ago
I agree with the other folks here, Shazam is one of those things that still works just fine and I have no fucking clue on how they do it. What do they compare the audio recorded with?
- duped 4y ago
  They "fingerprint" the audio and then compare the fingerprint to a large corpus. The hard part is fingerprinting that is resilient to noise (and position within a track!) and a fast way to search the corpus of known fingerprints.
duped 4y ago
The paper giving an overview of how shazam works (1) is one of my favorites (1) https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
- xtracto 4y ago
  Reminds me a lot of MusicBrainz Tagger, I remember being fascinated by it in 2001 ( https://web.archive.org/web/20010107213100/http://musicbrainz.org/how.html https://web.archive.org/web/20010107213100/http://musicbrain... ) because it was able to "identify" the song in the mp3/wma/ogg file and download the correct tags.
- rmnclmnt 4y ago
  I remember studying this paper as a student, was completely amazing, a bit mysterious and not so difficult to understand at the same time. And most of all: no ML involved! All hail the heuristics!
0xdeadbeee 4y ago
Way before apps were even a thing, around 2002-2004, I lived in the UK and shazam worked as calling service: you'd call 2580 (top to bottom on the center column of a phone numpad), it would listen for 30s, then would hang up and send you an sms with the name of the song. IIRC it would charge you something like 50p if it found a result. It really felt like pure magic!
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  I wonder how much getting that number cost them, I recall vaguely that memorable premium short numbers were... Expensive
danbr 4y ago
Does it strike anyone else as being odd that Apple is noting this in their “Newsroom” press release? Don’t get me wrong, great for Shazam and all … but why is Apple - the company that bought them just 4 years ago - is making a todo about it?
- trollied 4y ago
  I don't understand why you're so confused. Shazam is now part of Apple, they are not going to do a press release as "Shazam". The "Shazam" entity does not exist.
- dylan604 4y ago
  No it doesn't. Does it strike anyone else as odd that someone would question a company promoting/congratulating software achievements that they own?
  - nailer 4y ago
    Google doesn't celebrate the history of Writely or Android-pre-Google that much and Microsoft don't promote the history of Excel-pre-Microsoft that much either.
    - Jcowell 4y ago
      Sure but Apple does celebrate its products via Newsroom. Hell they even did it for iTunes in 2004
    - pohl 4y ago
      Their celebrations would be more like "10 years ago today we killed the only product of ours that you ever loved."
    - Kwpolska 4y ago
      > Microsoft don't promote the history of Excel-pre-Microsoft that much either. That’s probably because no such history exists, Excel was always a Microsoft product (even if they aren’t the inventors of spreadsheets).
beefman 4y ago
An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm (2003) https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
- DevX101 4y ago
  Short, recommended read on how Shazam works
halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
I wish they would expand the ACR into movies and TV. Would be awesome to Shazam a show/movie and get details, like X-Ray does.
ducktective 4y ago
Is there a CLI program similar to that? (for identifying songs based on a sample). CLI app not Python notebook, btw.
- rmnclmnt 4y ago
  You can « easily » reproduce the process and make a CLI out of it, but the hard part is to collect the enormous database…
- aidenn0 4y ago
  acoustid is an open-source database with an API; here's a list of already existing applications. beets is definitely CLI, not sure about some of the others: https://acoustid.org/applications https://acoustid.org/applications
- boredemployee 4y ago
  well, you could call the shazam api from CLI
kippinitreal 4y ago
I too have always been blown away by Shazam and pondered how it could possible index so much content for fast lookups. A few years ago this article was super helpful in helping me understand and learn a lot. Fun read which required a lot of side googling for me http://coding-geek.com/how-shazam-works/ http://coding-geek.com/how-shazam-works/
raamdev 4y ago
In the mid-ninties, around the time I had just become a teenager, I remember walking down the back corridor of a mall where my parents were leasing a space for their business and hearing a song playing overhead on the mall speakers that really caught my attention. I had no idea what the song was called or who made it, but I really liked it. I remember wishing I had some way to quickly find out, before the song ended, the name of the song and the artist. I remember thinking, "wouldn't it be great if this cell phone in my pocket could somehow tell me the name of this song?" A decade later I discovered Shazam, and even today, more than a decade after that, Shazam still has a place on my home screen, quickly within reach, helping me discover hundreds of great artists and songs overheard from as many different places. The magic of the experience, and the appreciation for the technology, stem from the memory of that moment in the mid-nineties when I stood under a speaker listening to a song that I might never hear again.
harmmonica 4y ago
Tangent, and this may be one of those cases where I learned about this on HN and am now passing it back to HN so pardon if I'm just late to the party, but if you're a regular Shazam user on iPhone you don't need to open the app anymore. You can just add a widget to control center. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210331 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210331
- joezydeco 4y ago
  Saying "Hey Siri what song is this?" is even quicker.
  - muziq 4y ago
    Yeah, I’ve spent five minutes scrolling a thread before someone says the obvious… Cepstrum for the win ;)
  - crossroadsguy 4y ago
    No, it definitely is not. Besides on many occasions I would not even want to do that. Fastest is simply turning on “Shazam on app start” in the settings and then starting the apps. However if your phone is locked then indeed what parent commenter said is quickest.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
Shazam is an amazing piece of tech. Always amazed me when you use it in a noisy bar, and it finds the right track instantly. One used to be able to sing the songs as well which does not seem to work anymore. Either that or my vocals are gone.
magicalhippo 4y ago
Reminds me of a fun IRC moment 20 years ago or so. A buddy had a song stuck in his head, but he couldn't recall the name of it. I asked how it went, and he typed something like "du du duu duu du du duu du, du du duu duu du du duu du" and within 10 seconds I replied "oh, Tom's diner by Suzanne Vega?" After a few moments he replied "yes! how the hell?!" Anyway, Shazam is great when out and about and I hear something I like. Clubs and other loud venues provide a challenge, but covering the mic usually does the trick. I'd love to read some more details about how such fingerprinting works. I'm sure there are lots of interesting details on how it deals with recording noise and such.
- endorphine 4y ago
  Lol, I swear that while reading the 2nd "duu" the same song came to mind. Not sure what happened here..
  - magicalhippo 4y ago
    To be fair I think it's a pretty distinctive song. Still, a fun memory.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  > I'm sure there are lots of interesting details on how it deals with recording noise and such. There's more to Shazam than that but Fourier transforms gets rid of the noise. I ported a FFT to Java back in the days and it was, IIRC, not even 100 lines of code. Amazing algorithm. I used it to record engine noise under acceleration and then derive power/torque curve of my car (it took into account the number of cylinders): drive the car several times, both ways, on a street, record the noise. Apply the FFT. Input the rims size / gear ratio etc. And I'd end up with about the exact same plot as the official one from the car manufacturer. Noise simply disappears with a FFT. A more concerning issue is harmonics.
- bluedino 4y ago
  Thought for sure that was on bash.org as I'd seen it before
nailer 4y ago
The Shazam creators commissioned a movie to be made about their company - they considered it to be like "The Social Network" except them as the heroes. Source: I watched the Shazam founder awkwardly pitch Danny Boyle at a director meet-and-greet while Danny tried his best to avoid them.
chirau 4y ago
