Apple is close to acquiring Shazam, sources say | Hacker News Reader

Apple is close to acquiring Shazam, sources say

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419 pointsrbanffy292 comments

So last year I was in a big brand clothing shop and I heard a cool song. I Shazamed it. At home searched it on YouTube.

To my shock, it was launched a few months ago and it barely had 5k views. The shock for me was how the hell a giant clothing company (H&M if I recall correctly) has such an underground song on.

So I started googleing around to find out how music in stores gets selected, and long story short, this is a multi-million dollar business and there are companies which create playlists according to your brand. These companies also scour the world for underground artists, because you want your store to have the best music before it's popular, so that customers perceive you as a trendsetter.

What is the success metric for these playlist companies? One of the task of store employees is to report how many customers they notice using Shazam in the store.

> One of the task of store employees is to report how many customers they notice using Shazam in the store

Fascinating. Do you remember your source?

It was an article about a UK playlist selection company which had 6 millions yearly revenue doing this. Unfortunately I can't hit the right keywords now to find it again.

What a delightful discovery, this playlist selection vertical.

Going down that rabbit hole, I discovered some gems:

[1] Restaurant music emerges from the background - http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20170807/ENTERTAINMENT/...

[2] Who Picks The Music You Hear At The Mall? - https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2012/11/28/165947927/...

[3] Gap In-Store Playlists 1992 to 2006: The Monthly Playlists at Gap - https://gapinstoreplaylists.blogspot.com

Well, shazam could sell that info to the stores

heck, they could even tell by sniffing wifi traffic

I wonder how many people actually end up connecting to the store wifi.

Or you install a DAS in the store and monitor the traffic of phones connected to that.

I think they could just get your MAC address if you have your WiFi turned on, without you actually connecting.

iOS doesn’t allow this any longer.

location + time + song = exact match

Of course, you'd have to trust Shazam to provide accurate data.

On iOS, Shazam is usually used through Siri (it's beyond me why anyone would download the standalone app).

I wonder if the connection is made straight from the iPhone to shazam, or Apple actually proxies this.

Do they really need to rely in manual reporting? I'm pretty sure Shazam has no trouble at all collecting these statistics, and I'd be really surprised if they didn't monetize them.

Wonder if Shazam asks for location? If yes I don’t see why they need it as a user. If no then this metric might be difficult.

"What was the name of that song I shazamed while visiting Amsterdam? Ah, here it is."

Location is massively important in searching for a memory. I will forget the dates I was in Europe, but I will not forget that I was there.

Is that a use case Shazam supports? I would think if the song was good you would add it to your library.

To answer your original question: I checked the latest version of Shazam, and it does not request location services at all. (And I can't find a setting that might enable it later, either.)

I believe cmelbye was simply responding to your "if yes" with a justification for why it's useful. Even if I added the song to my library, what if I don't remember the name or the artist? Will I find it easily amongst the 5000 other songs I've got in there? And maybe I didn't like the song, but I'm reminded of it for some reason and it's really bugging me that I can't remember enough details to find it again. I guess I could listen to every single from every unfamiliar artist I see in my Shazaam history...

Indexing our life events by location and time, paired with a smoother search interface, would dramatically improve the memory augmentation aspects of our personal devices. There are, of course, tremendous privacy risks in accumulating this data (which is why the design tradeoffs / permission system around location services exists in the first place).

No need to wonder. On my iPhone, Shazam has access to location while in use. It’s my impression that most people auto-click “yes” when prompted for this.

Yet, do many people use the standalone Shazam app, rather than the Siri integration?

Shazam would need your location to accurately report these.

Or they can install ultrasound beacons in the stores. They already have access to the microphone for obvious reasons.

Not even ultrasound, just correlate what everybody hears at the same time?

They might just need one data point, if the playlist curator tells them the exact moment at which the song started.

My Shazam app (iPhone) has access to location while in use. I assume most people just click “yes” when asked about this.

Mine is on never and the other option is “while using the app”. I have no recollection of choosing the setting either.

They know which song is played and how many seconds you are into the song at what time. The only info they need is the playlist of the store to find out your location.

In the UK a lot of chain stores have a "radio" station meaning that they all play the same song at the same time.

I would think its more related to royalties.. 'up and coming artists' are also cheap artists. I would am interested in subscribing to such a service for my properties.

I would imagine streaming a song in a store is much cheaper than say putting in a TV ad. But I'm no expert.

FWIW, it was this song. Sounded amazing on the store speakers. Even today, it barely has 100k views - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EdGEqbwSQ0

I wonder what if there really is a significant difference between streaming a song in a store vis-a-vis placing it in a TV ad.

That said, of the two playlist selection companies that I have only just read about, the charge for streaming in-store is between $34 to $199 per location per month.

[1] Soundtrack Your Brand, a ‘Spotify for B2B’ nabs $22M for expansion - https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/17/soundtrack-your-brand-a-sp...

[2] Restaurant music emerges from the background - http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20170807/ENTERTAINMENT/...

https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/109173-88

I am sure the 'underground songs' also cost a small fraction of the price of licensing mainstream songs.

Does it? I know for a fact that artists in most of Europe get fixed fees for different types of public performance (played on the radio/played at a company function/etc.). Only "royalty free" titles manage their own contracts. No TV station actually talks to some band's manager to license their song when it plays on the car radio in the background.

