6 ms·

The Shazam Effect (2014)

43 points by ascertain 11y ago

spatten 11y ago
> ...it has been downloaded more than 500 million times and used to identify some 30 million songs ... That doesn't sound right. On average one identification for every 16 downloads? I'm guessing that second million should be a billion.
- idlewords 11y ago
  My reading was '30 million distinct songs', not 30 million identifications
  - spatten 11y ago
    Ahh, good point. That makes more sense.
unicornporn 11y ago
An article from 2014 (that I remember reading). Perhaps that should go in the title here...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
davidu 11y ago
Every time I read an article about Shazam, I'm deeply skeptical of the claims. Example: http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/08/20/shazam-hits-100-million-active-users-as-it-gears-up-for-ipo/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/08/20/shazam-hit... Article makes it seem like Shazam has metrics like a social network, but my experience, and everyone I've ever seen is that it's rarely used -- and simply to quickly identify a song. This latest one in The Atlantic implies people use it far more frequently then I think they do, and I'm again, very skeptical. And even if they do, they don't shazam hits they know, or songs about to be hits, but they shazam that random song they can't identify -- not sure that's an indicator of hit'ness. From user numbers, to capital raised, to stories like this, each time I read about Shazam, I say to myself "Gosh, I really love the app, but can it really be this big and lucrative?" I feel like I'm missing something. I hope I'm wrong.
- girvo 11y ago
  I use Shazam as a kind of "music bookmarking" service. I hear a track I don't know, and I Shazam it to identify the track and it's saved into the list for later. That's pretty valuable data for Shazam.
- Grue3 11y ago
  How is this surprising? Shazam tracks searches and location. If a lot of people search a specific song in a specific location, that means they 1) liked the song, but it's new to them 2) the song is nevertheless played quite often. Both of these are good predictors for a viral hit. Because nobody uses Shazam on well-known songs, this filters out a lot of noise.
- jasode 11y ago
  >, they don't shazam hits they know, or songs about to be hits, but they shazam that random song they can't identify -- not sure that's an indicator of hit'ness. One of the Shazam folks gave a 10 minute presentation at O'Reilly conference.[1] She gave an example of how early Shazam datapoints correctly predicted that Katy Perry's song would beat Lady Gaga's song. (The singles were released at the same time.) Perhaps she was cherry picking clear correlations but it doesn't seem too far fetched that the early trends it sees from users is a reliable prediction of a future Billboard chart position and sales. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcTPvxo8SXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcTPvxo8SXY deep link at 3:32 that compares KP and LG: https://youtu.be/mcTPvxo8SXY?t=3m31s https://youtu.be/mcTPvxo8SXY?t=3m31s
- mintone 11y ago
  Think about the kind of data that they would collect. I personally rarely use Shazam, but when I do, it's more often then not a song I don't know at all rather than trying to remember a song's name. So someone like me hears a song and wants to identify it. Then another person, and another. So you have three people in a specific location at the same time looking to identify a song. That would suggest that those people like what they hear. You know what the song is so you know interest has piqued. If you cross reference that with radio plays at that time you have a new metric that you couldn't measure previously - reaction to a radio play. It's incredibly interesting because of the type of data it collects, which to be honest I think the article explains explicitly and very clearly!
golemotron 11y ago
> The trick, he discovered, was to turn a song into a piece of data. I cringe and then laugh inside whenever I see tech writing like this.
- eghri 11y ago
  I had to laugh at this too. What exactly was it before it became data? Magic? A choir of tiny gnomes?
- jasode 11y ago
  I didn't see a problem with it. The magazine is "The Atlantic" which has a general readership. If one writes a program to analyze Shakespeare text, he might describe it as "converted the text into a multi-dimensional vector space" or "mapped ngrams into a point cloud" -- and that would be acceptable lexicon for a Dr Dobbs Programming Journal or possibly ArsTechnica. However, for The Atlantic, it seems reasonble for a journalist/editor to write that as "convert the plays into data." Yes, Shakespeare the text itself was already "data" so in a pedantic analysis, saying "converting data to data" seems pointless but that's not the level of indirection the general readership is at.
  - andrewflnr 11y ago
    Even for a general audience, "data" is uselessly broad. Such a reader would be better served by a better explanation of the acoustic fingerprint idea, or even nothing at all. As it is, the article promotes the idea that "data" is some sort of magical thing, and that's harmful.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - golemotron 11y ago
    I never said there was a problem with it based on the readership. I just think it's funny. ;-)
gcb0 11y ago
Shazam is wasting a LOT of money to try to sell that image. they have 2min ads on feature films showing music news. i bet this is but paid PR. they are desperate. the music id business is so dead. Google, apple, yahoo... everyone does it!
- geographomics 11y ago
  Apple uses Shazam as the backend for their music identification service on iOS 8, so at least they're not having to compete there.
  - gcb0 11y ago