This paper of how their algorithm works by one of their lead developers at the time suggests that the company actually started in 2000. https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
- rwmj 4y ago
  I turned them down after an interview in around 2000/2001 (they started out in London). The reason was that the idea seemed completely useless to me and I thought they'd never make a business out of it :-)
  - saasxyz 4y ago
    Just read this paper, it is brilliant. And TIL about Shazam and the idea still sounds useless to me. Seems like I have never had this problem in my life.
    - The5thElephant 4y ago
      Do you like music? If so have you really never heard a song playing somewhere that you did not recognize and wanted to know what it was?
    - khazhoux 4y ago
      I use it several times a week. Driving with classical station on. Is this Mozart? That cadence sounded like Mozart, but I'm not sure. <Shazam and wait 10 seconds> Oh, it's Brahms! And now I have it auto-saved to listen to when I get home.
      - astrange 4y ago
        Don't use your phone while you're driving!
  - cannam 4y ago
    That's interesting - I had a vague recollection of having heard of them before launch - I guess they were hiring from the pool of developers being laid off from the dotcom bust? I have an image in my mind of my boss at the time going around the office asking if anyone was interested in talking to this thing called Shazam. I've long wondered if I imagined it. I certainly didn't act on it. I remember (not much later than this) interviewing at a place where the product was intended to be "an automated assistant that listens to your phone call and pipes supporting information to your computer as you speak". Obviously I gave them a wide berth. It's funny to think about the "gap" in magic - Shazam seems magical but totally worked, this other idea seemed magical and, at the time, totally was.
swid 4y ago
Here’s the list on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2Z69DiD4sGs5aHt4OXE3fU?si=bILFm9URREuIYVtBpa8Iqw https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2Z69DiD4sGs5aHt4OXE3fU?si=...
cannam 4y ago
It's obviously a cracking algorithm, but what made Shazam doubly remarkable was how efficiently they turned it into a working product. It wasn't just a case of developing an algorithm that could in theory be used to match an audio signal against all the world's pop songs. They presumably also had to get hold of a substantial number of those songs, fingerprint them, and roll out the search robustly against generally very poor audio hardware using simple telephony services at (for the time) quite considerable scale. They did it very quickly, it worked super well from launch, and it's been running continuously ever since. I've read the paper about the method, but I would love to know more about the original development and deployment.
- mkarliner 4y ago
  Well, I was CTO at the time, AMA...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
    How'd y'all monetise back then?
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      I think it was a premium-rate number you had to call. When it became an app, it eventually had an ad-supported version with a paid, premium version "Shazam Encore" that was ad-free.
      - jen729w 4y ago
        Yep, 50p a go from memory. Charged to your phone bill. I used Shazam in London when it launched. I left the UK in 2003 so I reckon it was literally just as it launched. Presumably I saw billboards or a Wired article or something?
  - schoen 4y ago
spinningarrow 4y ago
Not Shazam but I remember a website back in the day called ‘The Song Tapper’ where you could press your space bar to the rhythm of a song in your head and it would suggest which song(s) it might be. Teenage me thought that was very cool. The site seems no more but I found a Lifehacker post about it: https://lifehacker.com/find-the-name-of-a-song-by-tapping-149288 https://lifehacker.com/find-the-name-of-a-song-by-tapping-14...
jfoster 4y ago
I'm surprised that Apple have kept Shazam working well on Android for this long. They acquired it 4 years ago already.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  It might have something to do with the big "Play Full Song" button that opens Apple Music. Since they already have access to their music catalog for fingerprinting and the app is mature, maybe it pays for itself in subscriptions?
  - cannam 4y ago
    Yeah, I imagine as long as Apple Music runs on Android, so will Shazam. It's a gateway.
  - jfoster 4y ago
    That did cross my mind and probably explains it. I do wonder how much Apple Music revenue really comes from Android users via Shazam, but perhaps it's significant enough that they don't want to ruin it.
- scarface74 4y ago
  I have to believe that much of the reason for Apple buying Shazam was to know what songs piqued people’s interest. That type of data has to be valuable.
  - jfoster 4y ago
    Good point. Otherwise $400m is quite a high price to pay just for an entry point into Apple Music.
- lhoff 4y ago
  If i remember correctly the main way shazam makes money is by seeling statistics to the record companies and concert planer. If they would break it, they would loose these informations in certain areas of the world where iphones are not that common.
spaceheater 4y ago
Shouldn't their patent expire soon? I remember them actively issuing cease and desist letters to anyone who made code tutorials about how their algo works. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9594480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9594480
ksala_ 4y ago
Shazam always blows my mind. It doesn't work 100% of the times, but when it does it feels like magic. On top of that they introduced (I don't know exactly when) the feature to see lyrics for the song which are automatically synched with the music. This is also mind-blowing. Only Google has managed to top Shazam in blowing my mind, and only ~recently, by making this whole process happen completely offline and continuously in the background on a phone. It's not as broad but still incredible. Google's paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.10958 https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.10958
keepquestioning 4y ago
Does Shazam now use Deep Learning?
atlas_shrugged 4y ago
Ive always wondered why there is only 1 shazam. I was under the impression the algorithm/patent was just licensed from another company. Why havent people cloned this app? Also why arent the shazam geo charts more detailed ie by city/neighborhood or location. Would love to see what songs djs are playing at a location even if im not there. Right now the geo charts are very high level (only major cities)
- zekica 4y ago
  https://musicbrainz.org/ https://musicbrainz.org/ existed at least from 2003, and it does a similar, although a less impressive job. There are other apps such as SoundHound, and even some virtual assistants have the same feature.
  - piperswe 4y ago
    The actual audio fingerprinting/music identification project associated with MusicBrainz is AcoustID (https://acoustid.org/ https://acoustid.org/). It's a separate project that happens to be well integrated with MusicBrainz.
- cannam 4y ago
  The Shazam algorithm was genuinely novel and invented by one of their founders. They patented it to great effect.
- FabHK 4y ago
  I used to use Soundhound (used to be Midomi), until Shazam was integrated into iOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundHound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundHound
  - halostatue 4y ago
    SoundHound also has/had the hum-to-identity that is apparently present in Google’s offering now.
  - thrdbndndn 4y ago
jklinger410 4y ago
It's crazy they even mentioned Shazam in a PR because it will be folded into Siri at some point and disappear.
- hackmiester 4y ago
  It is already folded into Siri. That's what happens if you ask "What song is this?" It just shows you the answer with the Shazam branding. edit to add: I only know this so well because, when I switched to iPhone in 2016, I was REALLY confused about how you Shazam something. I couldn't find it in the App Store. I tried to use the Google app, since that's how I did the equivalent thing on Android, but it didn't support it. Finally I figured out that it's just built into Siri.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    IIRC, Shazam was on the App Store since it’s inception in 2008.
  - jklinger410 4y ago
