So last year I was in a big brand clothing shop and I heard a cool song. I Shazamed it. At home searched it on YouTube.
To my shock, it was launched a few months ago and it barely had 5k views. The shock for me was how the hell a giant clothing company (H&M if I recall correctly) has such an underground song on.
So I started googleing around to find out how music in stores gets selected, and long story short, this is a multi-million dollar business and there are companies which create playlists according to your brand. These companies also scour the world for underground artists, because you want your store to have the best music before it's popular, so that customers perceive you as a trendsetter.
What is the success metric for these playlist companies? One of the task of store employees is to report how many customers they notice using Shazam in the store.
This should have been an opportunity for Soundcloud actually, a lot of underground musical artists and an opportunity to connect via a large community platform to spread word.
Yes, but also a ton of unlicensed music (most of which came by way of remixes/DJ mixes), which they can't license it to soundtrack cos. Spotify owns one (major investor, created by an employee) called Soundtrack Your Brand. Pandora offers one as well.
Thats true actually and I've seen SoundCloud plagued by theses issues but there's always plenty talent that get accepted such as Lil Yachty or XXXtentacion or even Chance the Rapper who all started on SoundCloud, I think SoundCloud has the capability to filter out the easy hits to market and partner with
Not really, Chance the rapper, Lil Yachty etc had huge amounts of listens etc on SoundCloud which is why they became famous, they werent being signed by labels despite their heavy recognition. Chance the rapper went independent, like the thing is that labels only sort of pay attention to SoundCloud, the major medium is still YouTube, but we even see musicians there with followings and millions of views not being signed.
Not trying to sound ass-hurt but if theres a big platform of dedicated listeners and theres a lot of people with millions of listens, wouldnt those be easy hits?
Agreed. As long as you weed out the copyright infringement, this would work really well, considering that many artists that are popular today (chance the rapper comes to mind) started on Soundcloud.
I know a guy in a local band here in Portsmouth, England, and they had a song picked for a supermarket playlist in I think Brazil, ended up charting there and being flown out for a few shows. Another guy who was playing on the ferry to Spain for a living and had a hit in Korea through similar circumstances. This sort of thing can really make a career.
There was a company from the first dot-com boom called Big Champagne the crawled Napster and other file-sharing networks to discover what new songs were popular. They're now owned by Ticketmaster.
Yeah a friend of mine is a music producer and he signed a deal to have one of his songs at a designer clothes store when he had maybe 500 sales total. He has no idea how they found him but they paid him a few grand.
It's probably an easy way for them to get great music for cheap. There are underground artists making far better music than your generic EDM out there.
Well a lot of major EDM artists use ghost/shadow artists. Because they have to pump out a podcast every week with some of the music original they just have ghost minions do it. It's the brand they establish that sells it.
Friend of a friend does (did?) this for, iirc, Topshop etc. Apparently she's bleeding edge cool/hipster - literally tasked with listening to 'everything', figuring what's cool, what's up and coming, who is going be 'cool' next and sticking it on a playlist. I remember sitting in a pub chatting about what a great job it must be. That said, this was probably 8 years ago, so definitely in the Shazam era, but I assume before anyone was using it for any reference point.
Red Bull sponsors an amazing variety of cultural events as well as athletes including in some exceedingly niche sports as well as very very expensive endeavors (running effectively two formula 1 teams, fleet of old expensive to maintain aircraft, etc).
Their marketing budget must be massive. My understanding is the unit cost of any kind of drink is very low and its entirely a market-dominance driven game so the spend makes a lot of sense especially when they command a premium price.
Their Github (!) has a collection of event sourcing libraries they've built on top of Scala/Akka. Their budget is big enough for a soft drink company to justify a sizable open source program.
So much of product, especially beverage marketing is positioning yourself as being a part of a certain community, it's very possible their open source contributions are simply an extension of that.
There is a reason why Cocacola spends an obscene amount of money marketing sugared water. Almost every country I have been, I have seen coca cola bill board ads. They paint your storefront free if it's coca cola branded. Give you a free coca cola branded fridge if you only sell their drinks. They really do go out of their way to make a brand impression.
This is why I love mountain biking. Flying through the woods (or this setting) is just exhilarating.
You’re not thinking about the problems of life, you’re thinking and reacting to what’s a tenth of a second in front of you. What’s beyond that turn? You’ll find out soon enough.
