While most users think of Shazam as a handy tool for identifying unfamiliar songs, it offers music executives something far more valuable: an early-detection system for hits.īy studying 20 million searches every day, Shazam can identify which songs are catching on, and where, before just about anybody else. It has also helped set off a revolution in the recording industry. (In the days before smartphones, users would dial a number, play the song through their phones, and then wait for Shazam to send a text with the title and artist.) Since then, it has been downloaded more than 500 million times and used to identify some 30 million songs, making it one of the most popular apps in the world. The trick, he discovered, was to turn a song into a piece of data. But then he made a breakthrough: rather than trying to capture whole songs, he built an algorithm that would create a unique acoustic fingerprint for each track.
No technology existed that could distinguish music from background noise, and cataloging songs note for note would require authorization from the labels. Their idea was to develop a service that could identify any song within a few seconds, using only a cellphone, even in a crowded bar or coffee shop.Īt first, Wang, who had studied audio analysis and was responsible for building the software, feared it might be an impossible task. named Avery Wang co-founded, with a couple of business-school graduates, a tech start-up called Shazam.
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