    Oh I know it's included, by folded in I mean it's going to be completely removed as an additional app and the branding will disappear. It's just going to be a feature of Siri and nothing more at some point.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Apple acquired Siri from another company and kept the name. I doubt that they will kill the 20 year old Shazam brand. In fact on the control center, the Shazam icon is very prominent and it’s available as a complication on the watch.
      - jklinger410 4y ago
        If I ask Siri what song is playing, it doesn't say "thanks to Shazam" or something. It's already folded in to Siri to quite the degree. As the personal assistant war heats up, the drive to make Shazam disappear and force users to use Siri will become too strong to ignore. ERGO I am surprised that they put out a PR about it.
umaar 4y ago
I used to work at Shazam as a front-end web developer and they really supported me. Going to conferences, hackdays (20% time), being exposed to real production-grade systems, it was great. Very grateful to have worked there. Wrote about it too: https://umaar.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-working-at-shazam-part-1/ https://umaar.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-working-at-shaza...
- IshKebab 4y ago
  How on earth have they survived so long when their core feature was cloned by Google and Apple years ago?
  - doodlesdev 4y ago
    Apple acquired Shazam in 2018 [1] there is no Apple alternative because Shazam IS what Apple uses. [1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/09/apple-acquires-shazam-offering-more-ways-to-discover-and-enjoy-music/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/09/apple-acquires-shazam...
jmfldn 4y ago
In the pre-app world I would call Shazam on my mobile when out in clubs quite often. They were way ahead of the curve. Amazing company.
elboru 4y ago
Sometimes, I like to stop and think about all the amazing things that we can do with our phones and that we take for granted. What I do is to imagine myself finding a smartphone in elementary school (90s kid). These are a few things that would blow my mind: - Having a digital global map, with multitouch, that can show me where I am in that map. I can search anything and find reviews from virtually anywhere in the world. I can zoom and see my actual house. I can use street view. - I have access to any song I want. - The phone can listen to a song and it can tell me the name of it (then I can listen to it again) - I can play video games with much better graphics than my N64 - I can watch movies and TV in there. - I can video call - I have a digital assistant - I can find any answer online - I can buy anything online - In the future all this technology is not just for the rich, virtually anyone can buy a smartphone.
- Vinnl 4y ago
  My goto example is that I'm now able to see the text of the text message I'm replying to while typing the reply.
- sh4rks 4y ago
  > I can play video games with much better graphics than my N64 And - you can play N64 games on a rectangle you can carry in your pocket.
- jedberg 4y ago
  In 2004 I took my grandpa for a ride in my car, which had GPS. He couldn't stop staring at it. I asked him what's wrong, and he said, "When I was an insurance salesman driving door to door in LA, I had entire file folder of maps I kept on the passenger seat to find my way. If I had this gadget back then, I could have sold twice as much insurance".
scarface74 4y ago
What really surprises me is that years after the Apple acquisition that there is still the option to “open in Spotify” on the app.
LargeWu 4y ago
It's only been 20 years since Sinbad starred in this movie? I would have guessed closer to 30.
LeoPanthera 4y ago
A lot of people don't realise that Shazam is built into iOS. You don't actually need the app. Just ask Siri "What's playing?" and it will start to listen.
dperalta 4y ago
How Shazam works (Probably!): https://youtu.be/RRsq9apr5QY https://youtu.be/RRsq9apr5QY
ricksunny 4y ago
I’m confused - I love Shazam as much as the next person - but why is an app’s anniversary pushed to the top of Apple’s newsroom feed when there is no native write-up of comparable reach & understandability for their critical, already-exploited security update spanning the entire product line? I expose the extent of my confusion here: https://twitter.com/walkaboutrick/status/1560713609948250113?s=21 https://twitter.com/walkaboutrick/status/1560713609948250113...
willhackett 4y ago
Shazam is truly magical. For those iPhone users that don’t know, you can add it to Control Centre for quick access.
jliptzin 4y ago
I haven’t used Shazam in at least 10 years, I know what music I am listening to because I am streaming it.
asiachick 4y ago
Shazam was amazing when it came out but for some reason I ended up switching to Soundhound many years ago and haven't looked back. Maybe Shazam has this feature too but Soundhound would not only Id the song but if it's a popular enough song it will show the lyrics AND they'll be synced to the music.
davesque 4y ago
At first I thought, "No, that's gotta be at least 25." Then I remembered what universe I'm in: https://ourcommunitynow.com/film/sinbads-shazaam-the-strange-case-of-a-movie-that-doesnt-exist https://ourcommunitynow.com/film/sinbads-shazaam-the-strange...
tasty_freeze 4y ago
I have a relevant story here. The inventor of the Shazam algorithm, Avery Wang, gave me a demo of it within a couple weeks of it being created. Here is the backstory (partly from personal knowledge, partly relayed by Avery). Avery had gotten his PhD from CCRMA at Stanford under Julius O Smith. His PhD had been on the topic of automatically ("blind") recovery of individual vocal/instrument tracks from a final mix. From there he joined a startup, Chromatic Research, where I was also at. He created lots of code and patented some algorithms related to resampling and MIDI synthesis, stuff like that. Avery was (and is) a super nice guy, humble but incredibly smart -- he could work not only with the high level mathematics but was also equally excited to fine tune assembly code. After Chromatic folded, Avery had been struggling to get his own startup off the ground. About the same time, the Shazam guys had the idea for the product but didn't know how to create the algorithm. They approached Smith at CCRMA looking for someone capable of creating something that worked. Smith suggested they try Avery Wang. At first Avery said, "Hmm, that seems difficult, but let me think about it." Within a week he had a demo running on a few thousand songs he had gathered from CDs. I'm sure a lot of refinements went into it after that, but the core idea took him a weekend. [ All factual mistakes above are due to me and 20 year old memories -- if I misrepresented something it certainly wasn't due to Avery telling me something that wasn't true ] EDIT: A blurb about Avery https://www.seti.org/avery-wang https://www.seti.org/avery-wang
- damagednoob 4y ago
  At the beginning of this video[1], Avery talks about the beginning of Shazam. [1]: https://youtu.be/YVTnj3OIhwI https://youtu.be/YVTnj3OIhwI
grensley 4y ago
I'm just imagining the founders as every stoned business school student at the time like "Bro, wouldn't it be cool if there was an app where you just press a button and it tells you what song is playing" and they actually managed to find the guy capable of building it. To this day, Shazam still has that aesthetic of "press big button, do magic".
- llaolleh 4y ago
  Ha. I would watch this movie.
- monkpit 4y ago
  Actually, the first version in 2002 worked by listening to a phone call. There were no apps really at the time, at least not in the iPhone sense (because it didn’t exist).
  - mattigames 4y ago
    Maybe in a parallel dimension where internet took a few more decades to be created we call a number to listen to our Twitter feed narrated by some robotic voice, and we get a bulletin/form every week where we write down who we want to follow or unfollow, and of course a field where to write our own tweets!
    - rblatz 4y ago
      When I first used Twitter it wasn’t that far off. You could text your tweet to 40404 and it would post it. If I recall correctly it would also send you a text for any @‘s too
boredemployee 4y ago
I really like Shazam for general music, but for electronic music stuff it often identifies the wrong track
bboreham 4y ago
I was interested to hear (elsewhere) that the service gets spammed, perhaps by people trying to boost ratings. But you can tell the caller is a bot because it tends to start from the beginning of the track every time, and/or play exactly N seconds. Humans don’t do those things.
fito 4y ago
I use Huawei Music instead to identify songs. Shazam broke my heart when they announced they would sell their souls to Apple, and I was like f the american empire.