Danny MacAskill is incredible and when you watch the behind the scenes videos you really get a sense of how patient and supportive Red Bull are of their athletes.
He's incredible. All of their athletes are. I don't know if mere mortals understand just how good the best in the world are at their sport. It's always inspiring to see creativity in unexpected places.
Incidentally - or not, as the case may be - Red Bull's Danish offices are right on top of Google's in central Copenhagen. So much so that once I mistook one backdoor for the other.
The Google logo on the frontdoor, by the way, says Göögle.
I have once heard a beautiful song in a local swimming pool. I've shazamed and googled it just to find the only place it was available from being Audiosparx - a site I've never heard about before that time, seeming kind of an "audio clip-art" store, titled as "commercial music for video, TV, film and media".
It was an article about a UK playlist selection company which had 6 millions yearly revenue doing this. Unfortunately I can't hit the right keywords now to find it again.
You are correct. I used to work for a company in the Netherlands that does this for a couple of big brands, often for every store worldwide. I was in technical support for the music players.
They had two guys, who were also DJ's in some local clubs, work in an insane spreadsheet to decide the music for many different brands. Whenever I'd hear a cool new track I'd tell them. That way a track I found ended up playing in a bunch of stores worldwide, pretty cool.
The great extent of their database can be annoying at times. I turned on the TV during the Winter Olympics once, and saw that one of the ice skating events where the competitors skate to music was on--probably Ice Dancing.
The performance being shown was using some fairly well known piece of classical music that I did recognize, so I tried Shazam [1] and it identified it, but not in the way I wanted. Instead of telling me the name of the piece and the composer, it told me who the skaters were, that it was from their Winter Olympics routine, and what round of the competition it was from.
[1] ...I'm not actually sure if it was Shazam. Might have been SoundHound.
OP mentioned that they use the number of customers using Shazam as a metric. Maybe once they decide to use a song in their playlist they (somehow) make sure that it's in the database.
I was recently out and heard a country song I’m sure is one of the most inane songs I’ve ever heard in my life. I Shazam’d this atrocity to discover it was a two year old song by American Idol contestant, Kellie Pickler. How do I feel now, better or worse?
Do they really need to rely in manual reporting? I'm pretty sure Shazam has no trouble at all collecting these statistics, and I'd be really surprised if they didn't monetize them.
To answer your original question: I checked the latest version of Shazam, and it does not request location services at all. (And I can't find a setting that might enable it later, either.)
I believe cmelbye was simply responding to your "if yes" with a justification for why it's useful. Even if I added the song to my library, what if I don't remember the name or the artist? Will I find it easily amongst the 5000 other songs I've got in there? And maybe I didn't like the song, but I'm reminded of it for some reason and it's really bugging me that I can't remember enough details to find it again. I guess I could listen to every single from every unfamiliar artist I see in my Shazaam history...
Indexing our life events by location and time, paired with a smoother search interface, would dramatically improve the memory augmentation aspects of our personal devices. There are, of course, tremendous privacy risks in accumulating this data (which is why the design tradeoffs / permission system around location services exists in the first place).
No need to wonder. On my iPhone, Shazam has access to location while in use. It’s my impression that most people auto-click “yes” when prompted for this.
They know which song is played and how many seconds you are into the song at what time. The only info they need is the playlist of the store to find out your location.
I would think its more related to royalties.. 'up and coming artists' are also cheap artists. I would am interested in subscribing to such a service for my properties.
I wonder what if there really is a significant difference between streaming a song in a store vis-a-vis placing it in a TV ad.
That said, of the two playlist selection companies that I have only just read about, the charge for streaming in-store is between $34 to $199 per location per month.
In the early 2000s, I used to work a relatively large music company (Album Network, later acquired by Clear Channel) whole sole purpose in life was to make music charts of what's popular, and publish a monthly magazine/charts of the hottest artists.
Point being is that music charts are BIG business, and remain so to this day. I'm not at all surprised to hear that this has spread to brick and mortar stores. IIRC Starbucks has an in-house music curation department.
Shortly before MP3 players made the whole concept silky, Starbucks had some sort of pilot going with HP to let people burn custom discs at some sort of kiosk in Starbucks stores. So they’ve long been playing around with music-related stuff.
> What is the success metric for these playlist companies?
