Shazam is an audio recognition app that identifies songs from short music clips, with over 100 million monthly users and the ability to identify 15 billion songs. Founded in 1999 by Chris Barton and Avery Wang, Shazam uses fingerprinting technology as its "secret sauce" to quickly and accurately identify songs. While competitors like Gracenote and Soundhound also use fingerprinting, Shazam has positioned itself as faster, more accurate, and with a larger user base. The company has a valuation of around $1 billion despite making a loss of €2 million in 2013, and sees opportunities in real-time TV identification, advertising integrations, and emerging technologies like image recognition and iBeacon proximity marketing.

1. Matt Kliemann
mtkliema

2. Product
identify audio
100 unique
monthly users
15 billion song
identifications

3. Financial
Valuation ~ $1 billion
Revenue (2013) ~ €31 million How?
Costs (2013) ~ €33 million
Profit (2013) ~ (€2 million)

4. History
Inghelbrecht and Barton - visionaries
Avery Wang - technical - Stanford PhD

5. Essence “Almost every company starts off as a
feature or product.” - Chris Barton

6. Secret Sauce I - fingerprinting

7. Secret Sauce II - score & matching

8. What’s Hot
real time TV show identification
TV Advertising
Nvidia CUDA
Siri Integration

9. Competition
Gracenote - used by auto, musiXmatch, MTV
Soundhound - allows “query by humming”
Competitor characteristics:
● both offer fingerprinting
● slower
● less accurate with noise
● smaller userbase
● less advertising integration

10. Future Prediction - “Shazamed”
More Advertising:
Image Recognition advertising
-bad idea - Amazon Fire Phone
iBeacon advertising
-good idea - large userbase useful
POSITIVE OUTLOOK