Shazam

Shazam is a popular mobile application developed by Apple Inc., which provides a service for identifying music, movies, advertising, and television shows, based on a short sample played and using the microphone on the device.

History

Shazam was founded in 1999 by Chris Barton, Philip Inghelbrecht, Avery Wang, and Dhiraj Mukherjee. The application was initially launched in 2002 for use on mobile phones, and was available exclusively in the UK. The service became available worldwide in 2006, and was made available on the iPhone in 2008 with the launch of the App Store.

Functionality

Shazam works by analyzing the captured sound and seeking a match based on an acoustic fingerprint in a database of millions of songs. If it finds a match, it sends information such as the artist, song title, and album back to the user. Some implementations of Shazam incorporate relevant links to services such as iTunes, Spotify, or Google Play Music, where the song can be purchased or streamed.

Impact

Shazam has been downloaded more than 1 billion times and is used over 20 million times each day. It has been praised for its simplicity and effectiveness, and has been described as a "game changer for the music industry".

See also

• SoundHound
• MusicBrainz Picard
• Google Sound Search