Shazam (service)
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| Privately held company | |
| Founded | 1999 United States |
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| Headquarters | London, England, U.K. |
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Number of locations
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7 offices (2014) |
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Area served
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Worldwide |
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Key people
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| Products | Apps |
| Website | www |
Shazam is an app for Macs, PCs and smartphones, best known for its music identification capabilities that has expanded to integrations with cinema, advertising, TV and retail environments. Shazam Entertainment Limited was founded in 1999 by Chris Barton, Philip Inghelbrecht, Avery Wang, and Dhiraj Mukherjee.
Shazam uses a smartphone or computer's built-in microphone to gather a brief sample of audio being played. It creates an acoustic fingerprint based on the sample and compares it against a central database for a match. 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, YouTube, or Groove Music. In December 2013, Shazam was one of the top ten most popular apps in the world, according to its CEO. The Shazam app has more than 100 million monthly active users and has been used on more than 500 million mobile devices, as of August 2014. In October 2014, Shazam announced its technology has been used to identify 15 billion songs. In October 2016, Shazam announced its mobile apps have been downloaded more than 1 billion times, and users have performed more than 30 billion "Shazams" since launch.
Shazam offers two types of applications: a free app simply called Shazam, and a paid app called Shazam Encore. In September 2012, the service was expanded to enable TV users in the US to identify featured music, access cast information, and get links to show information online, as well as added social networking capabilities.
In February 2014, Shazam announced a redesign of the app, which included a new look and additional features, including lyric-viewing options, access to music videos and related videos, unique recommendations, improved biographies and discographies, and additional functionality for use with TV shows. The update also featured a News Feed and Auto-Shazam, a feature introduced in December 2013, which runs in the background of users’ mobile devices to automatically identify media.
In July 2014, Shazam announced the launch of Shazam for Mac, a desktop version of the app, which when enabled, runs in the background and automatically recognizes any song played on or near the computer, including songs playing in the background of TV shows or YouTube videos. Apple’s launch of iOS 8 in September 2014 came with the seamless integration of Shazam into Apple’s intelligent personal assistant Siri function.
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