An ASCAP license for a general business is around $3.33 * occupancy per year. There isn't that much money to save by getting out of licensing fees.

Big companies fund bands or give them exposure because if the song becomes popular its good for relevancy.

Check out Levi's as a good example in the 90's.

I know of one or two alcohol companies that fund small bands road tours in different countries as well.

On a related note, Red Bull funds a lot of programs for up-and-coming artists[0] as well as subsidizes as a concert series[1]. It's good for branding.

[0] http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com

[1] https://www.redbullsoundselect.com/events

Red Bull sponsors an amazing variety of cultural events as well as athletes including in some exceedingly niche sports as well as very very expensive endeavors (running effectively two formula 1 teams, fleet of old expensive to maintain aircraft, etc).

Their marketing budget must be massive. My understanding is the unit cost of any kind of drink is very low and its entirely a market-dominance driven game so the spend makes a lot of sense especially when they command a premium price.

Some of their downhill mountain biking races through narrow village streets are amazing. Honestly, all of their mountain biking videos are incredible.

One of my favorites: https://youtu.be/mFuSjk7jv_M

This is why I love mountain biking. Flying through the woods (or this setting) is just exhilarating.

You’re not thinking about the problems of life, you’re thinking and reacting to what’s a tenth of a second in front of you. What’s beyond that turn? You’ll find out soon enough.

Yeah, no room for extraneous worries when you are trying to navigate constantly shifting landscapes of obstacles and advantages.

Another one because why not.

https://youtu.be/K_7k3fnxPq0

Danny MacAskill is incredible and when you watch the behind the scenes videos you really get a sense of how patient and supportive Red Bull are of their athletes.

So good!

He's incredible. All of their athletes are. I don't know if mere mortals understand just how good the best in the world are at their sport. It's always inspiring to see creativity in unexpected places.

Their Github (!) has a collection of event sourcing libraries they've built on top of Scala/Akka. Their budget is big enough for a soft drink company to justify a sizable open source program.

So much of product, especially beverage marketing is positioning yourself as being a part of a certain community, it's very possible their open source contributions are simply an extension of that.

There is a reason why Cocacola spends an obscene amount of money marketing sugared water. Almost every country I have been, I have seen coca cola bill board ads. They paint your storefront free if it's coca cola branded. Give you a free coca cola branded fridge if you only sell their drinks. They really do go out of their way to make a brand impression.

I'm impressed

They sponsor a lot of collegiate hackathons. College students and high-income developers working long hours are natural target customers.

Red Bull is a media company that sells an energy drink. Not an energy drink company.

Incidentally - or not, as the case may be - Red Bull's Danish offices are right on top of Google's in central Copenhagen. So much so that once I mistook one backdoor for the other.

The Google logo on the frontdoor, by the way, says Göögle.

I guess this is a good thing for artists...an additional outlet besides the big record labels

This should have been an opportunity for Soundcloud actually, a lot of underground musical artists and an opportunity to connect via a large community platform to spread word.

Yes, but also a ton of unlicensed music (most of which came by way of remixes/DJ mixes), which they can't license it to soundtrack cos. Spotify owns one (major investor, created by an employee) called Soundtrack Your Brand. Pandora offers one as well.

Thats true actually and I've seen SoundCloud plagued by theses issues but there's always plenty talent that get accepted such as Lil Yachty or XXXtentacion or even Chance the Rapper who all started on SoundCloud, I think SoundCloud has the capability to filter out the easy hits to market and partner with

If it was obvious what the "easy hits" were, I'm sure many labels would be competing for them.

Not really, Chance the rapper, Lil Yachty etc had huge amounts of listens etc on SoundCloud which is why they became famous, they werent being signed by labels despite their heavy recognition. Chance the rapper went independent, like the thing is that labels only sort of pay attention to SoundCloud, the major medium is still YouTube, but we even see musicians there with followings and millions of views not being signed.

Not trying to sound ass-hurt but if theres a big platform of dedicated listeners and theres a lot of people with millions of listens, wouldnt those be easy hits?

very true

That's a good point. It looks like there is a bit of it going on: https://soundcloud.com/cosstores

Agreed. As long as you weed out the copyright infringement, this would work really well, considering that many artists that are popular today (chance the rapper comes to mind) started on Soundcloud.

> What is the success metric for these playlist companies?

I wonder this about the entire branding industry.

I'm also surprised by how Shazam had such an unknown song in its database...

Shazam is just another platform to service like iTunes or Spotify.

If it's in the licensed database of e.g. Apple Music or Spotify, then Shazam can just as easily scoop it up and classify it.

OP mentioned that they use the number of customers using Shazam as a metric. Maybe once they decide to use a song in their playlist they (somehow) make sure that it's in the database.

The great extent of their database can be annoying at times. I turned on the TV during the Winter Olympics once, and saw that one of the ice skating events where the competitors skate to music was on--probably Ice Dancing.

The performance being shown was using some fairly well known piece of classical music that I did recognize, so I tried Shazam [1] and it identified it, but not in the way I wanted. Instead of telling me the name of the piece and the composer, it told me who the skaters were, that it was from their Winter Olympics routine, and what round of the competition it was from.

[1] ...I'm not actually sure if it was Shazam. Might have been SoundHound.

Yeah a friend of mine is a music producer and he signed a deal to have one of his songs at a designer clothes store when he had maybe 500 sales total. He has no idea how they found him but they paid him a few grand.

