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There were 75K albums (not just songs) released in 2010 alone. The total number of songs is in hundreds of millions.

No way you can fit their fingerprints and the metadata into 64GB, compressed or not.

Shazam has 40M fingerprints in their DB, and they definitely don't have everything. Their software runs on beefy servers.

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The claim in the presentation was "the 10k most popular songs", updated weekly.

That won't satisfy the jazz nerd's needs, but they probably know their entire catalog by heart anyway.

I mean, would that satisfy a majority of needs, even? When I use Shazam, it's usually to identify a weird instrumental or otherwise obscure song that I've never heard before.

It depends on what the goal is. Is it to identify the song à la Shazam or to display lyrics, concert tickets info, ... ?

If you do the explicit ask for what song is playing then it starts recording and sends it to the cloud just like Shazam. Presumably that recognizes far more than just 10k most popular songs.

This is just passive recognition which can have much less coverage since you aren't relying on it.

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