361 points by feross 4y ago

For those of you who like a minimalist approach to apps, if you have an iPhone you don’t need any app to use the algorithm. Just say “what song is this” and Siri will employ the Shazam algorithm. Even more obscure is the list of all songs you ID is maintained. Launch the “iTunes Store” app (why is this still even a thing) then tap the upper right hamburger menu. Then select the middle “Siri” tab. It’s kind of neat. I use this feature when I’m out and about in restaurants, stores, etc. Again no need to install any app.

munchler 4y ago

TIL that Apple owns Shazam.

raghavbali 4y ago
+1 and also the fact that Google Pixel's "Now Playing" feature is such an amazing application of the same idea. Though I wonder how different are their implementations
- jaypeg25 4y ago
  Google's now playing feature is somehow always offline (to relieve privacy concerns) and is somehow still incredible at recognizing even obscure songs. Really impressive. I also love that it just shows up on my lock screen.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    Supposedly while building the backend, they realised the actual summary data for a reasonable breadth of tracks (say, anything you'd likely hear on the radio or on a jukebox) was tiny and so, why build a service at all when you can just ship the data to phones ? Recently for whatever reason I was listening to the twist/ cover "Stacy's Dad" and Now Playing recognised it as the rather more famous original Fountain's of Wayne "Stacy's Mom". So yeah, it doesn't know everything. It also doesn't recognise lots of obscure stuff I own that's like B-sides or special editions that never saw radio play, or bands that my friends were in (but everybody I know has read both Steve Albini's "Some of your friends are probably already this fucked" and the KLF's "The Manual" and so none of them signed a recording contract and thus you've never heard of them) but I've never had a situation where I heard something I liked at like a bar or somewhere and Now Playing didn't know what it is.
    - raghavbali 4y ago
      yeah packaging the data and updating it async does make a lot more sense. Also, I guess its fine that it doesn't know it all but covers a good percentage of requests
wincy 4y ago
Heck yeah! If you’ve got an iPhone you literally just have to say “Hey Siri, what’s this song” and it’ll start listening and give you the Apple Music link. The only indication it’s Shazam is a little understated badge at the bottom.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  It's also available as a shortcut in the Control Centre - you don't even have to install the app.

benjaminwootton 4y ago

20 years later and it still seems like magic. It’s incredibly impressive how it can identify a song in second even in noisy environments.

dominotw 4y ago

i feel old.

msoad 4y ago

Shazam loads so freaking fast and ready to listen on my iPhone I really want to read an article on how they did it. It loads as fast as an empty hello world app but the button is ready to press and listen!