It's probably an easy way for them to get great music for cheap. There are underground artists making far better music than your generic EDM out there.

Well a lot of major EDM artists use ghost/shadow artists. Because they have to pump out a podcast every week with some of the music original they just have ghost minions do it. It's the brand they establish that sells it.

Just didn't think someone put it in the playlist?

I know a guy in a local band here in Portsmouth, England, and they had a song picked for a supermarket playlist in I think Brazil, ended up charting there and being flown out for a few shows. Another guy who was playing on the ferry to Spain for a living and had a hit in Korea through similar circumstances. This sort of thing can really make a career.

There was a company from the first dot-com boom called Big Champagne the crawled Napster and other file-sharing networks to discover what new songs were popular. They're now owned by Ticketmaster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigChampagne

My team wrote a web crawler once to answer the same question about MP3 blogs. Fun era.

Blast from the past that. I feel like I heard about them in The Industry Standard or Wired at the time.

"What is the success metric for these playlist companies?"

Extremely difficult to determine.

And the 'taste-makers' in music are very hard to find, though they should easily have access to the latest/hippest tracks.

Design is one of the hardest things for a reason.

If fashion truly were a commodity H&M etc. simply would not exist.

I've conducted diligence on one of these businesses before (it was acquired a PE firm). The overall market is somewhat limited, but you're right there is a whole industry out there for this type of stuff.

I have once heard a beautiful song in a local swimming pool. I've shazamed and googled it just to find the only place it was available from being Audiosparx - a site I've never heard about before that time, seeming kind of an "audio clip-art" store, titled as "commercial music for video, TV, film and media".

We do this at amazinginstore.com with fresh new unsigned tunes uploaded to amazingtunes.com while promoted at amazingradio.com

The in-store music is how we make some money and pay artists.

I was recently out and heard a country song I’m sure is one of the most inane songs I’ve ever heard in my life. I Shazam’d this atrocity to discover it was a two year old song by American Idol contestant, Kellie Pickler. How do I feel now, better or worse?

Friend of a friend does (did?) this for, iirc, Topshop etc. Apparently she's bleeding edge cool/hipster - literally tasked with listening to 'everything', figuring what's cool, what's up and coming, who is going be 'cool' next and sticking it on a playlist. I remember sitting in a pub chatting about what a great job it must be. That said, this was probably 8 years ago, so definitely in the Shazam era, but I assume before anyone was using it for any reference point.

Am I the only one curious as to what the cool song was?

Posted it in another comment - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EdGEqbwSQ0

That was a very enjoyable circular anecdote.

In the early 2000s, I used to work a relatively large music company (Album Network, later acquired by Clear Channel) whole sole purpose in life was to make music charts of what's popular, and publish a monthly magazine/charts of the hottest artists.

Point being is that music charts are BIG business, and remain so to this day. I'm not at all surprised to hear that this has spread to brick and mortar stores. IIRC Starbucks has an in-house music curation department.

Shortly before MP3 players made the whole concept silky, Starbucks had some sort of pilot going with HP to let people burn custom discs at some sort of kiosk in Starbucks stores. So they’ve long been playing around with music-related stuff.

Heh. I’d love to find a site that has the Walmart playlist. I do wonder if these are actually kept secret or if stores do publish them.

So much for the disco soundtrack in my store :-(

Which song was it?

welcome to basic audio design practice in place for commercials and marketing for about 30 years. the approach hasn’t changed only it gets easier.

OK well every time I'm in Walgreens all I hear is Phil Collins.

That's why I could never find that song played in the SuperDry store!?

You are correct. I used to work for a company in the Netherlands that does this for a couple of big brands, often for every store worldwide. I was in technical support for the music players.

They had two guys, who were also DJ's in some local clubs, work in an insane spreadsheet to decide the music for many different brands. Whenever I'd hear a cool new track I'd tell them. That way a track I found ended up playing in a bunch of stores worldwide, pretty cool.

> What is the success metric for these playlist companies?

Well, if the goal is to pick trending music before it trends, I imagine it's largely a matter of letting time pass to see what % of music popped with the desired demographic segment.

They're going to remove my "Open with Spotify" button aren't they

"Open with  Music"

Tomorrow it'll be ● Music

It already has that.

FYI, 0xF8FF is only shown as an Apple logo on Apple products. It's a Unicode Private Use character.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas#Vendor_use

On my device it shows as "( t )": https://i.imgur.com/b3Yhh1I.png

I'm not sure why.

On my Linux Mint 18 Chromium 62 it's the Apple.

Black box LG G6 Android. Come on, Google. You know what it's supposed to be :)

Ugh, this has become my favorite music feature of all time. I've made amazing playlists in Spotify by using Shazam around town in cafes and clubs. It was too good to be true.

I use sound hound, it has the same thing.

Awesome, thanks for the tip.

Soundhound also recognizes songs by humming. (Shazam can't)

Is it as good as Shazam at finding songs? I remember trying it early and not being impressed, but it was very brief so my sample size was too small.

I didn't find much difference in recognition capabilities between Shazam, SoundHound, and built-in recognition on Windows Phones.

Switched to SoundHound a long time ago and have found it equally as good as Shazam. I have every song I "discover" automatically added to a Spotify playlist so I can check it out later.

I use both regularly. SoundHound is my go to by default but I use Shazam as a backup. Shazam is more successful normally but I like SoundHound more for whatever reason.

