Apple Is Reportedly Buying Shazam For Nearly Half a Billion Dollars (phonedog.com) 60
Apple is close to acquiring Shazam, one of the most recognized services for music recognition. While the exact amount is unknown, the service may be purchased by Apple for around $400 million. PhoneDog reports: Apple is close to acquiring Shazam, say sources speaking to TechCrunch. The deal will reportedly be signed this week and could be announced as early as next Monday. A report from Recode echoes the news of Apple acquiring Shazam, adding that Shazam will likely be valued at around $400 million. Apple -- and other companies -- already offer a music recognition service, but Apple must see something in Shazam's services that it thinks can help improve its own music recognition if it's going to drop nearly half a billion dollars on this deal. Shazam is able to identify TV shows, films, and advertisements in addition to music, so perhaps Apple sees some benefit to these abilities, too.
Do Do DO Dah Dah Dah (Score:2)
That's all I'll pay to you.
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(Heartbreaker) by the Rolling Stones?
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but does it have shaquille o'neal dressed as an oversized effeminate genie? Because if so, no way in hell that's worth half a billion.
Oh wait, that's Kazaam ..
Re: Shazam (Score:2)
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5 seconds is pretty shitty when a human can identify some songs with less than 5 notes.
Sure, but a human can only identify the relatively few songs that he/she knows (well) compared to Shazam, which can nominally identify ALL songs, TV shows, movies, commercials, etc.
RIAA and MPAA (Score:2)
...will be very interested in this automated recognition thing.
Hidden Codes could be easily disguised, try to disguise Giacchini's score.
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No they wouldn't, listening to something is irrelevant without the context.
e.g. I'm listening to CCR right now. That helps the RIAA with precisely didley squat. They don't know if I'm pirating it, if it's being played in a nightclub without performance rights, if I'm listening to it on a CD, or if it's just random internet station of the day.
The amount of effort to correlate when and where something was played to determine if it is legal or not would borderline bankrupt them.
I hope they try it.
Black Adam I can see selling out, (Score:2)
But I never though Billy Batson would sell out!
Re: Hunh, who woulda thunk it? (Score:1)
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Why the fuck would you think that? Did you think our brains suddenly became a database of sound? You are seriously dumb.
Because Shazam used to recognize and name music. When I last tried it (and then deleted it), it just tried to sell me stuff. No music recognition happened at all.
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My Shazamme does not work since years. ...
I guess they want me to upgrade to the newest version
But as I'm a software engineer my self, I refuse to follow the 'oh it does not work anymore? did you update?' meme.
I make some screen shots from the music it 'recognized' and then I delete it.
HomePod? (Score:2)
Maybe this is a "hearing aid" for Siri on HomePod [apple.com]?
I really don't like Apple. (Score:2, Insightful)
As soon as it's official, I'll delete the app.
Good (Score:2)
(Of course, having had to deal with iTunes on rare occasion, I'm not *that* hopeful.)
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Good luck with that. They'll probably delete the app and make a new tab in the Music App for it. In the process break everything else about the app while incorporating it and somehow make playing music on your own device even harder because it's all about streaming and the cloud.
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This isn't exactly rocket science (Score:3)
Buy an that recognizes multi-media and re-direct sale to iTunes. This isn't exactly rocket science. I'm kind of surprised Apple didn't buy Shazaam years ago.
What's kind of puzzling is that you can already do some of this with Siri:
Maybe they are looking to do deeper integration ?
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What's kind of puzzling is that you can already do some of this with Siri:
Guess what Siri uses for that ability. ;-)
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This isn't exactly rocket science. I'm kind of surprised Apple didn't buy Shazaam years ago
I'm kind of surprised Apple didn't make such feature years ago. Now they even need to buy a 3rd party software to fill the hole!?
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Because itt is cheeaper to let ten other companies compete about such a feature andd buy the surviving one ...
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Yeah it does that using Shazam.
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It does it through a deal with Shazzam. I guess they like it enough to now think they should just buy the company.
Re: I had no idea people still used Shazam (Score:1)
Siri already has this feature, but I wouldn't expect you to know that...
Great towels (Score:4, Funny)
I like their towels. They're made in Germany so you know they're good. But why would Apple buy them?
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I like their towels. They're made in Germany so you know they're good. But why would Apple buy them?
Clean up the mess they've made w iPhoneX?
Welp, there goes the neighborhood (Score:2)
How many think this is Apple's way of "getting even" with Android users, probably by forcing them to download a version of quicktime to their phone??
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There is also Musixmatch [google.com].
But no cutting-edge Mac (Score:2)
Coulda spent the money on a new Mac with the latest in RAM, bus design, and GPU, but noooooOOOOOOOoooooo...
Why? (Score:2)
Would have been cheaper to buy the assets and hire the people after they go belly up. I’m surprise Shazam is still around.
The value isn’t Music Recognition (Score:2)
beginning of the end? (Score:5, Informative)
I have been a Shazam user since it was a shortcode (2580) to call with your mobile phone and you got back an SMS message either identifying the song (and costing you) or saying sorry (for free). That was before app stores, and almost before phone apps, just after Shazam launched. A music- and technology-obsessed friend told me about it, and I thought it was one of the coolest things ever. I still think it's pretty cool.
I don't have a lot of confidence Apple won't ruin it. Will the Android app get any love now? Will there be links to buy the music from anyone except the iTunes store?
Shazam made a genuinely innovative idea that is useful for many people and it still is. Apple used to do that, now all their ideas are just marketing and they buy other companies to wither in Cupertino.
intergration in ios (Score:1)
this is an excellent purchase to have software intergrated into the os and allows awarness of the music fabric around the individual. Be nice to just go into the history and see a listing of the music detected about you. The meta data from the music listing would be an amazing resource for regional ratings and could even provide an insight into the individuals musical preferences and matched to purchase behavior could be correlated to playlists for stores that would increase the sales and would be highly va