Shazam! The Music Wizard

By Azam on October 17, 2008

Shazam is an innovative service for music listeners to discover and find music that they like. The Shazam music services allows a user to capture a sample of the music that is playing and find the artist and song playing. Essentially the services are great for naming that tune playing. Shazam expects to turn the service into a money maker by directing users to music for purchase and offering advertising for marketers trying to reach the audience of music users. Shazam is reported to be the number 2 Apple iPhone app as of Sept reaching 1.5m downloads. Shazam offers the free app from the Apple App Store leading to its popularity.

Shazam has enjoyed rapid growth over the past year and is now widely recognized as a leading music service across the world for music fans to capture, share and purchase songs wherever and whenever they hear music using just their mobile. Recently celebrating a milestone of 20 million customers, Shazam’s users have identified over 100 million tracks across the globe.

Shazam seeks to monetize the service through subscription and advertising. Shazam has partnered with leading carriers for its musical discovery MusicID service. Shazam also links users’ music interest to purchase tunes through the service. The company offers a white label service to carrier partners.

Vodafone can purchase unlimited usage Music Finder service for €2.99 per month.

AT&T users pay $3.99 a month for Music ID. “It’s a top ten application for us, and one of our top five music applications,” say Rob Hyatt, executive director of Premium Content for AT&T’s wireless operations

Verizon customers get Song ID when they sign up for the wireless company’s $15-a-month V Cast mobile entertainment service.

Social Applications

Shazam is already proving to be a strong powerful for in music with MusicID service. The ShazamiD Chart, generated by the company’s mobile music recognition service, is constantly referenced by the music industry as a true indicator of market interest in pre-release material and a monitor of the hit potential of a track or artist.

Shazam service has the ability to capture music tastes and preferences in real time. The ability to capture taste and preference will be tremendous asset and valuable service to the music industry and marketers.

Shazam has further plans for the social networking aspects of the service and music sharing that occurs in music discovery among users. Shazam strategy of offering the app for free on the iPhone is smart as adoption of the service will lead viral spread of the app and valuable social network adoption and creation.

From Shazam CEO Andrew Fisher

Ultimately, Shazam wants to connect its customers and create a vast social network of music lovers. “We are very much focused on the social aspect of music,” he says. “Look at MySpace. They started with music. Music is a really social currency, both in terms of you or I wanting to discover music before our friends and the fact that people also meet each other though music.”

Fisher predicts Shazam users will create diaries on their phones of where they are and who they are with when they discover songs. It’s also working on technology that would enable users to send songs immediately to their friends once they have identified them.

“That’s the final piece in the puzzle for us,” Fisher says.

About Shazam

Shazam’s solutions enhance the music strategies of more than 75 carriers across 60 markets globally, including AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone and T-Mobile. Shazam Entertainment the company behind Shazam app and MusicID music recognition service for mobile phones received $6.6 million in a new round of funding from IDG Ventures Europe and Lynx Capital Ventures, both of which invested in the last round, and a news investor Soft Park, an IDG Fund in China.

Shazam! The Music Wizard

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