Wow, Thanks for point this out and I have never heard of Soundhound before. ( Talk about Discovery problems )

There are many times when a song suddenly pops up into your head, and you cant record the exact lyrics, the may likely be a few words that is wrong so Google doesn't help, and humming it in Shazam never worked. I had always thought my voice was sounded too bad.

THANK YOU for the Sound Hound tip; I’d somehow been ignorant of its existence. Haven’t really put it through its paces yet but the UI and featureset look great. Never expected to say this but I might be done w/ Shazam!

It would be quite a joy if there were a way to curate/aggregate in-store music playlists and then serve them such that visitors could search by store.

I love this too — when it works. But I’ve had a long, recent and ongoing stretch of Shazam failing to identify songs.

Never update

I wish you could turn off auto update for just one app on iOS.

And the Android version of Shazam, if we're speculating along those lines.

Is there any loss in that? The integrated music recognition if Google Now rarely fails me, and when it does, Shazam wasn't able to recognize the song either.

That feature only works in the US (and maybe a few other countries?).

Are you sure about that? I know that it works in Germany. Might it be that you are confusing it with the Google Assistant song search?

Looking at my sound search history[0], I first used it in Germany in August 2014, so I'd be surprised if it wasn't rolled out worldwide by now (unless of course due to legal reasons).

[0]: https://myactivity.google.com/page?page=soundsearch

Huh, it looks like it works in my country (Sweden) now. It was unavailable for the longest time though.

I've never had it work as fast or accurately as Shazam, especially in noisy environments. There's also no obvious way to get the full history of the songs I've searched for (there probably is - it's just not easily discoverable). I had high hopes for the automatic detection that rolled out on pixel 2s but have found that it only works on the terrible music that my gym plays.

Relevant fact for context: the Pixel 2 shipped with a built-in music identification feature.

https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/19/how-googles-pixel-2-now-p...

Siri has been able to identify music (I believe using Shazam?) for 3 - 4 years. I suspect they were shopping themselves around, and Apple wanted to own the technology enough to give them their asking price.

And I mean why not? Apple has over $250 billion in cash, so they might as well use it to make acquisitions like this.

The difference is that it never seems to work with Siri where as soon as I open the Shazam app it works fine.

I use Siri a lot, I’m not a Siri hater. But I don’t think this feature has ever worked when I tried it.

Interesting, this is pretty much the only thing I use Siri for and it works great in my experience.

"Siri, name that tune"

Does Siri save the result anywhere? It’s nice to get an instant response but my memory isn’t very good.

iTunes Store app

Gracenote (the people who bought and closed CDDB) offer music identifying to anyone who wants to license it. I remember Sony Ericsson feature phones all had this feature powered by gracenote. I would assume that's what Apple is using.

Apple's music ID results have always had the Shazam logo in the corner.

I haven't been able to determine if this is a deliberate plot or just incompetence, but Siri's language parsing for the Shazam music identification became maddeningly limited in some recent iOS update. The only phrasing I can trigger it with now is "What's this song?". "Name this song", "What song is this", etc. all give me some Marx-brothers-esque response like "Sorry, I couldn't find the song What in your library."

Oh, and the only thing you can do with the result is tap it to be bumped to Apple Music, where (if you have a subscription and the song is available), the song starts playing. Hey Apple, when in the history of ever has someone wanted to start playing the song they are already listening to? At least let me copy the damn name. Siri is a dumpster fire.

I use "What's playing?"

The technology Google is using here is very different. They also have active detection on Assitant, but this one is a passive 24/7 detection. There's a local database of the ~10k most popular songs, and it's only ~50mb [0]. It's all done locally, and when it works (Which is very often), you just have to look down at your phone and the song name is already there on the lockscreen without you touching anything.

[0] https://www.xda-developers.com/google-pixel-2-now-playing-so...

What a waste of power.

You seem to presume that uses a lot of power. Which (to the best of my knowledge) is not true.

I don't know that sounds very cool, but it really just seems like a waste of power. I can't think of the last time I would want that.

As mentioned above, this is already running to do OK Google detection. It's also not scanning 100% of the audio, as far as I understand, it analyzes samples roughly each minute. I'm sure they would not make this a feature if it had a big impact. From my own experience, turning this feature on or off made no difference in battery life.

Google Assistant has also been able to that for ages.

The pixel does something very different : it automatically tries to identify what is playing right now and writes the name of the song on the lockscreen.

It might seem to be gimmicky but I have found myself really liking this feature.

Is it the one that "google now" uses, or "google assistant?" Are they the same? I don't even know with google anymore man I just can't keep track of this shit.

The one on Pixel 2 is done in the background on device, but it has a small catalog of titles. You can explicitly ask the Assistant for all the other songs.

Google assistant has a music identification feature now (up until recently it did not).

Now is still there, but the search feature that used to be on the launcher is just a web search now (can't do anything fancy with it anymore, that's reserved for Assistant).

Pixel 2 has a music identifier that is always listening and will place what song is playing on your lock screen. It does this with a local database and does not send audio data to Google.

> It does this with a local database and does not send audio data to Google.

Do you have details on this? I'm honestly quite surprised; I'd imagine the fingerprints to enough songs for that feature to be usable would take up quite a bit of space.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15883218

Wait really? I still use my launcher for all my things, because it has more "voice commands" than the Assistant.