    Had no idea about that. <troll>but agreeing to apple terms, show that a company is already in bad position to negotiate. :) </troll> now let the downvotes begin.
lumberjack 11y ago
Is there some write-up on the algorithm used? I'm currently in the planning stage for a similar project and this might end up being really helpful for me. EDIT: Thanks guys.
- Nimitz14 11y ago
  No idea but I'd guess instead of simply comparing the received signal with an internal database of time domain signals, one's database is split into different categories (according to certain features). So you could then quickly go down a tree of options until you end up a song with the most similar ones (features). The unique combination of features would make up the "acoustic fingerprint" they're talking about. That's probably too obvious though I'd imagine there's something else going on as well.
- aditya 11y ago
  EchoNest used to do this[1] and is open source 1. http://developer.echonest.com/forums/thread/3650 http://developer.echonest.com/forums/thread/3650
- anonova 11y ago
  See "An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm"[1], a 2010 paper written by one of the Shazam developers. The analysis itself doesn't seem complicated[2] but having a large enough database to compare against is probably the hard part. [1]: http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf [2]: http://www.royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/06/creating-shazam-in-java/ http://www.royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/06/creating-shazam-in-ja...
- pronoiac 11y ago
  From memory, they do a spectrum analysis (frequency vs time) and look for peaks, specifically sets of three peaks in a row, evenly spaced. Gather a lot of them and send them in.
fchollet 11y ago
So basically, labels are now treating music production as an optimization problem. And because they're terrible at this type of optimization problem, they're getting stuck in a local minimum (the space is anything but convex), which happens to be repetitive, awful, and targeted at the largest common denominator. Treating music as an optimization problem may not be a bad thing in itself, the issue is being unable to solve the problem properly.
- wmkn 11y ago
  Are they really terrible at it? You seem to assume that the global minimum to the problem is an artistically perfect song. For record labels the global minimum is the song that makes the most money. If that song happens to be repetitive and awful, so be it.
  - fchollet 11y ago
    If so many people are unhappy with the state of the pop music landscape, then that is not a global minimum. The space of possible music is immense, you could invent so many new genres. By not exploring the unknown, they are missing out. Iterating endlessly on a single recipe is just not how you build a sustainable artistic business. It makes money in the near term, but it is doomed in the long term. The music labels and Hollywood will have to realize this at some point.
    - AustinG08 11y ago
      The music labels will never have to 'realize' this because, short of a cultural revolution, it will always make the most money. I'm a musician, I am very picky about the music I listen to. My wife? Not quite as picky. She will hear a song on the radio, like it, and become a fan of that song. Her, along with probably 90%+ of the general public don't carry the same snobbery that I do, and have no guilt liking a Nickelback or a One Republic song. Edit: I meant One Direction, but same thing.
      - girvo 11y ago
cpeterso 11y ago
Media measurement company BigChampagne tried to do the same thing by monitoring file-sharing networks.
mkagenius 11y ago
Any reason why would Shazam be significantly faster than Twitter or the likes in detecting trends?
- mintone 11y ago
  I would imagine that it's good because it doesn't require any more information that what a song sounds like. A user hears a song they like, records it there and then and that shows 'interest'. Twitter on the other hand needs a name / artist.. you can't really analyse a tweet saying "I like that song that goes du du dud dud dahhh"... but Shazam actually can.
nirkalimi 11y ago
I remember posting this awhile ago. Here is the Original Thread if you are looking for more comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634357 Great article regardless. Glad to see more peoples take on it.
bsder 11y ago
Nice PR piece for Shazam. Does anybody do actual reporting anymore?
dghughes 11y ago
I'm not clicking since is is the Atlantic so I'm not sure what was discussed but... I'm on the cusp of deleting Shazam as useful as it is it's getting more spammy as the days go by too many notifications of junk.
- DanBC 11y ago
  > too many notifications of junk. I LOATHE NOTIFICATIONS that are junk! Far too many apps do this. I turn them all off now. This is why we can't have nice things - appdevs cramming too much stuff into stupid notifications. Years ago there was a GNKSA - Good Net Keeping Seal of Approval. This was a set of criteria for Usenet clients to promote sensible usability and formatting standards. There's probably a niche for something similar for apps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Netkeeping_Seal_of_Approval https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Netkeeping_Seal_of_Approv...
- pervycreeper 11y ago
  >I'm not clicking since is is the Atlantic Context? What did they do?
  - dghughes 11y ago
    Very spammy at least on social media such as reddit and HN breaking a rule (official or not) of not submitting your own material it should come from a user not the website. They get around it by making up a username or pay someone to submit. Physorg is another terribly spammy site often with misleading headlines. Both phsyorg and the Atlantic have been banned from reddit at least once if not multiple times I'm not sure about on HN.