Well, if the goal is to pick trending music before it trends, I imagine it's largely a matter of letting time pass to see what % of music popped with the desired demographic segment.
I've conducted diligence on one of these businesses before (it was acquired a PE firm). The overall market is somewhat limited, but you're right there is a whole industry out there for this type of stuff.
Does it? I know for a fact that artists in most of Europe get fixed fees for different types of public performance (played on the radio/played at a company function/etc.). Only "royalty free" titles manage their own contracts. No TV station actually talks to some band's manager to license their song when it plays on the car radio in the background.
Ugh, this has become my favorite music feature of all time. I've made amazing playlists in Spotify by using Shazam around town in cafes and clubs. It was too good to be true.
THANK YOU for the Sound Hound tip; I’d somehow been ignorant of its existence. Haven’t really put it through its paces yet but the UI and featureset look great. Never expected to say this but I might be done w/ Shazam!
Wow, Thanks for point this out and I have never heard of Soundhound before. ( Talk about Discovery problems )
There are many times when a song suddenly pops up into your head, and you cant record the exact lyrics, the may likely be a few words that is wrong so Google doesn't help, and humming it in Shazam never worked. I had always thought my voice was sounded too bad.
I use both regularly. SoundHound is my go to by default but I use Shazam as a backup. Shazam is more successful normally but I like SoundHound more for whatever reason.
Switched to SoundHound a long time ago and have found it equally as good as Shazam. I have every song I "discover" automatically added to a Spotify playlist so I can check it out later.
Is there any loss in that? The integrated music recognition if Google Now rarely fails me, and when it does, Shazam wasn't able to recognize the song either.
I've never had it work as fast or accurately as Shazam, especially in noisy environments. There's also no obvious way to get the full history of the songs I've searched for (there probably is - it's just not easily discoverable). I had high hopes for the automatic detection that rolled out on pixel 2s but have found that it only works on the terrible music that my gym plays.
Are you sure about that? I know that it works in Germany. Might it be that you are confusing it with the Google Assistant song search?
Looking at my sound search history[0], I first used it in Germany in August 2014, so I'd be surprised if it wasn't rolled out worldwide by now (unless of course due to legal reasons).
It runs 24/7 aongside the "ok google" detection, and as soon as it detects a song, it'll show the name on the lockscreen. So normally, all you have to do is look at your phone to get the song name [0]. This is also done 100% locally, there's a offline database of 10k+ songs which is only ~50mb [1], and gets updated regularly.
Siri has been able to identify music (I believe using Shazam?) for 3 - 4 years. I suspect they were shopping themselves around, and Apple wanted to own the technology enough to give them their asking price.
The technology Google is using here is very different. They also have active detection on Assitant, but this one is a passive 24/7 detection. There's a local database of the ~10k most popular songs, and it's only ~50mb [0]. It's all done locally, and when it works (Which is very often), you just have to look down at your phone and the song name is already there on the lockscreen without you touching anything.
As mentioned above, this is already running to do OK Google detection. It's also not scanning 100% of the audio, as far as I understand, it analyzes samples roughly each minute. I'm sure they would not make this a feature if it had a big impact. From my own experience, turning this feature on or off made no difference in battery life.
I haven't been able to determine if this is a deliberate plot or just incompetence, but Siri's language parsing for the Shazam music identification became maddeningly limited in some recent iOS update. The only phrasing I can trigger it with now is "What's this song?". "Name this song", "What song is this", etc. all give me some Marx-brothers-esque response like "Sorry, I couldn't find the song What in your library."
Oh, and the only thing you can do with the result is tap it to be bumped to Apple Music, where (if you have a subscription and the song is available), the song starts playing. Hey Apple, when in the history of ever has someone wanted to start playing the song they are already listening to? At least let me copy the damn name. Siri is a dumpster fire.
Google Assistant has also been able to that for ages.
The pixel does something very different : it automatically tries to identify what is playing right now and writes the name of the song on the lockscreen.
It might seem to be gimmicky but I have found myself really liking this feature.
Gracenote (the people who bought and closed CDDB) offer music identifying to anyone who wants to license it. I remember Sony Ericsson feature phones all had this feature powered by gracenote. I would assume that's what Apple is using.
Is it the one that "google now" uses, or "google assistant?" Are they the same? I don't even know with google anymore man I just can't keep track of this shit.