dylan604 4y ago
Sadly, that is not my experience with the app. I would equate the time my Shazam loads and is ready to listen as roughly the same amount of forever that it takes to launch the native camera app and being able to take a picture.
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  You can add it to Control Centre and it's seemingly instant, just starts listening as soon as you press the button.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    interesting. i've never messed with these options.
    - Jackpillar 4y ago
  - jimjambw 4y ago
    I'm a massive fan of Shazam in Control Centre. It let me have space for another app on the home screen, and they also sync with the iOS app now too.
  - yarabarla 4y ago
    Only problem with that is that it doesn't save the results in your list of Shazam'd songs.
    - beermonster 4y ago

bluetidepro 4y ago

Shazam is one of the very few apps in the past 20 years that STILL "wows" me. I have no idea how the tech works, and I even sort of like not knowing, to be honest. It's one of the very few apps out there that still in exist in a "magical" way to me. I am constantly impressed with how fast/easy it works, even with very obscure music. What an amazing app. Fun quick related story, about 10 or more years ago there was a back tracking song on a TV show (Scrubs) that I really liked that was only in the Netflix version. It was just an instrumental song with some French sounding words speaking in it so there was no easy way to search for it. However, it was distinct enough that it didn't seem like something made just for the show. It was also pretty quiet and under some talking in the tv show scene. I had posted on reddit asking if anyone knew it, and never got any responses. I searched all over the web, but no source had the track details. It drove me crazy every time I would hear the song in re-watching the show, and I still could not track it down every few years when I tried again. Back then, Shazam had no cataloging of it so it wasn't in there either yet. However, when re-watching it a few years back again, I tried Shazam again and to my surprise it finally worked. I was blown away that Shazam was finally able to solve this 10+ year mystery. It was one of the coolest feelings every to scratch that itch finding this rare French song and hearing it in full. It was truly magical. EDIT: Oh sorry, I didn't think anyone would actually care about the song itself lol It was called "Sans Hésitation" by the French-Canadian band "Chapeaumelon". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju4d3YQhByU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju4d3YQhByU - It's also interesting cause now the song does in the episode in tv music database sites. Very cool.

cooperadymas 4y ago
Well?
adnanaga 4y ago
What was the song ??
- sexy_panda 4y ago
  You will get the result once $commenter is online again
- 4y ago

nomilk 4y ago

> August 2002: Shazam launches as a text message service based in the UK. At the time, users could identify songs by dialing “2580” on their phone and holding it up as a song played. They were then sent an SMS message telling them the song title and the name of the artist. Incredible! Curious to know what exactly happened backend after it listened to the audio, and what hardware it ran on.

ID1452319 4y ago
Yep, I remember dialling that number and holding my phone up to the telly!
mortenjorck 4y ago
Just as amazing to me is that the algorithms could identify a song through the extremely limited bandwidth and spectrum of an early-2000s CDMA stream and a cheap Kyocera microphone.
- manderley 4y ago
  GSM, not CDMA.
  - post-it 4y ago
    CDMA on Verizon and Sprint in the USA and Bell and Telus in Canada, at the time.
    - gridder 4y ago
      Yeah but we’re talking about UK here…. So GSM is correct.
    - sbuk 4y ago
      "> August 2002: Shazam launches as a text message service based in the UK." AFAIR, we never had CDMA in the UK, so what Verizon et al. were using is irrelevant.
- 4y ago

yannis7 4y ago

Shazam belongs to that class of iPhone apps that when they were released I was like "wow, the future is here" -- this alongside the first accelerometer and AR ones

nicofcurti 4y ago

I agree with the other folks here, Shazam is one of those things that still works just fine and I have no fucking clue on how they do it. What do they compare the audio recorded with?

duped 4y ago
They "fingerprint" the audio and then compare the fingerprint to a large corpus. The hard part is fingerprinting that is resilient to noise (and position within a track!) and a fast way to search the corpus of known fingerprints.

duped 4y ago

The paper giving an overview of how shazam works (1) is one of my favorites (1) https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf

xtracto 4y ago
Reminds me a lot of MusicBrainz Tagger, I remember being fascinated by it in 2001 ( https://web.archive.org/web/20010107213100/http://musicbrainz.org/how.html https://web.archive.org/web/20010107213100/http://musicbrain... ) because it was able to "identify" the song in the mp3/wma/ogg file and download the correct tags.
rmnclmnt 4y ago
I remember studying this paper as a student, was completely amazing, a bit mysterious and not so difficult to understand at the same time. And most of all: no ML involved! All hail the heuristics!

0xdeadbeee 4y ago

Way before apps were even a thing, around 2002-2004, I lived in the UK and shazam worked as calling service: you'd call 2580 (top to bottom on the center column of a phone numpad), it would listen for 30s, then would hang up and send you an sms with the name of the song. IIRC it would charge you something like 50p if it found a result. It really felt like pure magic!

nibbleshifter 4y ago
I wonder how much getting that number cost them, I recall vaguely that memorable premium short numbers were... Expensive

danbr 4y ago

Does it strike anyone else as being odd that Apple is noting this in their “Newsroom” press release? Don’t get me wrong, great for Shazam and all … but why is Apple - the company that bought them just 4 years ago - is making a todo about it?

trollied 4y ago
I don't understand why you're so confused. Shazam is now part of Apple, they are not going to do a press release as "Shazam". The "Shazam" entity does not exist.
dylan604 4y ago
No it doesn't. Does it strike anyone else as odd that someone would question a company promoting/congratulating software achievements that they own?
- nailer 4y ago
  Google doesn't celebrate the history of Writely or Android-pre-Google that much and Microsoft don't promote the history of Excel-pre-Microsoft that much either.
  - Jcowell 4y ago
    Sure but Apple does celebrate its products via Newsroom. Hell they even did it for iTunes in 2004
  - pohl 4y ago
    Their celebrations would be more like "10 years ago today we killed the only product of ours that you ever loved."
  - Kwpolska 4y ago
    > Microsoft don't promote the history of Excel-pre-Microsoft that much either. That’s probably because no such history exists, Excel was always a Microsoft product (even if they aren’t the inventors of spreadsheets).

beefman 4y ago

An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm (2003) https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf

DevX101 4y ago
Short, recommended read on how Shazam works

halfmatthalfcat 4y ago

I wish they would expand the ACR into movies and TV. Would be awesome to Shazam a show/movie and get details, like X-Ray does.

ducktective 4y ago

Is there a CLI program similar to that? (for identifying songs based on a sample). CLI app not Python notebook, btw.

