Apple buys music app Shazam

Apple shares closed in the green Monday, following confirmation from the tech giant it has purchased London-based music app, Shazam. Currently, the app is holding around 1 billion downloads out of which nearly 80% are active regularly.

Apple has said that Shazam is a “natural fit” for its streaming music platform.

The reported $400m price for Shazam falls short of a recent $1bn valuation for the privately-held company.

Shazam wasn’t very profitable on its own, but it used to earn commissions by sending users to Apple Music and Apple’s competitor, Spotify. When asking Siri to identify a song, the assistant pulls up the result through the help of Shazam. It already has an app for sharing songs via iMessage.

Apple has launched a new feature for the App Store, giving you the ability to pre-order apps and have them automatically download upon their release.

Shazam was one of the earliest smartphone apps to capture the public’s attention. It expanded beyond simple audio recognition in 2010 by adding capabilities that let television viewers “Shazam” an ad, which would then open a promotion from the advertiser on a user’s device.

In fact, Shazam has been in the business long before even smartphones came into being, having started back in 1999. Shazam launched a visual recognition engine in 2015, following it up with an augmented reality platform in March 2017 that allows users to point their phone camera on advertisements and other physical products using the Shazam app, triggering product visualizations and 360-degree videos.

“A company isn’t worth a billion dollars until it’s sold or exited”.

Whatever Apple does with Shazam it’s fitting that the firm finds a place in Cupertino.

“Spotify has made the discovery of new music front and centre of what makes it a compelling proposition”, said Mark Mulligan, from the consultancy Midia Research.

This purported transaction is a long time coming for some analysts who have predicted this application would be on-boarded into Apple’s stable of companies, given the current level of integration between the two companies now.