Shazam And Spotify

Shazam And Spotify Music
Integrate Shazam And Spotify

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Shazam, the world’s leading mobile discovery company, today announced that Spotify, the popular music service, will be integrated across the full range of Shazam’s free and premium Apps for iPhone, iPod touch and Android. As a result, Shazamers will be able to access Spotify directly through a new ‘Play in Spotify’ feature, which will take them directly to Spotify where they can immediately begin listening to the full track that they either tagged or discovered within Shazam from recommendations or the Shazam charts.

Link Spotify to other apps From soundtracking your run with Runkeeper, to seeing what potential matches are listening to on Tinder, Spotify can be integrated with many other awesome apps. Note: Your Spotify account will never be integrated with a third-party app without your explicit permission to do so. Shazam is a mobile app that recognizes music and TV around you. With Shazam, you can discover, explore and share the music and TV you love. The Spotify integration in Shazam gives you the power to: Keep track of your Shazamed songs by automatically adding them to your personal “My Shazam Tracks” playlist in Spotify.

In a world where Shazam's audible tagging app works seamlessly with our favorite on-demand music app Spotify, you won't have to close one app to manually search for a song in another app. Shazam supports two such streaming platforms, Apple Music and Spotify respectively. Apart from that, you can also export the Shazam tags to the YouTube playlist in order to watch the video songs. Since Shazam does not support export to YouTube, we will have to use a third-party website to get the job done.

The new capability will allow users of Shazam and Spotify full playback of tracks via a fully-integrated experience on both the free and premium Shazam Encore Apps on Android and Apple’s iOS – including (SHAZAM) RED. ‘Play in Spotify’ integrates with the Spotify Premium App in the UK, Sweden, Norway, Finland, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

“Integrating Spotify into Shazam’s applications combines music discovery with one of the world’s most popular music streaming services, providing a seamless experience for music fans at the point of inspiration in any location,” says Andrew Fisher, CEO of Shazam. “Spotify is delivering an innovative, high quality experience to music lovers and we’re excited to bring the Spotify service to Shazam.”

'Shazam is a very innovative company in the mobile space, having achieved a massive following around the world and we're excited about the potential of this partnership for new music discovery through Spotify,' says Daniel Ek, CEO, Spotify. 'Now if you hear a great new track you can identify it, listen to it instantly in its entirety and easily add it to your music collection. That's pretty powerful stuff.'

As of today, users of premium Apps Shazam Encore and (SHAZAM) RED will be able to combine their ability to access unlimited tagging with the new ‘Play in Spotify’ feature for an unparalleled and unrestricted mobile music discovery and streaming service.

The Shazam free App, available with five tags per month, will include the same feature later in Q1. The service combines Shazam’s database of more than 10 million tracks, which powers music identification and song and artist recommendations, with Spotify Premium’s mobile App on the iPhone, iPod touch and Android-powered phones, which offers instant access to millions of tracks and playlists.

About Spotify

Spotify is an award-winning music service offering a legal and superior quality alternative to music piracy. Spotify provides instant access to whatever music you want, whenever and wherever you want it, through a simple, clean and quick to use platform via an ad-supported, free-to-the-user service and a paid subscription service. With access to millions of songs through your computer, on your mobile and beyond, Spotify makes it easier than ever to play and share music legally. www.spotify.com

About Shazam Entertainment

For further information about Shazam Entertainment visit www.shazam.com and @ShazamNews

For daily music updates follow the Shazam Blog www.shazamers.com and @Shazam

Shazam® is the world’s leading mobile discovery application - enabling consumers to experience and share content with others across mobile devices and the Internet. Launching eight years ago as the first mobile-specific service to help people discover new music, Shazam has now expanded beyond its music roots to enable viewers to interact with broadcast media and brands, via its Shazam Audio Recognition Advertising (SARA) initiative.

Headquartered in London, UK, Shazam’s services enhance the content discovery strategies of carriers - including AT&T, T-Mobile and Vodafone; broadcasters – including NBC Universal and Fox Broadcasting Company and brands – including Levi’s Dockers and Universal Music.

Shazam is available across multiple platforms such as iPhone, Android, Symbian, Brew, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Java and can be found in more than 200 countries in over 30 languages.

The Shazam Tag Chart, generated by the company’s mobile music recognition service, is constantly referenced by the music industry as a true indicator of market interest in pre-release material and a monitor of the hit potential of a track or artist.

The quality of Shazam’s service has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Mobile Entertainment Award for Best Music Service Provider and Mobile Marketing Association Award for its SARA initiative with Levi’s. Its entrepreneurial drive and business success have Shazam was recently recognised as the Best Management Team by the Sunday Times in its Tech Track 100 awards 2010, ranked as the top company in The Guardian’s Tech Media Invest Top 100 2010 and Silicon Valley networking and media group AlwaysOn’s 100 Top Private Companies. The company has offices in London, Palo Alto, New York and Seoul.

Since launch, Shazam has attracted funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Acacia Capital and DN Capital.

