Apple has acquired London-based music and image recognition service Shazam. The company confirmed the news today. It is purchasing the startup — one of earliest players in the world of mobile music — as part of its bigger ambitions in the music business.
“We are thrilled that Shazam and its talented team will be joining Apple. Since the launch of the App Store, Shazam has consistently ranked as one of the most popular apps for iOS. Today, it’s used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, across multiple platforms. Apple Music and Shazam are a natural fit, sharing a passion for music discovery and delivering great music experiences to our users. We have exciting plans in store, and we look forward to combining with Shazam upon approval of today’s agreement,” said Apple in a statement to the media.
Apple did not disclose the price, but several sources suggest the deal is in the region of $400 million. Sources also say that Apple’s deal had been in the works for about five months and came after Shazam had been in talks with others, including Snapchat and Spotify.
Shazam’s core business is in music recognition: people use its app to capture a clip of music that is playing, and then it matches that against its large database to tell you what you are listening to. The service has brought the company over 1 billion downloads of its app to date.
Over the years Shazam has augmented this with a number of other services: it sends users through to other sites to download and listen to the music at their leisure; it provides more information to users about the music and the artists behind it; it keeps charts of popular music based on the clips that it hears and that people want to identify.
It’s also branched out into more marketing services based on visual recognition — essentially augmented reality plays where users can capture snaps of images that lead them to more content from a brand or another organization. Through all of this, Shazam has developed some interesting partnerships, specifically with Apple and Spotify (who together get around 1 million referrals each month via Shazam), and Snapchat, which currently has an integration with Shazam where Snapchat users can “recognize music, engage with Shazam content, and send their music and artist discoveries as Snaps to their friends.”
It is no surprise that these are also the three names that we heard were all approached and discussed an acquisition of the startup. “We are excited to announce that Shazam has entered into an agreement to become part of Apple. Shazam is one of the highest rated apps in the world and loved by hundreds of millions of users and we can’t imagine a better home for Shazam to enable us to continue innovating and delivering magic for our users,” Shazam said in a statement.
