Shazam's music-recognition app has helped millions of app users answer the question, "What song is this?" Rather than typing snippets of lyrics into Google, just hold up your phone to the speakers and within seconds, Shazam tells you what's playing.
In recent years, however, Shazam has shifted from music discovery to what Shazam CEO Andrew Fisher calls "media discovery." The service can now Shazam TV shows and accompanying TV commercials (What song is that American Idol contestant singing? How about a discount for Shazaming a particular ad?). "We're seeing success in moving into a broader media discovery experience," according to Fisher.
PCMag spoke to Fisher recently, who talked about embracing this new model, whether Shazam would start its own music service, and more.
PCMag: How did Shazam get started?
Andrew Fisher: There were four founders of the company, three of which came up with the idea to point a cell phone at a piece of music and for it to identify the name of the song. And, they went to a number of universities in North America and investigated whether somebody could build a technology that would work in real-world environments, meaning being in a bar or restaurant or nightclub, where there was background noise. The technology was actually invented within Stanford University by Dr. Avery Wang and Prof. Julius Smith, [but] they weren't able to secure funding in North America, so they raised angel investment in the U.K. And that's how the company ended up incorporating and actually launching in the U.K. Today, Shazam has 200 million users in over 200 countries worldwide, and every day we identify over 7.5 million peoples' content.
PCMag: Can you talk a bit about the technology involved with Shazam?
Andrew Fisher: The way we make a match on a piece of music is we look at the various sound waves that are created either by the vocal performance or the instrument. And if you can imagine a piece of music with a vocalist and queue instruments, there will be three sound waves going up and down, and we take a moment in time – we take a slice of that song – and we plot the sound waves and we actually plot the spatial difference between the peaks and the troughs in the music in the sounds waves. And that creates what we call a pattern or a fingerprint. And, what we do is, we take a sample of that music and create a fingerprint based on the sample of what we're listening to and we match it against our database that we've created already. It's pattern matching. So, every performance is unique and they'll be small, total differences between the same artist performing the same song but in two different recording studios. We can actually make an exact match on the song that someone is listening to and then bring that back to them so they can actually purchase that exact performance.
PCMag: How did you build the database?
Andrew Fisher: When we first launched the service, there was not digitized catalogue of music in the U.K., so we actually worked with Entertainment U.K., which owned Woolworth and we had teams of people working 24-7 actually taking physical, vinyl records and encoding them – actually putting them into a digitized format and putting them into a database, as well as creating the database of track names and artist names they'd match against that music. And that was a strategic partnership that we had with Entertainment U.K. at the time, and that actually created the first digitized database of music in the U.K. And that was 1.6 million songs. Today, we've got over 16 million tracks on the database, and that's continuing to grow very rapidly as we expand internationally.
PCMag: Lately, Shazam has moved from just music recognition to TV shows and ads. Can you talk a bit about that evolution?
Andrew Fisher: For a period of years, we've looked at audio recognition as a technology that can be used in direct-response marketing. And so whilst we were focusing on building our business through music, because it's a mass-market category and it's helped to build this global audience of a few 100 million people, we felt ready in 2010 to launch this in the context of TV advertising. Our first partner was actually Levis Dockers and we launched at the Super Bowl in February 2010, where people could Shazam the Dockers advert and Dockers gave away 5,000 pairs of chinos.
That was a very successful launch for us, and it created a lot of media attention. So we had the broadcast community approach us and ask if we'd thought of enabling people to interact with TV shows. We actually got started with NBC Universal on the SyFy Network with our first show and today we work with all the major broadcasters in North America and various television shows. The one that's highest profile for us is American Idol. So the experience is you can Shazam the show and then on your mobile phone or on your iPad or netbook, you can actually have an interactive experience with the show. For example, you can see which artist is performing, you can see their Twitter feed, you can find the original recording, you can go deeper into diary information or exclusive information behind the scenes or even the judges' deliberations. So there are a number of different experiences that we've built for the TV format. The important thing is that broadcasters have been putting the Shazam logo on screens to inform people that they can actually use Shazam with the television show itself and have an interactive experience.
PCMag: Is there a particular platform that's most popular among Shazam users?
Andrew Fisher: One of the things that differentiates us as a company is that we've been in the market now for nine years, and so our heritage is on mobile. So we support every major mobile platform and actually, what we saw when we launched on the iPhone was success across all the other platforms as well. Each week we acquire 1.5 million new users to Shazam and we've seen that consistently week after week over the past 18 months. And whilst 200 million people sound like a lot, there are 6 billion phones in the world, so there's still a significant opportunity to attract new users to Shazam. So we don't see that being focused on platforms like iOS and Android – we also see that coming from platforms like Microsoft, Symbian, Java, Brew, and RIM as well. And we're continuing to support those platforms, as our mission is to become as ubiquitous as we can.
Continue Reading: Tackling Rivals and Unsigned Artists>
PCMag: What was the goal of the Shazam Music Player that launched in January?
Andrew Fisher: One of the things that we are very aware of is that in spite of the success that we've had on TV, most people know us as a music discovery service, so we want to continue to invest in expanding and developing the service for our users. So the player app itself was taking some of the new innovation, particularly around lyrics. [It's] a lyrics product where you can start mid-way through a song and we will actually bring the lyrics onto the screen at that point in the song. You don't have to start at the beginning. You can see lyrics at any time that are synchronized to the song, [as well as] other value-added services – like ticketing, biographies, and sharing across the social networks. And that's been very successful, particularly on the lyrics functionality, we've had very popular reviews on the app stores in terms of peoples' feedback.
PCMag: Were lyrics a requested feature?