I'm wrong actually. Just checked and it still works as before if you use the mic icon. That icon is now an extra tap away, however.

Android has had music identification since at least the Nexus 4. Maybe it was 'built in' to the assistant now, but it's been around forever.

All you have to do is hold up voice search to music.

Wow, I've been using Android since 2012 and I had no idea about that. Thanks!

This is very different.

It runs 24/7 aongside the "ok google" detection, and as soon as it detects a song, it'll show the name on the lockscreen. So normally, all you have to do is look at your phone to get the song name [0]. This is also done 100% locally, there's a offline database of 10k+ songs which is only ~50mb [1], and gets updated regularly.

[0] https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/19/how-googles-pixel-2-now-p...

[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/google-pixel-2-now-playing-so...

That is impressive.

Now it all makes sense. This is a killer feature

Is this US / Regional Specific? I have never seen this working anywhere in Asia.

Works in India for me. I'm on Android Oreo (OnePlus 3).

Is this something you have to switch on? Oneplus3t here, I am not aware of this feature. Thanks

Nope, as far as I can tell. You have to enable it in settings though. This seems to be one of the best features that Pixel 2 came with.

In the US.

No, everywhere. Or at least, also in NZ and the UK and a bunch of countries around Europe.

Why would Apple pay for Shazam? It’d be totally trivial to recreate their service if you are Apple. My guess is Shazam have patents and Apple will stop this feature on Android, one of the most compelling features of the new pixel is always on Shazam equivalent.

They are already contracting with Shazam to answer "Siri, what song is this?"

It could just be that owning the goose makes more sense than buying eggs at their volume.

No my point is why pay huge sums when if you have all the songs in the world at hand, watermarking and searching those watermarks is trivial. I looked into this a while back and the algorithms/libs to do this extremely accurately are available.

Obviously the problem is getting access to ever song and keeping it up to date with new ones.

Perhaps Apple is interested in Shazam's userbase and it's metrics (popularity of Shazamming various songs, etc.)

Seems for them the cost (financially and in terms of overhead) of building that team vs. buying a very experienced one was not worth it. They almost have ~$300 billion just sitting around.

It's naive to think that a company that has been operating for decades only has capability that is implementable in a weekend. Surely there are plenty of edge cases with certain songs/genres and how they mix with various environmental noises. That in addition to already having the system scaled, and having a team of people who are intimately familiar with maintaining that system.

Then there's also the userbase. Even if you successfully clone the app, most Shazam users won't even know it exists.

The basics might not be that hard, but you can be pretty sure that Shazam has perfected the tech in 15 years of operation while aquiring hundreds of millions of users in the process. Apple also has more money than anyone, it might just make more sense to just buy it and integrate the brand and userbase.

How does one look up what patents Shazam has? or is this a situation where it's possible but any patent worth a penny obfuscates the owner?

Shazam has an Excellent patent. Very broad coverage. A lot harder and less effective using other means for this purpose.

https://www.google.co.uk/patents/US6990453

A brief perusal, and that seems incredibly broad.

The usage-related data sets that Shazam has collected over its operational history are likely the biggest driver of value for this deal. Think about the insight you could gain by cross-referencing Shazam lookups with iTunes downloads. Probably lots of insight in how certain genre fan bases intersect, good predictive analytics on time-to-monetization of hot underground bands, etc

This is such a good point. Apple Music (and Spotify) are pouring money into people who stay on the beat. To this day this is still very analog (which in many ways is a good thing). But when your Apple or Google or whomever you must see the power of using basic statistics to do some part of this. (You could use ML too but that is super overkill most likely).

They probably have technology related to voice recognition that makes it valuable.

Surprised I haven't seen anyone mention this angle yet.

I remember this patent threat http://royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/07/patent-infringement and lost any respect I had for them.

I understand being angry at patent trolls, but you are aware that Shazam isn't one correct? They actually use the patented IP in question. Even patent attorneys in his own country effectively told him he's likely infringing.

I know they are not the same as a patent troll but I find repulsive the idea of silencing and threatening this guy:

> I’ve written some code (100% my own) and implemented my own methods for matching music. There are some key differences with the algorithm Shazam uses. The code isn’t published yet, but I was planning on releasing it under Apache License to the open source community soon

Edit: of course if you are OK with software patents then it's perfectly logic. I am happy I don't live in a country where software patents exist.

IANAL but actually the "software" - patent "system" in european has been under changes since around ~2000 which means that there would not have been any problem in releasing his code... (https://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal-texts/html/epc/2016/e...) (basically they are not de jure, but they would have a hard time to actually enforce this, if it is trivially).

actually the lawyer did make a strange assumption..

well there would still be a problem if he ever want to travel outside the eu where somebody could actually claim the infrigdement.

(Edit: in germany where I live there were patent processes about that matter in ~2000 and the federal court ruled in favor of the patent, however after/at the end of 2000 they basically always rejected them.)

The patentability of software has been significantly broadened since then in Germany, just look for example at the cases Dynamische Dokumentengenerierung and Routenplanung.

That’s more a case of bullshit IP Lawyers than Shazam being a problem.

Shazam is a feature not a product: index the Fourier Transform of all songs.

It's surprisingly easy to do. I know a company that has a bank of servers listening to streaming radio stations all day and night, fingerprinting the songs and taking the track and artist names from the stream to create an in-house Shazam.

