Shazam Has 50 Million Users and Secures Investment From KPCB | Hacker News Reader

Shazam Has 50 Million Users and Secures Investment From KPCB

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11 pointsphyscab13 comments

i used to work for the company that now owns the music recognition algorithm that shazam is using. it's staggering how much hardware it takes to make this stuff work. they have a database of millions of songs, all of which must be kept in ram at all times, to make recognitions fast. it requires hundreds of linux servers.

despite my preference for stuff i've actually worked on, i think the midomi app works just as well or better. but they were late to the party, so they're having trouble getting the eyeballs.

Shazam is the song identification app on the iPhone. The real question is whether they're actually making money off of their iTunes referrals; KPCB seems to think/know so.

I wonder how they are calculating users... The iPhone app has 10m downloads, hard to believe that the other platforms (BlackBerry, Android, etc) account for more than 80% of their users.

Goes to show that: urgent need + simple solution = home run.

If you consider home run to be a large round of capital.

You seriously ought to reconsider your definition of a home run.

I think if you build a product that 50 million people love, or that 10 million people have downloaded, that would be considered to be a home run. If that isn't, what is?

I've downloaded the Shazam iPhone app -- and have always been disappointed with the results.

When Shazam was featured in an iPhone commercial, I actually tried identifying the exact music in the commercial with Shazam. Couldn't get it to work on multiple tries (replaying the commercial online).

I hope some of those 10 million lookie-loos had better luck than I did.

Sorry you couldn't get it to work. I for one am a very happy lookie-loo.

I remember a couple weeks back I was at a nightclub and thought "damn I really want to know this song" but I didn't want people to see me Shazaming. So I took out my phone, turned on tagging, and dropped it in my pocket waiting for the vibrate. It still got it!

50 million downloads is a great thing and a big deal. But it is not a homerun. Home run almost exclusively refers to a liquidity event: either selling for hundreds of millions or billions or going public.

I guess everyone has different definitions. 50 million users is a pretty tough benchmark to get to, especially in a little over a year. Hell, I'd be happy if there were 1000 happy customers for my apps. But damn if your bar is set on IPO, more power to you.

And of 'urgent need'. Instantly knowing the name of a song is pretty low on the hierarchy of human needs.

Well duh. Urgent not in the sense of subsistence but definitely in the sense of timing. When that kind of thing happens you are usually in a bar, at a party, in the car whatever, and you've got to find a way to somehow write the song down or remember the lyrics for later googling.

I love music so having a good fingerprinting technology at my fingertips is a simple pleasure I'm really thankful for.

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