43 points by ascertain 11y ago

> ...it has been downloaded more than 500 million times and used to identify some 30 million songs ... That doesn't sound right. On average one identification for every 16 downloads? I'm guessing that second million should be a billion.

idlewords 11y ago
My reading was '30 million distinct songs', not 30 million identifications
- spatten 11y ago
  Ahh, good point. That makes more sense.

unicornporn 11y ago

An article from 2014 (that I remember reading). Perhaps that should go in the title here...

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

davidu 11y ago

Every time I read an article about Shazam, I'm deeply skeptical of the claims. Example: http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/08/20/shazam-hits-100-million-active-users-as-it-gears-up-for-ipo/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/08/20/shazam-hit... Article makes it seem like Shazam has metrics like a social network, but my experience, and everyone I've ever seen is that it's rarely used -- and simply to quickly identify a song. This latest one in The Atlantic implies people use it far more frequently then I think they do, and I'm again, very skeptical. And even if they do, they don't shazam hits they know, or songs about to be hits, but they shazam that random song they can't identify -- not sure that's an indicator of hit'ness. From user numbers, to capital raised, to stories like this, each time I read about Shazam, I say to myself "Gosh, I really love the app, but can it really be this big and lucrative?" I feel like I'm missing something. I hope I'm wrong.

girvo 11y ago
I use Shazam as a kind of "music bookmarking" service. I hear a track I don't know, and I Shazam it to identify the track and it's saved into the list for later. That's pretty valuable data for Shazam.
Grue3 11y ago
How is this surprising? Shazam tracks searches and location. If a lot of people search a specific song in a specific location, that means they 1) liked the song, but it's new to them 2) the song is nevertheless played quite often. Both of these are good predictors for a viral hit. Because nobody uses Shazam on well-known songs, this filters out a lot of noise.
jasode 11y ago
>, they don't shazam hits they know, or songs about to be hits, but they shazam that random song they can't identify -- not sure that's an indicator of hit'ness. One of the Shazam folks gave a 10 minute presentation at O'Reilly conference.[1] She gave an example of how early Shazam datapoints correctly predicted that Katy Perry's song would beat Lady Gaga's song. (The singles were released at the same time.) Perhaps she was cherry picking clear correlations but it doesn't seem too far fetched that the early trends it sees from users is a reliable prediction of a future Billboard chart position and sales. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcTPvxo8SXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcTPvxo8SXY deep link at 3:32 that compares KP and LG: https://youtu.be/mcTPvxo8SXY?t=3m31s https://youtu.be/mcTPvxo8SXY?t=3m31s
mintone 11y ago
Think about the kind of data that they would collect. I personally rarely use Shazam, but when I do, it's more often then not a song I don't know at all rather than trying to remember a song's name. So someone like me hears a song and wants to identify it. Then another person, and another. So you have three people in a specific location at the same time looking to identify a song. That would suggest that those people like what they hear. You know what the song is so you know interest has piqued. If you cross reference that with radio plays at that time you have a new metric that you couldn't measure previously - reaction to a radio play. It's incredibly interesting because of the type of data it collects, which to be honest I think the article explains explicitly and very clearly!

golemotron 11y ago

> The trick, he discovered, was to turn a song into a piece of data. I cringe and then laugh inside whenever I see tech writing like this.

eghri 11y ago
I had to laugh at this too. What exactly was it before it became data? Magic? A choir of tiny gnomes?
jasode 11y ago
I didn't see a problem with it. The magazine is "The Atlantic" which has a general readership. If one writes a program to analyze Shakespeare text, he might describe it as "converted the text into a multi-dimensional vector space" or "mapped ngrams into a point cloud" -- and that would be acceptable lexicon for a Dr Dobbs Programming Journal or possibly ArsTechnica. However, for The Atlantic, it seems reasonble for a journalist/editor to write that as "convert the plays into data." Yes, Shakespeare the text itself was already "data" so in a pedantic analysis, saying "converting data to data" seems pointless but that's not the level of indirection the general readership is at.
- andrewflnr 11y ago
  Even for a general audience, "data" is uselessly broad. Such a reader would be better served by a better explanation of the acoustic fingerprint idea, or even nothing at all. As it is, the article promotes the idea that "data" is some sort of magical thing, and that's harmful.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- golemotron 11y ago
  I never said there was a problem with it based on the readership. I just think it's funny. ;-)

gcb0 11y ago

Shazam is wasting a LOT of money to try to sell that image. they have 2min ads on feature films showing music news. i bet this is but paid PR. they are desperate. the music id business is so dead. Google, apple, yahoo... everyone does it!

geographomics 11y ago
Apple uses Shazam as the backend for their music identification service on iOS 8, so at least they're not having to compete there.
- gcb0 11y ago
  Had no idea about that. <troll>but agreeing to apple terms, show that a company is already in bad position to negotiate. :) </troll> now let the downvotes begin.

lumberjack 11y ago

Is there some write-up on the algorithm used? I'm currently in the planning stage for a similar project and this might end up being really helpful for me. EDIT: Thanks guys.

