Throughout the summer, franceinfo presents an application that has changed your lives or your habits. It’s the turn of Shazam, the music recognition application which, in just over 20 years, has conquered the world.
His name is synonymous with magic in English. And it’s true that there is a bit of magic for the fans who almost instantly recognize the title of a piece of music, like the artists discovered too. Today, the number of Shazams is in the billions. The Shazam brand grew in influence until it became a verb. And the app is now available in “birdsong shazam” or even monuments.
But the story began in 2002. Shazam was developed in London by four students from the American Silicon Valley. At the time, smartphones did not yet exist. To identify a piece of music, you had to dial a number, stretch your cell phone towards the speakers and wait to receive the title by SMS, a few minutes later… Jeepster group T. Rex is thus the first Shazam in history in 2002.
In 2008, Shazam took off by becoming a real phone application. Concretely, it connects to the microphone, captures the music played to create an “acoustic fingerprint”, that is to say a simplified extract, and compares this fingerprint to its database. In 2018, it’s a turning point: Shazam is bought by Apple.
In all, more than 70 billion requests have been made to Shazam since its inception. And Dance Monkey by Australian Tones and I, recognized 41 million times, is the most Shazame title of all time.
Another highly sought-after piece: Butter of the K-pop group BTS. The tube became, in 2021, the title to reach one million shazams the fastest in history, in just 9 days.
A role in the music industry
Over time, Shazam gains functionality: in addition to track info, Shazam can be linked to music apps like Apple Music, Spotify or Deezer to add the newly Shazam track to a playlist. And, lately, the artists’ upcoming concerts are announced.
Shazam sometimes gives unexpected notoriety to artists, like CKay who was discovered outside Nigeria by settling permanently in the top Shazam.
This weekly “top 200”, the professionals of the sector scrutinize it. However, the fact of “shazamer” does not necessarily indicate that the music is appreciated, because one can as well seek music out of simple curiosity or… because one hates it.