For more information please visit: www.shazam.com

The Shazam name and symbol are trademarks of Shazam Entertainment Limited.

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Depending who you talk to, Apple’s December 11 purchase of London-based Shazam was either the smartest thing to happen to Siri and Apple Music – or the best excuse, ever, to start listening to SoundHound.

Apple shelled out a reported $400 million for the “name that tune” app, down from a 2015 valuation of $1 billion. The deep discount wasn’t Apple’s only advantage in the sale. They bought Shazam right out from under Snap Inc. and Spotify – companies that were showing interest in purchasing the app for themselves, and who have existing relationships with Shazam. Spotify is also Apple Music’s largest competitor.

So what does this purchase portend? Readers may recall that Apple began integrating Shazam’s song-identification technology into the Siri voice assistant back in 2014, with their rollout of iOS 8. So if not to get their hands on the platform, why else would they be interested? Some analysts suspect it’s to have exclusive control of the service, since other platforms have integrated Shazam into their own products (Snapchat, for example), and Apple might be looking to limit who else shares the technology. Others suggest that with companies like Snap showing interest in a Shazam buyout, the surest way for Apple to guarantee a continued relationship with the music identification app was if they bought it, outright. Since Apple relies on the technology to power Siri’s song identification capabilities, it’s unlikely they wanted to take any risks, were it sold to a third party.

It’s so far unclear what Apple has in mind. Shazam has been a key part of Spotify’s music discovery service, and that feature is one of the reasons Spotify generally wields a monthly 2:1 user acquisition rate over Apple Music. The increasing trend toward streaming versus purchasing has been a bane to both Shazam and Apple Music (it was Apple’s iTunes Store that popularized individual song-buying in the first place, which went hand-in-glove with their iPod devices, back in the day). But if Apple can use Shazam to create a more robust suggestion service for streaming, than they’re in better fighting shape to go up against Spotify.

The fact that Spotify is Apple Music’s most significant competition has some users worried about the future of Shazam’s integration into Spotify. Some predict that Apple will axe it completely, thus cutting Spotify off at the proverbial knees. Another worry is that Apple will do away with the stand-alone app completely, forcing curious users to ask Siri what’s playing, without being able to silently direct the query with their fingertips. Both scenarios seem possible – if a little extreme. Likewise, neither is perfect and both carry ramifications that could affect existing relationships with Apple as much as they might create new ones. In the event Apple guts Shazam from Spotify, remember that the music service is Apple’s biggest competition, but not their only competition. Most diehards seem prepared to pivot to Google’s SoundHound before ever agreeing to fall in with Apple Music. And Siri works best in quiet rooms, which immediately kills the functionality if someone needs to convince the voice assistant to name their newly discovered favorite tune in the middle of a crowded bar or pulsing nightclub.

Still others worry that Apple will remove the Shazam app from Android or get rid of its Android support. These outcomes are realistic as well, although SoundHound again becomes a very real wrench in those works. Apple engineering a less-than-enjoyable experience for Android users hardly guarantees that devoted Shazam fans would be lured to Apple via the app; it seems unlikely that frustrated customers would run right into the arms of the company that hijacked their experience. This is especially true when SoundHound is out there, ready and able to offer angry music lovers melodic salve for their digital wounds.

“Those who rule data will rule the entire world.” - Masayoshi Son

What seems to be almost universally assumed is that Apple purchased Shazam for access to their intellectual property and user data. Sure, the timing aligns with the delayed launch of HomePod, implying there’s some last-minute fiddling on the back-end. It certainly sets the stage for a major update to Siri in iOS 12 (it also suggests that Apple has stopped upgrading products in-house, in favor of almost exclusively relying on acquisitions to add functionality). But these little bells and whistles – much like the Spotify speculation – are small potatoes compared to what Apple could do with this new treasure trove of information.

For example, Kif Leswing of Business Insider, points to Shazam’s analytic control center, a “‘dashboard’ — for music industry professionals,” that collects data on what’s being Shazamed. “When someone identifies what a song is through Shazam, that’s a pretty strong signal that it’s catchy, or distinctive. ‘Our data has shown that we can typically predict 33 days in advance what’s going to be at the top of the Billboard Hot 100,’ a Shazam executive said in 2014.” This data broadens the breadth and depth of what Apple has been able to access from their existing platforms. It also, of course, includes mountains of data on Android users that has, heretofore, remained inaccessible to them.

And Now For Something Completely Different

But these are just the services we know about – and we don’t know what we don’t know. Just as Apple’s acquisition of PrimeSense was more about accessing the visual technology to create FaceID than it was about trying to turn AppleTV into an Xbox rival, maybe the Shazam acquisition is part of a larger strategy, using Shazam’s IP, to create an entirely new product.

So count on a few new bells and whistles from Apple Music, and prepare for Siri to get a juicy, new upgrade – these are simple and almost guaranteed. If you’re a Spotify die-hard or an Android user, you might soon have some tough choices about where to go to stream songs.