Google assistant has a music identification feature now (up until recently it did not).
Now is still there, but the search feature that used to be on the launcher is just a web search now (can't do anything fancy with it anymore, that's reserved for Assistant).
Pixel 2 has a music identifier that is always listening and will place what song is playing on your lock screen. It does this with a local database and does not send audio data to Google.
> It does this with a local database and does not send audio data to Google.
Do you have details on this? I'm honestly quite surprised; I'd imagine the fingerprints to enough songs for that feature to be usable would take up quite a bit of space.
The one on Pixel 2 is done in the background on device, but it has a small catalog of titles. You can explicitly ask the Assistant for all the other songs.
Why would Apple pay for Shazam? It’d be totally trivial to recreate their service if you are Apple. My guess is Shazam have patents and Apple will stop this feature on Android, one of the most compelling features of the new pixel is always on Shazam equivalent.
The usage-related data sets that Shazam has collected over its operational history are likely the biggest driver of value for this deal. Think about the insight you could gain by cross-referencing Shazam lookups with iTunes downloads. Probably lots of insight in how certain genre fan bases intersect, good predictive analytics on time-to-monetization of hot underground bands, etc
This is such a good point. Apple Music (and Spotify) are pouring money into people who stay on the beat. To this day this is still very analog (which in many ways is a good thing). But when your Apple or Google or whomever you must see the power of using basic statistics to do some part of this. (You could use ML too but that is super overkill most likely).
No my point is why pay huge sums when if you have all the songs in the world at hand, watermarking and searching those watermarks is trivial. I looked into this a while back and the algorithms/libs to do this extremely accurately are available.
Obviously the problem is getting access to ever song and keeping it up to date with new ones.
It's naive to think that a company that has been operating for decades only has capability that is implementable in a weekend. Surely there are plenty of edge cases with certain songs/genres and how they mix with various environmental noises. That in addition to already having the system scaled, and having a team of people who are intimately familiar with maintaining that system.
Then there's also the userbase. Even if you successfully clone the app, most Shazam users won't even know it exists.
Seems for them the cost (financially and in terms of overhead) of building that team vs. buying a very experienced one was not worth it. They almost have ~$300 billion just sitting around.
The basics might not be that hard, but you can be pretty sure that Shazam has perfected the tech in 15 years of operation while aquiring hundreds of millions of users in the process. Apple also has more money than anyone, it might just make more sense to just buy it and integrate the brand and userbase.
I understand being angry at patent trolls, but you are aware that Shazam isn't one correct? They actually use the patented IP in question. Even patent attorneys in his own country effectively told him he's likely infringing.
I know they are not the same as a patent troll but I find repulsive the idea of silencing and threatening this guy:
> I’ve written some code (100% my own) and implemented my own methods for matching music. There are some key differences with the algorithm Shazam uses. The code isn’t published yet, but I was planning on releasing it under Apache License to the open source community soon
Edit: of course if you are OK with software patents then it's perfectly logic. I am happy I don't live in a country where software patents exist.
IANAL
but actually the "software" - patent "system" in european has been under changes since around ~2000 which means that there would not have been any problem in releasing his code...
(https://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal-texts/html/epc/2016/e...) (basically they are not de jure, but they would have a hard time to actually enforce this, if it is trivially).
actually the lawyer did make a strange assumption..
well there would still be a problem if he ever want to travel outside the eu where somebody could actually claim the infrigdement.
(Edit: in germany where I live there were patent processes about that matter in ~2000 and the federal court ruled in favor of the patent, however after/at the end of 2000 they basically always rejected them.)
The patentability of software has been significantly broadened since then in Germany, just look for example at the cases Dynamische Dokumentengenerierung and Routenplanung.
It's surprisingly easy to do. I know a company that has a bank of servers listening to streaming radio stations all day and night, fingerprinting the songs and taking the track and artist names from the stream to create an in-house Shazam.
I also happen to know the company you’re talking about. However, what they’re doing is way more complicated than a simple Fourier transform, it’s not easy to do at all.
Crawl public facebook videos, automatically figure out what they were watching/listening to in the background, and correlate that with their public demographic information.
Radio stations use this kind of technology to keep track of the amount commercial content is played which gives then gives them a indication on royalties they need to pay.
shazam's value is obviously in how it scaled this method to millions of users and songs but implementing it for yourself on a limited catalog of songs is a couple days of work once you have the theory. in fact this was a lab project for the intro signal processing class at berkeley that i ta'd.