rmnclmnt 4y ago
You can « easily » reproduce the process and make a CLI out of it, but the hard part is to collect the enormous database…
aidenn0 4y ago
acoustid is an open-source database with an API; here's a list of already existing applications. beets is definitely CLI, not sure about some of the others: https://acoustid.org/applications https://acoustid.org/applications
boredemployee 4y ago
well, you could call the shazam api from CLI

kippinitreal 4y ago

I too have always been blown away by Shazam and pondered how it could possible index so much content for fast lookups. A few years ago this article was super helpful in helping me understand and learn a lot. Fun read which required a lot of side googling for me http://coding-geek.com/how-shazam-works/ http://coding-geek.com/how-shazam-works/

raamdev 4y ago

In the mid-ninties, around the time I had just become a teenager, I remember walking down the back corridor of a mall where my parents were leasing a space for their business and hearing a song playing overhead on the mall speakers that really caught my attention. I had no idea what the song was called or who made it, but I really liked it. I remember wishing I had some way to quickly find out, before the song ended, the name of the song and the artist. I remember thinking, "wouldn't it be great if this cell phone in my pocket could somehow tell me the name of this song?" A decade later I discovered Shazam, and even today, more than a decade after that, Shazam still has a place on my home screen, quickly within reach, helping me discover hundreds of great artists and songs overheard from as many different places. The magic of the experience, and the appreciation for the technology, stem from the memory of that moment in the mid-nineties when I stood under a speaker listening to a song that I might never hear again.

harmmonica 4y ago

Tangent, and this may be one of those cases where I learned about this on HN and am now passing it back to HN so pardon if I'm just late to the party, but if you're a regular Shazam user on iPhone you don't need to open the app anymore. You can just add a widget to control center. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210331 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210331

joezydeco 4y ago
Saying "Hey Siri what song is this?" is even quicker.
- muziq 4y ago
  Yeah, I’ve spent five minutes scrolling a thread before someone says the obvious… Cepstrum for the win ;)
- crossroadsguy 4y ago
  No, it definitely is not. Besides on many occasions I would not even want to do that. Fastest is simply turning on “Shazam on app start” in the settings and then starting the apps. However if your phone is locked then indeed what parent commenter said is quickest.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

Shazam is an amazing piece of tech. Always amazed me when you use it in a noisy bar, and it finds the right track instantly. One used to be able to sing the songs as well which does not seem to work anymore. Either that or my vocals are gone.

magicalhippo 4y ago

Reminds me of a fun IRC moment 20 years ago or so. A buddy had a song stuck in his head, but he couldn't recall the name of it. I asked how it went, and he typed something like "du du duu duu du du duu du, du du duu duu du du duu du" and within 10 seconds I replied "oh, Tom's diner by Suzanne Vega?" After a few moments he replied "yes! how the hell?!" Anyway, Shazam is great when out and about and I hear something I like. Clubs and other loud venues provide a challenge, but covering the mic usually does the trick. I'd love to read some more details about how such fingerprinting works. I'm sure there are lots of interesting details on how it deals with recording noise and such.

endorphine 4y ago
Lol, I swear that while reading the 2nd "duu" the same song came to mind. Not sure what happened here..
- magicalhippo 4y ago
  To be fair I think it's a pretty distinctive song. Still, a fun memory.
TacticalCoder 4y ago
> I'm sure there are lots of interesting details on how it deals with recording noise and such. There's more to Shazam than that but Fourier transforms gets rid of the noise. I ported a FFT to Java back in the days and it was, IIRC, not even 100 lines of code. Amazing algorithm. I used it to record engine noise under acceleration and then derive power/torque curve of my car (it took into account the number of cylinders): drive the car several times, both ways, on a street, record the noise. Apply the FFT. Input the rims size / gear ratio etc. And I'd end up with about the exact same plot as the official one from the car manufacturer. Noise simply disappears with a FFT. A more concerning issue is harmonics.
bluedino 4y ago
Thought for sure that was on bash.org as I'd seen it before

nailer 4y ago

The Shazam creators commissioned a movie to be made about their company - they considered it to be like "The Social Network" except them as the heroes. Source: I watched the Shazam founder awkwardly pitch Danny Boyle at a director meet-and-greet while Danny tried his best to avoid them.

chirau 4y ago

This paper of how their algorithm works by one of their lead developers at the time suggests that the company actually started in 2000. https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf

rwmj 4y ago
I turned them down after an interview in around 2000/2001 (they started out in London). The reason was that the idea seemed completely useless to me and I thought they'd never make a business out of it :-)
- saasxyz 4y ago
  Just read this paper, it is brilliant. And TIL about Shazam and the idea still sounds useless to me. Seems like I have never had this problem in my life.
  - The5thElephant 4y ago
    Do you like music? If so have you really never heard a song playing somewhere that you did not recognize and wanted to know what it was?
  - khazhoux 4y ago
    I use it several times a week. Driving with classical station on. Is this Mozart? That cadence sounded like Mozart, but I'm not sure. <Shazam and wait 10 seconds> Oh, it's Brahms! And now I have it auto-saved to listen to when I get home.
    - astrange 4y ago
      Don't use your phone while you're driving!
- cannam 4y ago
  That's interesting - I had a vague recollection of having heard of them before launch - I guess they were hiring from the pool of developers being laid off from the dotcom bust? I have an image in my mind of my boss at the time going around the office asking if anyone was interested in talking to this thing called Shazam. I've long wondered if I imagined it. I certainly didn't act on it. I remember (not much later than this) interviewing at a place where the product was intended to be "an automated assistant that listens to your phone call and pipes supporting information to your computer as you speak". Obviously I gave them a wide berth. It's funny to think about the "gap" in magic - Shazam seems magical but totally worked, this other idea seemed magical and, at the time, totally was.

swid 4y ago

Here’s the list on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2Z69DiD4sGs5aHt4OXE3fU?si=bILFm9URREuIYVtBpa8Iqw https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2Z69DiD4sGs5aHt4OXE3fU?si=...

cannam 4y ago

It's obviously a cracking algorithm, but what made Shazam doubly remarkable was how efficiently they turned it into a working product. It wasn't just a case of developing an algorithm that could in theory be used to match an audio signal against all the world's pop songs. They presumably also had to get hold of a substantial number of those songs, fingerprint them, and roll out the search robustly against generally very poor audio hardware using simple telephony services at (for the time) quite considerable scale. They did it very quickly, it worked super well from launch, and it's been running continuously ever since. I've read the paper about the method, but I would love to know more about the original development and deployment.

