Shazam is an app that captures a few seconds of audio and a fingerprint is sent to database of over 11 million songs that extends back to the ?50s. The songs are divided into billions of fingerprints that when tagged provide relative artist info, lyrics, YouTube links, purchase opportunities and more back to the user. Around 150 million people use Shazam to identify music that is playing, with over 300,000 songs a day being sold through the company’s music recognition system. To learn more about Shazam, we caught up with EVP Marketing David Jones for a conversation about a company that he says has “cool technology, very positive brand awareness, a good reputation with users and a solid strategy to build the business.
David Jones
By Michael Parrish
In 2002, Shazam started as dial-in service in the U.K. where people could dial 2580 and hold their phone up to the speaker and then it would text you the name of the song you were listening to. With the advent of smart phones, Shazam’s music recognition technology has helped the company blossom into one of the world’s most recognized mobile consumer brands.
Around 150 million people use Shazam to identify music that is playing. The app captures a few seconds of audio and a fingerprint is sent to database of over 11 million songs that extends back to the ’50s. The songs are divided into billions of fingerprints that when tagged provide relative artist info, lyrics, YouTube links, purchase opportunities and more back to the user.
But Shazam isn’t just for music tagging as the company has extended its reach to television and advertising tagging opportunities as well. Shazam for TV enables customers to tag their favorite shows or commercials to access exclusive content, contests and other information.
Shazam is a privately held company and is growing every day. It is headquartered in London with offices in New York, Chicago, Palo Alto, Los Angeles and Seoul that help the company stay on top of musical trends on a global level.
To learn more about Shazam, we caught up with EVP Marketing David Jones for a conversation. With a background that includes a stint at eBay and as part of the team that helped restart Friendster and build it up to becoming the #1 social network in Asia, Jones was looking for his next challenge. “Shazam was most exciting because it had cool technology, very positive brand awareness, a good reputation with users and a solid strategy to build the business,” explains Jones when asked how he ended up at Shazam. It’s a very fun gig combining entertainment, commerce, social and mobile skills into one position.”
With so much music being released, how do you keep your database current?
We spend a lot of effort making sure our database is up to date with the latest songs to be tagged on the radio, in television shows and in ads. It’s really important to have the latest in the database. We have a music team focused on that and we have deals with all the major labels and indies. We also have a team out there making sure yet-to-be-discovered songs are in our database.
Labels send us music because they want their artists to be discovered since we sell over 300,000 songs a day throughAmazon and iTunes when people tag and buy them. The labels are excited about selling digital music and how we are facilitating that. We also work with music supervisors of television shows and the top deejays before they play their new music sets on the radio. We have a wide variety of ways to make sure we have everything before you might hear it.
How many songs get tagged per day lead to sales?
Globally we have over 4 million tags per day with roughly one-third of those in the United States. About 8 percent of those end up as songs purchased by users, so we sell over 300,000 through our partners. It really is amazing how much music is sold once discovered by Shazamers.
The Encore version of Shazam has some benefits over the free version, such as LyricPlay and promotional opportunities.
Encore is where we introduce a lot of our new features. LyricPlay is an example of that where you Shazam a song anywhere you are and then tilt the screen and see the lyrics played in sync with the external music source like the radio or whatever you just tagged. We spent a lot of time putting that together. We acquired the technology which helps us process songs quickly through the indexing and syncing that needs to happen. We spent quite a bit of time folding that into the product and building the database of lyrics that it works with. It actually takes the color scheme of the album cover art to present the lyrics in a few ways. We’ve had great feedback and it’s taken off.
Have record labels caught on to the impact Shazam is having on artist and track development?
We have an open line of communication with record labels. They know we can help break a song. Whether it’s the label that wants to sell music or the artist that wants to sell concerts and merch, everyone’s excited about working with Shazam. Millions of people a day use Shazam and when a new track, album or video launches we can spread the word quickly and help spark the fire and flames. We did a recent promotion with the new Red Hot Chili Peppers song where if users tagged the song they were entered to win a flyaway to Paris. We’re also doing the same thing with Ke$ha where you can tag her song and win a VIP pass to Las Vegas to see her in concert. There’s also another where if you tag Enrique Iglesias’ new song “Dirty Dancer” you get exclusive access to a behind-the-scene video about the making of the “Dirty Dancer” video. And that’s only available through Shazam. We love bringing that type of experience to the users and these are the types of things we are doing more and more of in the last six months. It’s great for our users and also really good for the industry and the artists.
What is you most active audience?
A lot of people might think we are predominantly used by early adopters, but our user base nears that of smart phones, so we surprisingly don’t skew youthful. We have over half our users between 25-44, with a quarter of our users 45 and up and a little less than 20 percent of our users are 24 and younger. Over 30 percent of iPhones in the U.S. have Shazam on it and a good percentage of them use it every week and every month. We have good distribution across the demographics in age and gender.
What genres get tagged the most?
We’ll see every type of music tagged on Shazam. We probably over-index slightly on Urban and Dance. We’re very deep in Pop and American Top 40. We under-index a bit on Country, Jazz and Classical, but everything is well tagged on Shazam.
Have you had any radio companies come to you yet to use your information so they can help predict hits?
We have deejays, program directors, stations and radio companies all excited to learn more about the data we have about what songs are breaking. We are sitting on a goldmine of information. Keeping aside the personal information of our users, knowing which songs are being tagged, where and at what time, we see hits long before they start showing up on digital sales charts. We looked back at 2010 and have some interesting stats how the Shazam charts predict #1 songs at Billboard around 33 days in advance and as much as 74 in the case of a Rihanna song. That gets people excited and want access to the charts as a result and we are finding ways to make that available to the industry. Imagine if an artist can find out their song is popular in a certain part of the country, they might set their tour dates based on where their songs are breaking. And labels can shift their promotional marketing efforts around from one artist to another. There are a lot of possibilities with the data in aggregate that we are sitting on.
Talk about how Shazam is being integrated into television as well.
What’s happening is people have been Shazaming television for years. It’s a natural extension to Shazam television shows and ads. The networks and show creators are excited to work with us because for the first time there is this unbelievably easy way of establishing interaction and engagement with users on a second screen mobile device. People don’t want to block the screen on a TV with guide information on other content. 86 percent of smartphone owners watch television and use their mobile device at the same time, so it’s a great way to augment or supplement what’s going on on-screen with additional information on your mobile device. Shazam can establish that connection and from that point the user can go off on rich, satisfying experiences designed specifically by the networks or show creators around whatever they want to accomplish in the show. The same thing is true of advertising with major brands that are using Shazam to amplify their television ad campaign, making them interactive so people can literally shop from their couch. This combination is working out quite well. People love Shazam for music. Extending it to TV is straight forward for unlocking additional content or activity and engagement beyond the show.
[eQB Content by Michael Parrish]
