Shazam, founded in 1999 by Berkeley students, evolved from a UK service into a global music identification app, leveraging partnerships for database growth and expansion across platforms. Utilizing acoustic fingerprints, Shazam can identify songs from various audio sources, and as of 2012, it houses a database of over 11 million songs. Its services cater to different user needs, including free tagging, recommendations, and contributions to HIV/AIDS programs in Africa.

1. Shazam, Encore Shazam!
Course: MIS
Prof: Christophe Dubois
By: Margarita Lapshina
Daria Chizhova
S

2. Table of Content
S History of Shazam
S Creation
S Early days
S Evolution and partnerships
S How it works?
S Types of Shazam
S Competitors
S Social Communications
S Movie
S Bibliography

3. History of Shazam (I).
Creation
S Was founded in 1999
S By Chris Barton and Philip Inghelbrecht – Berkeley students
S Audio specialist - Avery Wang, a Stanford PhD
S Couldn’t find investors in Silicon Valley -> moved to London, partners
with IDG Ventures. Dhiraj Mukherjee joined
S As of 2012, Wang is the only one of the four to remain as Chief
Scientist

4. History of Shazam (II).
Creation
S Andrew Fisher, the current CEO was hired in 2005 from Infospace
S The first partnership - Entertainment UK, part of Woolworths;
(digitise of music catalogue of 1.5 million songs )
S As the service grew to have a worldwide userbase, it needed to keep
its database up-to-date, which it does by having relationships with
labels globally
S By December 2008, the database had grown to 8 million songs

5. History of Shazam (III).
Early Days
S The service was launched initially in UK in 2002
S Was known as 2580
S Shazam launched in the US on the AT&T Wireless network in 2004 in a
joint offering with Musicphone
S The service was free at launch with AT&T saying that it would charge
USD0.99 for each use in future
S In 2006, users were charged £0.60 per call or had unlimited use for
£4.50 a month

6. History of Shazam (IV).
Evolution and Partnerships
S Shazam's progress accelerated with the launch of the Apple's App Store
S Shazam launched on the Android platform in October 2008. The Android app
connected to Amazon's MP3 store instead of iTunes
S The app launched on the Windows Mobile app store in October 2009
S
GetJar, an app store for Android, Blackberry and Symbian, added Shazam in
November 2010
S In January 2011, Shazam and Spotify announced a partnership for iOS and
Android
S While Shazam already had Facebook and Twitter share buttons, deeper
Facebook integration was released in March 2011

7. History of Shazam (V)
S Some Milestones Summary

8. How it works? (I)
S The key element that makes
Shazam work are acoustic
fingerprints
S Audio fingerprint is based on a
time-frequency graph called a
spectrogram
S Shazam can identify prerecorded
music broadcast from any
source: radio, television, cinema
or club, provided that the
background noise level is not too
high

9. How it works? (II)
S The user tags a song for 10
seconds and the
application creates an
audio fingerprint
S Database of more than 11
million songs
S If there is no match, it
returns an error

10. Types Of Shazam (I)

11. Types Of Shazam (II)
Shazam
Free
Shazam
RED
Shazam
Encore
• Discover and buy music
• Unlimited tagging
• Lyric Play
• Play in Spotify
• Recommendations
• 20% of the purchase price is
contributed to HIV and AIDS
programs in Africa

12. Competitors

13. Social Communications
S Tag Chart
S Blog
S Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus
S Shazam Sessions
S Interviews

14. Let’s watch a Movie
S http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNNm1vLpszI
S http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF5GO1ztbp0

15. Bibliography
S http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_%28service%29
S http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint
S http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF5GO1ztbp0
S www.shazam.com
S retailtechnologytrends.com