Andrew Fisher: No, one of the things that we are very considerate of is that people describe Shazam as a magical experience, so when we think of extending our product offerings and the service, we're always looking at bringing a popular feature to market in a very magical way. Lyrics have consistently been one of the top search terms on Internet search engines for a period of years, and so we know it's very popular content. What we wanted to do was bring our very own Shazam perspective to that experience and that's why we wanted to create a synchronized experience in real-time around what you're listening to. So what we actually did was we found some technology in the market and we actually bought the company and then we spent six months building the service before we launched it.
PCMag: How does Shazam differentiate itself from rivals?
Andrew Fisher: On a number of fronts. The first one is performance. We just launched about a month ago the world's fastest recognition experience. It's below one second. There's no other service in the world that comes close to the one-second experience. And at the end of the day this is about making it as convenient and efficient as possible to find a piece of content, whether it's music or a TV show or another piece of content, in the shortest possible timeframe, and to be able to go on and engage and interact with that content. So staying very conscious of the full user experience and why people would use Shazam, we continue to invest very heavily to keep ourselves ahead of our competitors.
One of the other key differentiators here is our music database and music sourcing. We work very, very hard on particularly the unsigned music across 200 countries around the world. So for instance, there's a new dance track that's being played in a nightclub in Chile or Taiwan or Uruguay. And it's a popular nightclub that might have 2,000 people in the audience, that track could get played five times during a set over the course of an evening and may have up to 200 people Shazam each performance of that track. So that could be 1,000 people … who get a failed result. So we have to work very hard to make sure we have that undiscovered, unsigned music that's being played in public places on our database and we're very successful at doing that. And then what we then do is we share that information with the music industry, typically the record labels, who will then look at the Shazam chart each week with a view to signing new acts. Or alternatively they'll put more marketing budget behind more acts who are going up the charts because that's a pre-cursor to getting into the Billboard Top 40 or making it to number one. So we're a keen industry influencer in that respect.
And none of our competitors have the breadth of catalogue sourcing that we do on the unsigned acts. They would typically go to a label where the act has already been signed and because we have so many people using the service around the world, we have to solve that in making sure we have the catalogue available to people.
PCMag: How do you find these unsigned acts? Shazam employees or submissions?
Andrew Fisher: It's both. As we've become better known, a lot of artists will submit their content to us. But we also have specialists in territories who speak the local language. And they can really understand the local trends that are happening and the underground trends around music. And they may even be permanent employees of Shazam or they may be part-time employees who are professional DJs or artist managers, who have a very strong affinity for what's happening in the music scene. And therefore, they can bring insight into the latest trends and emerging bands.
PCMag: How has the online music space changed since Shazam first started?
Andrew Fisher: Shazam wouldn't be here without the digitization of content and so if you look at the macro factors that have driven the success of the company, we've been very influenced by the behavior of consuming digital content. iTunes would be a great example; iTunes didn't exist when Shazam started. That's helped people not just find out the name of a track but go on to purchase the track and use Shazam as the most-convenient way of buying music.
The adoption of devices like smartphones have yielded a better user experience and have music players in them. Adoption of unlimited data tariffs; you don't buy a piece of music for a pound and it costs you 3 pounds in data charges to download it over a data network. And pricing parity; historically it was the case that it was more expensive to buy music using your mobile phone than it was to go to an Internet store and buy it there. And today you have that pricing parity on stores like iTunes and Amazon MP3. So those four factors together have really influenced people changing their behavior.
What we do is, we enable people to purchase music at the point of inspiration. That's why we call ourselves as the "made for mobile" experience because mobile gives you the ability to interact with music at the point of inspiration wherever you are. We are now selling over $100 million worth of music every year through our service and we're one of the biggest re-sellers of iTunes worldwide for that reason.
PCMag: What about the impact of social networks?
Andrew Fisher: They're really important because music and TV and any form of entertainment is a social medium and social phenomenon in that people want to talk about the TV show they've just seen or the song that they've just discovered. And so, integrating Facebook and Twitter to us is very important to our users because it gives them a way to communicate that they've just Shazamed the Pepsi advert or the Cadbury advert during Britain's Got Talent final, so other people can then see that brand and participate with the promotion themselves. So it really adds virality and scale to not just the people who are Shazaming, but their friends on the social networks as well.
PCMag: Have you ever considered launching your own music service?
Andrew Fisher: We have thought about what would make the most sense and where we'd want to put our resources, but we don't have any current plans to do that. We just think that those types of businesses really succeed at scale and so, there are some established brands that provide very good services that are partners of ours. And it's not a business that we think is best served by ourselves. We really want to focus on discovery and what we describe as media engagement. We think this is a new and emerging category where we can … make it as easy and convenient as possible for somebody to engage with a piece of content, whether that's music or a TV show or a brand, in the easiest and most frictionless way possible. And for us, that's a significant category because television advertising alone is worth over $300 billion each year and recorded music is worth about $10 billion. And nobody is really driving or has succeeded in driving engagement into that traditional media. It's a very linear, one-directional experience. And the results we've seen so far are very, very encouraging. We had over 1 million people Shazam the ads this year at the Super Bowl. And we're seeing not only high interaction rates but high activity post-tag. [Meaning], once somebody's actually Shazamed that piece of content, we have a 64 percent click-through rate on average that people spend more time with the brand or broadcaster on their content itself. So by making it easier for people to interact, we're seeing that people are very willing to spend time.
PCMag: What are you favorite gadgets?
Andrew Fisher: I'm just looking at my desk and seeing my two MiFi units. So the mobile Wi-Fi units, I have a great love for those in terms of being able to provide better bandwidth access on-the-go across all the wireless devices that I own. And I find those indispensable, which is why I've got two of them right now. And I think that's a tremendous innovation, maybe not quite so obvious as a tablet or a new cell phone, but that is one thing that I couldn't live without.
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