Shazam is a music recognition service that has been around for over a decade. It’s available in many platforms such as desktop and mobile operating systems and even wearable devices. The app has been updated with additional features over all of these years, it is now able to recognize songs, TV shows, and movies and it now gives more information like the lyrics of a song and connect to a bunch of services like Spotify or Rdio to stream that particular song or some others to purchase it. They have even integrated some functionality with the camera to identify QR codes from some posters that will send you to an artist page within the app.
The app is also becoming more social with Facebook integration so users can see the songs that their friends are discovering and now, they are making it possible to know what musical artists are discovering too. Shazam launched a test program last summer with 30 artists and the list had extended for over 200 including Pharrell, David Guetta, Sam Smith and more recently, Ed Sheeran, who has over 35 million followers. Now, they are opening this program so that any artist, from independent ones to really popular ones, can share the music they have discovered with the app. To do so, they have to become verified artists, which can be done by sending some basic information.
This feature will be particularly useful for the artists that recommend songs on their social networks as the songs they have “Shazamed” (new discoveries or one of their all-time favorite songs) will be automatically shared to their followers in real time and thus create a more personal experience between artists and fans. Artists won’t get paid to use this feature, but some users might end up buying the song as the app already makes the process fairly easy, plus, with over 100 million users globally, they will surely get some exposure. This new feature has proven to be a successful one as the verified artists have gathered more than 1.4 billion followers and hundreds of artists are on queue to get verified.