Shazam is an app that allows you to find information about any song you hear, anywhere you are. Everyone has listened to a song and asked themselves who sings it and what is it called. Shazam shows you all the information you are looking for in just a few seconds.
Last week a Mexican billionaire, and the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim invested $40 million in Shazam. Carlos is investing in the future of Shazam. More than a third of a billion people use it to identify music today, in the next few years, Shazam is plotting to become one of the largest names in tech.
Today, if you tag a song you have a ton of options. You can comment on how much more you like one specific song, share it on Facebook, watch its YouTube video, read its lyrics, find out if the its playing near you, read the artist bio, buy the track on iTunes, or play it on streaming services like Pandora, Rdio, and Spotify. By playing around with the locations and times where users tag songs, Shazam now shows you your own tags on a map, and what other people are listening to in every country, region, city, and even block around the world. It’s beginning to create lists of the most popular songs in different areas.
Music may have gotten Shazam this far, but it’s television that is helping it attract a wider audience. Though there have been Shazam-able commercials for a while, last fall, it added TV show tagging to its arsenal. Tagging a TV show – like The Daily Show – will let you see all the music in the broadcast, view the cast, connect to IMDB, read about it on Wikipedia, read the show’s latest tweets, and connect to its official site, among other things. Though it sounds strange to say you’re going to Shazam a show, the TV service is taking off.
Carlos Slim, the multi-billionaire Mexican said he’s investing because ”Shazam is defining a new category of media engagement that combines the power of mobile with traditional broadcast media and advertising.”
The goal of Shazam is to continue adding more audio, help you tag it faster, and deliver everything you want to know about it. Keeping this mission in mind, Shazam’s next phase is to eliminate the few seconds it takes you to tag things. It has already launched a new autotagging feature on its iPad app that will constantly listen (without draining the battery) to every TV show or piece of audio that your iPad comes in contact with, even while the app is off. Soon, this feature will roll out to other platforms, allowing Shazam a near 24/7 window into your listening habits, and ensuring that you have a complete record of everything you hear.
There are a lot of scary or annoying things Shazam could do if it listened and tagged all the audio we encounter on a daily basis, but the benefits are even more interesting. With such complete access, Shazam could recommend music or TV better than Pandora or Netflix; after that, all it has to do is deliver on those recommendations. Eliminating the need to tag and predicting what you want before you want it could set up Shazam’s next big achievement: to go public in the next two years, becoming one of the first apps to grow into a major tech player. By being everywhere, listening to everything, and helping us identify the audio in our lives, Shazam may end up being the next big thing in tech.
References: Digital Trends