How Shazam Works (2015)

How Shazam Works (1999)

When they started beta in London there was no mobile data network and no smartphones. You would call up a number while the song was playing and they would send you a text message back. I used to see marketing slides with Shazam as an example use case for 3G rollouts and it truly succeeded.

afaik Shazam is perhaps THE original Mobile App and is certainly one of the only ones to make it this long still in use.

Posting this before reading the article :-

Back in circa July 2016 I was fascinated with both Shazam and Prisma, with the latter being newly launched and being quite the rage on the internet.

I found a paper which described how Prisma worked (believe that was released by the makers themselves), but Shazam remained elusive.

This post should get me upto speed.

PS - kindly correct me if I am grammatically wrong anywhere _ /\ _

How Shazam works has always fascinated me.

does Shazam work on vinyl or cassette? Or does the track have to be digitized to mirror the footprint?

I guess it just does pattern matching for spectrograms with some basic filters for background noises? At least that would be sufficient, IMO.