mkarliner 4y ago
Well, I was CTO at the time, AMA...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
  How'd y'all monetise back then?
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    I think it was a premium-rate number you had to call. When it became an app, it eventually had an ad-supported version with a paid, premium version "Shazam Encore" that was ad-free.
    - jen729w 4y ago
      Yep, 50p a go from memory. Charged to your phone bill. I used Shazam in London when it launched. I left the UK in 2003 so I reckon it was literally just as it launched. Presumably I saw billboards or a Wired article or something?
- schoen 4y ago

spinningarrow 4y ago

Not Shazam but I remember a website back in the day called ‘The Song Tapper’ where you could press your space bar to the rhythm of a song in your head and it would suggest which song(s) it might be. Teenage me thought that was very cool. The site seems no more but I found a Lifehacker post about it: https://lifehacker.com/find-the-name-of-a-song-by-tapping-149288 https://lifehacker.com/find-the-name-of-a-song-by-tapping-14...

jfoster 4y ago

I'm surprised that Apple have kept Shazam working well on Android for this long. They acquired it 4 years ago already.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
It might have something to do with the big "Play Full Song" button that opens Apple Music. Since they already have access to their music catalog for fingerprinting and the app is mature, maybe it pays for itself in subscriptions?
- cannam 4y ago
  Yeah, I imagine as long as Apple Music runs on Android, so will Shazam. It's a gateway.
- jfoster 4y ago
  That did cross my mind and probably explains it. I do wonder how much Apple Music revenue really comes from Android users via Shazam, but perhaps it's significant enough that they don't want to ruin it.
scarface74 4y ago
I have to believe that much of the reason for Apple buying Shazam was to know what songs piqued people’s interest. That type of data has to be valuable.
- jfoster 4y ago
  Good point. Otherwise $400m is quite a high price to pay just for an entry point into Apple Music.
lhoff 4y ago
If i remember correctly the main way shazam makes money is by seeling statistics to the record companies and concert planer. If they would break it, they would loose these informations in certain areas of the world where iphones are not that common.

spaceheater 4y ago

Shouldn't their patent expire soon? I remember them actively issuing cease and desist letters to anyone who made code tutorials about how their algo works. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9594480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9594480

ksala_ 4y ago

Shazam always blows my mind. It doesn't work 100% of the times, but when it does it feels like magic. On top of that they introduced (I don't know exactly when) the feature to see lyrics for the song which are automatically synched with the music. This is also mind-blowing. Only Google has managed to top Shazam in blowing my mind, and only ~recently, by making this whole process happen completely offline and continuously in the background on a phone. It's not as broad but still incredible. Google's paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.10958 https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.10958

keepquestioning 4y ago

Does Shazam now use Deep Learning?

atlas_shrugged 4y ago

Ive always wondered why there is only 1 shazam. I was under the impression the algorithm/patent was just licensed from another company. Why havent people cloned this app? Also why arent the shazam geo charts more detailed ie by city/neighborhood or location. Would love to see what songs djs are playing at a location even if im not there. Right now the geo charts are very high level (only major cities)

zekica 4y ago
https://musicbrainz.org/ https://musicbrainz.org/ existed at least from 2003, and it does a similar, although a less impressive job. There are other apps such as SoundHound, and even some virtual assistants have the same feature.
- piperswe 4y ago
  The actual audio fingerprinting/music identification project associated with MusicBrainz is AcoustID (https://acoustid.org/ https://acoustid.org/). It's a separate project that happens to be well integrated with MusicBrainz.
cannam 4y ago
The Shazam algorithm was genuinely novel and invented by one of their founders. They patented it to great effect.
FabHK 4y ago
I used to use Soundhound (used to be Midomi), until Shazam was integrated into iOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundHound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundHound
- halostatue 4y ago
  SoundHound also has/had the hum-to-identity that is apparently present in Google’s offering now.
- thrdbndndn 4y ago

jklinger410 4y ago

It's crazy they even mentioned Shazam in a PR because it will be folded into Siri at some point and disappear.

hackmiester 4y ago
It is already folded into Siri. That's what happens if you ask "What song is this?" It just shows you the answer with the Shazam branding. edit to add: I only know this so well because, when I switched to iPhone in 2016, I was REALLY confused about how you Shazam something. I couldn't find it in the App Store. I tried to use the Google app, since that's how I did the equivalent thing on Android, but it didn't support it. Finally I figured out that it's just built into Siri.
- scarface74 4y ago
  IIRC, Shazam was on the App Store since it’s inception in 2008.
- jklinger410 4y ago
  Oh I know it's included, by folded in I mean it's going to be completely removed as an additional app and the branding will disappear. It's just going to be a feature of Siri and nothing more at some point.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Apple acquired Siri from another company and kept the name. I doubt that they will kill the 20 year old Shazam brand. In fact on the control center, the Shazam icon is very prominent and it’s available as a complication on the watch.
    - jklinger410 4y ago
      If I ask Siri what song is playing, it doesn't say "thanks to Shazam" or something. It's already folded in to Siri to quite the degree. As the personal assistant war heats up, the drive to make Shazam disappear and force users to use Siri will become too strong to ignore. ERGO I am surprised that they put out a PR about it.

umaar 4y ago

I used to work at Shazam as a front-end web developer and they really supported me. Going to conferences, hackdays (20% time), being exposed to real production-grade systems, it was great. Very grateful to have worked there. Wrote about it too: https://umaar.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-working-at-shazam-part-1/ https://umaar.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-working-at-shaza...