I bet the stream operators paying the bandwidth bills don't appreciate that too much.

What does this company need an "in-house Shazam" for?

Presumably he's talking about Mediabase, or Meltwater, or something along those lines.

Just out of curiosity what need do they have for in-house Shazam?

Crawl public facebook videos, automatically figure out what they were watching/listening to in the background, and correlate that with their public demographic information.

I also happen to know the company you’re talking about. However, what they’re doing is way more complicated than a simple Fourier transform, it’s not easy to do at all.

Must be a different company, then.

Would love to hear more about this and what is complicated and the type of problem they are solving. I have little experience with audio.

http://coding-geek.com/how-shazam-works/

It's your lucky day :)

This is really great, thanks for sharing!

Radio stations use this kind of technology to keep track of the amount commercial content is played which gives then gives them a indication on royalties they need to pay.

My company has shopped around for a 'shazam library' to integrate to our product.

We tried a dozen of these before finding one that was actually working reliably enough.

There's an app as well as their huge database that the algorithm wouldn't work without.

it’s just a button. and in a perfect world I wouldn’t even need a button

Sure. Search, Buy, Publish, Analyze, Like are also just buttons.

But there are tens of thousands of the best developers and billions in investment to make those buttons work.

what is your point?

saying the algorithm "wouldn't work" without an app is like saying my door doesn't work without a doorknob.

OP made a point: Shazam is not magic, and people have the opportunity to compete or DIY. to me, it seems simple/contrarian/not helpful to respond with "they have an app too"

The point is that saying Shazam is just a button ignores the huge amount of effort that sits behind it. Not just the technology but more importantly the sales and marketing to get to the number of users they have.

Amazon or Youtube are not magic either. But good luck getting to that same scale without significant effort.

and saying "they have an app" is ignoring OP's actual point, which is all i am trying to defend. no one is calling into question the merit it's taken to build Shazam as a company.

how do i find myself defending the most ridiculous shit here?... like an algorithm can't work without a UI.

> guy 1: "index the Fourier Transform of all songs"

> guy 2: "[don't forget about] their huge database[!]"

how is this not contrarian? biz guy spotted? the dude straight up fucking said to build a database of "ALL SONGS". if you think that's simple you're either not thinking hard enough or you have no idea what he's talking about.

> saying Shazam is just a button

Nobody said that.

colordrops was claiming that the app itself was important, on top of the backend effort.

And it's not. The app is trivial.

Not sure why you are downvoted, it is true.

Execution is everything and I have found that the ondevice index shipping with pixel devices displaying the title of the currently playing song on the lockscreen was such a better implementation than having to hurry up and remember where the shazam app is, open it, and try to identify the song (optionally having to try several times and store the sample for later when I have more network).

> (optionally having to try several times and store the sample for later when I have more network).

Weird you brought that up since in the pixel implementation you'd just lose the song forever.

Well, I am trying to stay impartial :) .

While I think it is the best execution so far, it is not perfect.

the reason i am being downvoted is because hacker news is fucking garbage now. too many insecure, underqualified jackasses looking for a reason to argue.

Google Search is a feature not a product: index the content of all web pages.

So not sure your statement makes much sense. When you have that much customer data then it's absolutely a product.

Google search is more than just indexing the content of all web pages though. It's also getting people to the result they're searching for which is significantly more complex.

That said, it's still a feature which is why Google makes it's money off of advertising instead. That's the real Google product in relation to their search feature.

Google Search is not a feature. It's a product. They have product owners, product managers, product roadmaps etc and it's fundamental to what Google is as a company. They themselves call it a product: https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/products/

And we can play this game all day if you like. By your ridiculous logic: Spotify, Facebook, WhatsApp, Amazon, Youtube are all just features.

Sure, there's a complexity scale where we arbitrarily consider something a "product" instead of a "feature". In fact the scale can slide as technology improves. Something that was previously complicated enough to consider a product may now be trivial enough to become a feature.

> Something that was previously complicated enough to consider a product may now be trivial enough to become a feature.

Mp3 players for example.

If you can point to any blog post that shows how one would implement Shazam, I'd love to read it.

I read somewhere that the Pixel 2's on-device index of 10,000 popular songs was only ~60MB. That blew my mind.

the original paper is quite readable: https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf

shazam's value is obviously in how it scaled this method to millions of users and songs but implementing it for yourself on a limited catalog of songs is a couple days of work once you have the theory. in fact this was a lab project for the intro signal processing class at berkeley that i ta'd.

Thanks for the link. I thought these things involved a lot of markov models and gaussian functions but this is mostly just some pretty slick engineering. The 1000x search speed seems very good.

I can imagine that at the shazam's scale it's just a completely different ball game.

Check out this article that was on HN before:

http://royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/06/creating-shazam-in-java/

A few others have posted references. We did it as a lab in my undergrad signal processing class. Theory is simple: transform time into frequency domain and you have a fingerprint of the song. I guess the value is in the execution, a la Shazam.

Transform from time into frequency domain and you have the Fourier transform of the song, not a fingerprint. Fingerprinting is a lot more involved than that.

Well, it's still not difficult. You just need a good bucket size for the FFT, some filtering, and a hash function. Voila.

So now you’ve fingerprinted an entire song. How do you go about matching that to the 7 seconds of music and loud background noise I actually present you with?

No idea. I'm sure that's where it gets challenging.