Nimitz14 11y ago
No idea but I'd guess instead of simply comparing the received signal with an internal database of time domain signals, one's database is split into different categories (according to certain features). So you could then quickly go down a tree of options until you end up a song with the most similar ones (features). The unique combination of features would make up the "acoustic fingerprint" they're talking about. That's probably too obvious though I'd imagine there's something else going on as well.
aditya 11y ago
EchoNest used to do this[1] and is open source 1. http://developer.echonest.com/forums/thread/3650 http://developer.echonest.com/forums/thread/3650
anonova 11y ago
See "An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm"[1], a 2010 paper written by one of the Shazam developers. The analysis itself doesn't seem complicated[2] but having a large enough database to compare against is probably the hard part. [1]: http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf [2]: http://www.royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/06/creating-shazam-in-java/ http://www.royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/06/creating-shazam-in-ja...
pronoiac 11y ago
From memory, they do a spectrum analysis (frequency vs time) and look for peaks, specifically sets of three peaks in a row, evenly spaced. Gather a lot of them and send them in.

fchollet 11y ago

So basically, labels are now treating music production as an optimization problem. And because they're terrible at this type of optimization problem, they're getting stuck in a local minimum (the space is anything but convex), which happens to be repetitive, awful, and targeted at the largest common denominator. Treating music as an optimization problem may not be a bad thing in itself, the issue is being unable to solve the problem properly.

wmkn 11y ago
Are they really terrible at it? You seem to assume that the global minimum to the problem is an artistically perfect song. For record labels the global minimum is the song that makes the most money. If that song happens to be repetitive and awful, so be it.
- fchollet 11y ago
  If so many people are unhappy with the state of the pop music landscape, then that is not a global minimum. The space of possible music is immense, you could invent so many new genres. By not exploring the unknown, they are missing out. Iterating endlessly on a single recipe is just not how you build a sustainable artistic business. It makes money in the near term, but it is doomed in the long term. The music labels and Hollywood will have to realize this at some point.
  - AustinG08 11y ago
    The music labels will never have to 'realize' this because, short of a cultural revolution, it will always make the most money. I'm a musician, I am very picky about the music I listen to. My wife? Not quite as picky. She will hear a song on the radio, like it, and become a fan of that song. Her, along with probably 90%+ of the general public don't carry the same snobbery that I do, and have no guilt liking a Nickelback or a One Republic song. Edit: I meant One Direction, but same thing.
    - girvo 11y ago

cpeterso 11y ago

Media measurement company BigChampagne tried to do the same thing by monitoring file-sharing networks.

mkagenius 11y ago

Any reason why would Shazam be significantly faster than Twitter or the likes in detecting trends?

mintone 11y ago
I would imagine that it's good because it doesn't require any more information that what a song sounds like. A user hears a song they like, records it there and then and that shows 'interest'. Twitter on the other hand needs a name / artist.. you can't really analyse a tweet saying "I like that song that goes du du dud dud dahhh"... but Shazam actually can.

nirkalimi 11y ago

I remember posting this awhile ago. Here is the Original Thread if you are looking for more comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634357 Great article regardless. Glad to see more peoples take on it.

bsder 11y ago

Nice PR piece for Shazam. Does anybody do actual reporting anymore?

dghughes 11y ago

I'm not clicking since is is the Atlantic so I'm not sure what was discussed but... I'm on the cusp of deleting Shazam as useful as it is it's getting more spammy as the days go by too many notifications of junk.

DanBC 11y ago
> too many notifications of junk. I LOATHE NOTIFICATIONS that are junk! Far too many apps do this. I turn them all off now. This is why we can't have nice things - appdevs cramming too much stuff into stupid notifications. Years ago there was a GNKSA - Good Net Keeping Seal of Approval. This was a set of criteria for Usenet clients to promote sensible usability and formatting standards. There's probably a niche for something similar for apps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Netkeeping_Seal_of_Approval https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Netkeeping_Seal_of_Approv...
pervycreeper 11y ago
>I'm not clicking since is is the Atlantic Context? What did they do?
- dghughes 11y ago
  Very spammy at least on social media such as reddit and HN breaking a rule (official or not) of not submitting your own material it should come from a user not the website. They get around it by making up a username or pay someone to submit. Physorg is another terribly spammy site often with misleading headlines. Both phsyorg and the Atlantic have been banned from reddit at least once if not multiple times I'm not sure about on HN.