IshKebab 4y ago
How on earth have they survived so long when their core feature was cloned by Google and Apple years ago?
- doodlesdev 4y ago
  Apple acquired Shazam in 2018 [1] there is no Apple alternative because Shazam IS what Apple uses. [1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/09/apple-acquires-shazam-offering-more-ways-to-discover-and-enjoy-music/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/09/apple-acquires-shazam...

jmfldn 4y ago

In the pre-app world I would call Shazam on my mobile when out in clubs quite often. They were way ahead of the curve. Amazing company.

elboru 4y ago

Sometimes, I like to stop and think about all the amazing things that we can do with our phones and that we take for granted. What I do is to imagine myself finding a smartphone in elementary school (90s kid). These are a few things that would blow my mind: - Having a digital global map, with multitouch, that can show me where I am in that map. I can search anything and find reviews from virtually anywhere in the world. I can zoom and see my actual house. I can use street view. - I have access to any song I want. - The phone can listen to a song and it can tell me the name of it (then I can listen to it again) - I can play video games with much better graphics than my N64 - I can watch movies and TV in there. - I can video call - I have a digital assistant - I can find any answer online - I can buy anything online - In the future all this technology is not just for the rich, virtually anyone can buy a smartphone.

Vinnl 4y ago
My goto example is that I'm now able to see the text of the text message I'm replying to while typing the reply.
sh4rks 4y ago
> I can play video games with much better graphics than my N64 And - you can play N64 games on a rectangle you can carry in your pocket.
jedberg 4y ago
In 2004 I took my grandpa for a ride in my car, which had GPS. He couldn't stop staring at it. I asked him what's wrong, and he said, "When I was an insurance salesman driving door to door in LA, I had entire file folder of maps I kept on the passenger seat to find my way. If I had this gadget back then, I could have sold twice as much insurance".

scarface74 4y ago

What really surprises me is that years after the Apple acquisition that there is still the option to “open in Spotify” on the app.

LargeWu 4y ago

It's only been 20 years since Sinbad starred in this movie? I would have guessed closer to 30.

LeoPanthera 4y ago

A lot of people don't realise that Shazam is built into iOS. You don't actually need the app. Just ask Siri "What's playing?" and it will start to listen.

dperalta 4y ago

How Shazam works (Probably!): https://youtu.be/RRsq9apr5QY https://youtu.be/RRsq9apr5QY

ricksunny 4y ago

I’m confused - I love Shazam as much as the next person - but why is an app’s anniversary pushed to the top of Apple’s newsroom feed when there is no native write-up of comparable reach & understandability for their critical, already-exploited security update spanning the entire product line? I expose the extent of my confusion here: https://twitter.com/walkaboutrick/status/1560713609948250113?s=21 https://twitter.com/walkaboutrick/status/1560713609948250113...

willhackett 4y ago

Shazam is truly magical. For those iPhone users that don’t know, you can add it to Control Centre for quick access.

jliptzin 4y ago

I haven’t used Shazam in at least 10 years, I know what music I am listening to because I am streaming it.

asiachick 4y ago

Shazam was amazing when it came out but for some reason I ended up switching to Soundhound many years ago and haven't looked back. Maybe Shazam has this feature too but Soundhound would not only Id the song but if it's a popular enough song it will show the lyrics AND they'll be synced to the music.

davesque 4y ago

At first I thought, "No, that's gotta be at least 25." Then I remembered what universe I'm in: https://ourcommunitynow.com/film/sinbads-shazaam-the-strange-case-of-a-movie-that-doesnt-exist https://ourcommunitynow.com/film/sinbads-shazaam-the-strange...

tasty_freeze 4y ago

I have a relevant story here. The inventor of the Shazam algorithm, Avery Wang, gave me a demo of it within a couple weeks of it being created. Here is the backstory (partly from personal knowledge, partly relayed by Avery). Avery had gotten his PhD from CCRMA at Stanford under Julius O Smith. His PhD had been on the topic of automatically ("blind") recovery of individual vocal/instrument tracks from a final mix. From there he joined a startup, Chromatic Research, where I was also at. He created lots of code and patented some algorithms related to resampling and MIDI synthesis, stuff like that. Avery was (and is) a super nice guy, humble but incredibly smart -- he could work not only with the high level mathematics but was also equally excited to fine tune assembly code. After Chromatic folded, Avery had been struggling to get his own startup off the ground. About the same time, the Shazam guys had the idea for the product but didn't know how to create the algorithm. They approached Smith at CCRMA looking for someone capable of creating something that worked. Smith suggested they try Avery Wang. At first Avery said, "Hmm, that seems difficult, but let me think about it." Within a week he had a demo running on a few thousand songs he had gathered from CDs. I'm sure a lot of refinements went into it after that, but the core idea took him a weekend. [ All factual mistakes above are due to me and 20 year old memories -- if I misrepresented something it certainly wasn't due to Avery telling me something that wasn't true ] EDIT: A blurb about Avery https://www.seti.org/avery-wang https://www.seti.org/avery-wang

damagednoob 4y ago
At the beginning of this video[1], Avery talks about the beginning of Shazam. [1]: https://youtu.be/YVTnj3OIhwI https://youtu.be/YVTnj3OIhwI

grensley 4y ago

I'm just imagining the founders as every stoned business school student at the time like "Bro, wouldn't it be cool if there was an app where you just press a button and it tells you what song is playing" and they actually managed to find the guy capable of building it. To this day, Shazam still has that aesthetic of "press big button, do magic".

llaolleh 4y ago
Ha. I would watch this movie.
monkpit 4y ago
Actually, the first version in 2002 worked by listening to a phone call. There were no apps really at the time, at least not in the iPhone sense (because it didn’t exist).
- mattigames 4y ago
  Maybe in a parallel dimension where internet took a few more decades to be created we call a number to listen to our Twitter feed narrated by some robotic voice, and we get a bulletin/form every week where we write down who we want to follow or unfollow, and of course a field where to write our own tweets!
  - rblatz 4y ago
    When I first used Twitter it wasn’t that far off. You could text your tweet to 40404 and it would post it. If I recall correctly it would also send you a text for any @‘s too

boredemployee 4y ago

I really like Shazam for general music, but for electronic music stuff it often identifies the wrong track

bboreham 4y ago

I was interested to hear (elsewhere) that the service gets spammed, perhaps by people trying to boost ratings. But you can tell the caller is a bot because it tends to start from the beginning of the track every time, and/or play exactly N seconds. Humans don’t do those things.

fito 4y ago

I use Huawei Music instead to identify songs. Shazam broke my heart when they announced they would sell their souls to Apple, and I was like f the american empire.