Off the top of my head: lots more noise analysis and reduction (ML?) + partial spectrum matching (some kind of common tones/beat fingerprinting?).

But I still stand by my response to the original comment.

http://coding-geek.com/how-shazam-works/

Search for “python fingerprinting dejavu”. The article linked in the GitHub repo is a must read.

That's ok. Apple is probably just buying it for there team of devs., right? The app./technology is just a bonus.

Did Shazam do any product innovation for a while now? They may not have many developers left, just running what they have?

Linkedin shows at least a few software engineers currently employed.

I was looking for a way to see the lyrics of a song on Spotify. The official Spotify help page recommended using SoundHound instead for lyrics. SoundHound can listen to the music and show you the lyrics in real time line by line. That was pretty cool. I wonder how Shazam and SoundHound differ and how they make money.

Plug here: I used to work for SoundHound. They just have more sophisticated deep learning going on (the cofounders wrote the original papers on deep learning back at standford). SoundHound and Shazaam are similar on the surface, but its all the tech underneath that's different.

Checkout Hound/Houndify: www.houndify.com

SoundHound truly is the most innovative company I have worked at so far, and their tech is the very best I've seen, and I've worked at quite a few tech shops by now. Their partnership with Nvidia is awesome, and I can't wait to see their work come to fruition.

what is the bigger picture here with Apple's media intentions? Bought Pop Up Archive (podcast tech), Shazam, hires a top TV exec, and that's only just this week. Is Netflix on the radar?

Apple's core competency: sell flat computers.

Anything that brings you deeper into that ecosystem, feeding the likelihood of buying another flat computer, is fair & likely game for Apple to buy or compete with. Shazam: you hear a song, use phone to recognize it[1], download album from Apple Music, ... you're a little more likely to stay within the iOS ecosystem and buy another iPhone.

[1] - Recently I stopped at a traffic light; cheap chopped car pulls up with music blaring hard edgy electronica. Something sounded interesting about it. Yank out iPhone, run Shazam, identify song before car drives off. Download album which is about...software engineering?!

> Download album which is about...software engineering?

The traffic jams in your city are 83% more awesome than the ones in my city.

Well, don’t leave us hanging, what was the album? :)

"Brute Force" by The Algorithm: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/brute-force/1083396755 reply

See, I'd add digital music to the list of apples core competency, while they haven't stayed as relevant since streaming took off, you could make the argument that the initial success of the iphone could have been attributed to the fact that tons of people were locked into their music ecosystem via ipods, and the iphone was the only way to move said music to a phone.

Also note that apples services revenue, of which music is a part of, is large enough on its own to be a fortune 100 company.

Was it "The Algorithm"? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDS9gmdHtB8) I really like "Pointers" from this album.

Bingo! "Brute Force" by The Algorithm: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/brute-force/1083396755

The integration via Siri is fantastic. Instead of opening the Shazam app, you just ask Siri. In fact, there is little reason to have the app around if Apple buys them. Just make the integration native.

- Hey Siri, find this song.

* It's "Just Jammin" from "Grammatik"

- Please save it

* Done!

It appears that what you wish for is already a feature on iOS, Android, and Windows:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/identify-song-cortana-windows-1...

Side note: WinPhones had music recognition integrated since 2014 at least, but nobody seemed to notice or care.

Sony Ericsson feature phones apparently had the feature since 2006(!) http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20060523005400/en/Grac...

And it worked surprisingly well.

That's it. In face, I've not used Shazam often because it's really bothering to open Shazam when I curious about the song I listen. But if it's in Siri, the game is totally different.

If you install the Shazam app, it is integrated into Siri. It just displays that the result come from Shazam.

What about in quiet/work scenarios? I hate speaking out loud when I want to do things with my phone. This is why I never ever use Siri.

Isn't there already music playing? You're not in a quiet scenario anymore.

If there's any possibility of somebody (e.g. a barista) overhearing me asking my phone to identify a song, I won't do it. Perhaps I'm excessively bashful, but I would find it embarrassing.

they will probably hardwire it to iTunes which i loathe

The Shazam app gives you a place to go back to if you want to see which songs you've recently discovered. It also works offline - it will look up songs when you open the app later. Not to mention that some people don't enjoy talking to their phones.

I hope they keep the app around...

>>>Notably, though, both of the numbers we’ve heard are lower than the $1.02 billion (according to PitchBook) post-money valuation the company had in its last funding round, in 2015.

What happens here in terms of payouts? Who gets screwed and who comes out ahead, assuming this turns out to be true?

Well first off, the employees for sure. Then it just comes down to which investor got better terms as to who gets screwed the least.

Same as if the purchase price were more than the valuation: whoever had the least negotiation power when they purchased shares.

Edit: maybe nobody gets screwed, except in that they may have expected a bigger return. The sale numbers quoted are both more than the investment total reported.

Basically it's who you'd think. Some investors will get their money back, some will get a bit more than others. The founders will be fine, but probably more due to their role than their stock.

Common stock will probably be worth $0, and the employees Apple wants to keep will get a new stock vesting schedule for Apple stock.

I switched from Shazam to SoundHound a long time ago like many others pointed out, SoundHound is just a better product. But geeze, money talks. With Apple's backing, how does SoundHound compete? Perhaps Google/Amazon should snatch up SoundHound to keep that competition going.

