I recreated Shazam's algorithm with Go [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
tangent: I'm also thinking about some fast way to search text algo maybe related to Spotify damn that was a long time ago read that article
There were questions as to the validity of the threats their lawyers used, but even a bulletproof case is a costly endeavor when going up against the scale of companies.
PFFFT that's the sound of Youtube's lawyers spitting out their coffee and sprinting back to their desks
How Shazam Works (2003) [pdf] (117 points, 11 months ago, 29 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40029036 - there's a lot of links to past Shazam stories in comments
Hmm they did seem to have gotten some more customers after I left but the website is all glitchy now so I guess it's abandoned.
Shazam can take only a tiny snippet, and can guess quite accurately just from that snippet. By comparison to AcoustID, which is also a song database (with an entirely different purpose) we can say that the "main ingredient" is Shazam's system for identifying songs from short snippets.