Excellent article. His/her explanation of the the theory behind audio fingerprinting was simple, to-the-point, and most importantly, very well-explained. Thanks for submitting this.
You only truly understand something when you can explain it in lay (or close to) terms, I find.
The American vernacular is you get "dejavu" whenever you have that "I've been here before..." feeling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(service)#Patent_infrin...
The core algorithm is well known and fun to implement:
https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
A blog had a simple implementation of it and were contacted by Shazam's lawyers:
Pretty sure Shazam/Philips/Dolby patents cover Europe.
Contrast this to now with you would like to know what artist performs a song and you Shazam a song in one app and then when you identify it you open up Deezer or Spotify or whatever and then have to type it in the search box and then add it to your library or a playlist.
By integrating fingerprinting you can identify and add new music all in the same app.