Does Google need better tech? I've personally not extensively tested these services (I'd actually love to see a thorough comparison of a big variety of songs), but I get the impression that Google already has a pretty good tech in place for doing this.

SoundHound has a number of beefy corporate partnerships already. They have a very intelligently designed API around their deep learning models that 3rd parties are using in their own in-house voice/music products (www.houndify.com).

I am curious what their end-goal is though. I think they can likely stand on their own if they play their cards right.

I heard the Soundhound search tech under the hood was much better... but I guess Shazam has the mindshare.

in my experience a/b testing shazam just has a way, way bigger database. It would easily identify really obscure stuff like 1970s Arabic psych rock or disco even if it wasn't even available in US online stores, and wasn't ever sold here. Same goes for gracenote, and the other systems that tried the same shtick

the database is the golden goose here, not the algorithm. it's similar to what made grooveshark more fun than spotify

But then Apple already Has the Data, Apple Music and iTunes Store.

This is the Tech vs Data question, it seems people value Data a lot more.

You underestimate the world of music that isn't available via iTunes, Apple Music or Spotify. It's huge. While Shazam is far from perfect for obscure music, it surprised me at times and iTunes or streaming services aren't even close.

I always thought Spotify should buy Shazam. This article explains why they haven't: "... the $1.02 billion post-money valuation [Shazam] had in its last funding round, in 2015."

Spotify bought The Echo Nest.

And killed the public API :(

Seemed likely since around iOS 6 or 7 they debuted Siri's music recognition feature which was powered by Shazam.

When I saw the headline, my first thought was "didn't they do that years ago?"

Siri can already recognize a song, and apparently this uses licensed Shazam technology. But I never want to use that, and instead use Shazam, because I don't want to talk to my phone in public.

I'm afraid Apple will kill the app and just want me to use Siri.

You can turn on write to Siri in the options

As an example, say you own a single share in Shazam, are there any ways to figure what that one single share could be worth? - Assuming Shazam is bought for $100 Million.

If you own the share (exercised the option to buy it, were granted a share, what-have-you), you'll get a letter once the deal is finalized. If they were bought for $100m, you'll likely get a letter saying that your share is worth $0.

Ok thank you for explaining! Curious about the $0 bit though

Depends on the deal, and how many shares of Shazam has been issued. If its a straight up 100 mill deal, and there are 1 mill shares, and you have 1 stock, well you get 100 usd. But the deal might be structured way more advanced, or Shazam might have a lot of debt etc.

I like Shazam. I hope Apple doesn't break it.

As long as you have an iPhone I'm sure it will work just fine (via siri) ;)

I wonder if they'll drop Android support.

There's an Apple Music for Android...

...making the transition to iOS that much easier.

Sounds like you can criticize them if they don't support Android and criticize them if they do support Android.

that has an implicit assumption that apple music on android is a nice app. spoiler: it isn't. it hardly works. it will often sputter and think and try to play a song, as if there is a bad internet connection, EVEN when i have the song downloaded locally. and apple often tweaks the UI where it is musical chairs with common actions.

Did you ever try it? This app works so terribly on Android (really, one of the worst apps I've ever used) that I just assume Apple makes it bad on purpose to somehow make naive people believe Android is somehow worse.

Glad to hear the product manager for iTunes for Windows is still employed by Apple...

I just thought about quite an ironic situation. A new-hire at Apple starts their first day in a software dev position for desktop applications. They're very excited to be creating consumer Apple products. The new-hire is introduced to their team.

New-hire: What are we working on?

Supervisor: iTunes for Windows.

Implying iTunes for Windows is still being worked on. That's a good one.

It’s a sad thing when the product being dead would be the upgrade you hope for. I’m referring to the Mac version though.

I mean it can’t work worse than Google Apps do on iOS (so bad that the web versions are usually better... until they cripple those and funnel you to the apps, like they do for Sheets).

I hope the leaders of Apple are smarter than that. Shazam is a great marketing channel.

Does anyone else have better success with SoundHound? I feel like their product is much better.

BBC quotes $400 million amount.

Truth in headlines:

Apple is close to to acquishuttering Shazam, say friends of Shazam founders to shake the bushes for a bidding war.

The built-in song recognition in the Pixel 2, has played wonders for Shazam's money tunes.

Does it feel like the second gilded age to anyone else?

what do you mean?

Massive consolidation of major companies and rampant inequality.

Basically, whaaaa...?

Too bad, that movie with Shaq was awful.

I thought most companies were moving towards NN for this. Doesn't Shazam rely on a ton of audio processing and not NNs? Seems like a backward move.

The data set could be really useful.

Apple has rather good music data, too.

I'm assuming they just want one more icon that leads to Apple Music and not to Spotify

Their processing works perfectly - why would you need an NN?

NN would be more useful maybe for "recognize this song by me humming it, da-na-na'ing its main riffs, or badly singing a few words".

Yeah that's true. I would hope they would make that a different function though. Google uses NNs for the android keyboard autocorrect now and it will incorrectly change correctly spelled words that I wrote 3 words back because it decided I wanted to write a more "likely" sentence. It replaced "worry about that" with "sorry about that". The shotgun approach of NNs in certain scenarios is infuriatingly frustrating. Sometimes an exact match is preferable to a probabilistic method.

I don't know if you know, but NNs are better than anything at everything. /s

NN isn’t a magic bullet. You still need data, inputs, and users.

Branding is nice too.

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