Apple announced plans to buy popular music-identification service Shazam in December of last year and today they have announced they have finally brought the deal to a close. This will hopefully lead to a deeper integration with Apple Music and Siri in the future. Currently when you identify a song through Siri you can only play the song via Apple Music which is kind of useless when the song has to already be playing to identify it. Shazam however offers the ability to stream it, buy it, view lyrics and learn about the artist.
Apple have also committed to removing ads from the Shazam app and making the ad-free Shazam Encore experience available to everyone. They also highlighted the close relationship they have had with the country with it being one of the first apps available on the App Store when it launched and growing to have over 20 million people using the app every day. I can see why an app used that much is well worth the $400 million dollars Apple spent on it.
Apple
“Apple and Shazam have a long history together. Shazam was one of the first apps available when we launched the App Store and has become a favourite app for music fans everywhere,” said Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music. “With a shared love of music and innovation, we are thrilled to bring our teams together to provide users even more great ways to discover, experience and enjoy music.”
All that is left to be seen is if Shazam will drop integration with Spotify and Deezer and only start promoting Apple Music in the app. We also could see the app disappear altogether and be rolled into Apple Music but that seems unlikely. And Android users shouldn’t be worried about the app disappearing since Apple has become very open to having apps on the Google Play Store recently with Apple Music being installed over 10 million times on the service. Let us know what you think in the comments below, do you use Shazam? Do you also get annoyed by those little popups in commercials asking you to Shazam the song for more information? We would love to hear from you!