Popular Apple-owned music discovery app and service Shazam is celebrating a new milestone today, surpassing more than 1 billion Shazams per month and a total of 50 billion tags since the app was first launched.
"Shazam is synonymous with magic," said Oliver Schusser, Apple's vice president of Apple Music and Beats, "both for the fans getting a song recognition almost instantly, and for the artists being discovered. With 1 billion recognitions a month, Shazam is one of the most popular music apps in the world. Today's milestones show not only people's love for Shazam, but also the ever-growing appetite for music discovery around the world."
Shazam launched as a text message service in 2002, but started seeing significant growth when the App Store launched in 2008, and with it, the Shazam app.
Shazam hit its first billion tags at the 10 year mark, but now less than 10 years after that, Shazam has successfully matched more than 50 billion tags with 51 million songs. The first Shazam result ever was "Jeepster" by T. Rex, and that result was delivered over a text message.
The 50 billionth milestone Shazamed song was Evangeline's Mandopop song "框不住的愛 (不插電版)," and Tone and I's "Dance Monkey" continues to be the most Shazamed track of all time.
Shazam is built right into Apple devices so you can ask Siri to identify a song, or you can access music recognition functionality through the Control Center on iPhone and iPad. There's also a Shazam app available from the App Store.
Going forward, Apple is making a ShazamKit feature available to developers, allowing third-party apps to integrate Shazam's audio recognition technology into their apps. Apps will be able to match music to Shazam's song catalog, but it can also be used to match any prerecorded audio to custom results. Apple plans to release ShazamKit later this year.