Thanks for the link. I thought these things involved a lot of markov models and gaussian functions but this is mostly just some pretty slick engineering. The 1000x search speed seems very good.
A few others have posted references. We did it as a lab in my undergrad signal processing class. Theory is simple: transform time into frequency domain and you have a fingerprint of the song. I guess the value is in the execution, a la Shazam.
Transform from time into frequency domain and you have the Fourier transform of the song, not a fingerprint. Fingerprinting is a lot more involved than that.
So now you’ve fingerprinted an entire song. How do you go about matching that to the 7 seconds of music and loud background noise I actually present you with?
Execution is everything and I have found that the ondevice index shipping with pixel devices displaying the title of the currently playing song on the lockscreen was such a better implementation than having to hurry up and remember where the shazam app is, open it, and try to identify the song (optionally having to try several times and store the sample for later when I have more network).
the reason i am being downvoted is because hacker news is fucking garbage now. too many insecure, underqualified jackasses looking for a reason to argue.
saying the algorithm "wouldn't work" without an app is like saying my door doesn't work without a doorknob.
OP made a point: Shazam is not magic, and people have the opportunity to compete or DIY. to me, it seems simple/contrarian/not helpful to respond with "they have an app too"
The point is that saying Shazam is just a button ignores the huge amount of effort that sits behind it. Not just the technology but more importantly the sales and marketing to get to the number of users they have.
Amazon or Youtube are not magic either. But good luck getting to that same scale without significant effort.
and saying "they have an app" is ignoring OP's actual point, which is all i am trying to defend. no one is calling into question the merit it's taken to build Shazam as a company.
how do i find myself defending the most ridiculous shit here?... like an algorithm can't work without a UI.
> guy 1: "index the Fourier Transform of all songs"
> guy 2: "[don't forget about] their huge database[!]"
how is this not contrarian? biz guy spotted? the dude straight up fucking said to build a database of "ALL SONGS". if you think that's simple you're either not thinking hard enough or you have no idea what he's talking about.
Google search is more than just indexing the content of all web pages though. It's also getting people to the result they're searching for which is significantly more complex.
That said, it's still a feature which is why Google makes it's money off of advertising instead. That's the real Google product in relation to their search feature.
Google Search is not a feature. It's a product. They have product owners, product managers, product roadmaps etc and it's fundamental to what Google is as a company. They themselves call it a product: https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/products/
And we can play this game all day if you like. By your ridiculous logic: Spotify, Facebook, WhatsApp, Amazon, Youtube are all just features.
Sure, there's a complexity scale where we arbitrarily consider something a "product" instead of a "feature". In fact the scale can slide as technology improves. Something that was previously complicated enough to consider a product may now be trivial enough to become a feature.
I was looking for a way to see the lyrics of a song on Spotify.
The official Spotify help page recommended using SoundHound instead for lyrics.
SoundHound can listen to the music and show you the lyrics in real time line by line. That was pretty cool.
I wonder how Shazam and SoundHound differ and how they make money.
Plug here: I used to work for SoundHound. They just have more sophisticated deep learning going on (the cofounders wrote the original papers on deep learning back at standford). SoundHound and Shazaam are similar on the surface, but its all the tech underneath that's different.
Checkout Hound/Houndify: www.houndify.com
SoundHound truly is the most innovative company I have worked at so far, and their tech is the very best I've seen, and I've worked at quite a few tech shops by now. Their partnership with Nvidia is awesome, and I can't wait to see their work come to fruition.
what is the bigger picture here with Apple's media intentions? Bought Pop Up Archive (podcast tech), Shazam, hires a top TV exec, and that's only just this week. Is Netflix on the radar?
Anything that brings you deeper into that ecosystem, feeding the likelihood of buying another flat computer, is fair & likely game for Apple to buy or compete with. Shazam: you hear a song, use phone to recognize it[1], download album from Apple Music, ... you're a little more likely to stay within the iOS ecosystem and buy another iPhone.
[1] - Recently I stopped at a traffic light; cheap chopped car pulls up with music blaring hard edgy electronica. Something sounded interesting about it. Yank out iPhone, run Shazam, identify song before car drives off. Download album which is about...software engineering?!
See, I'd add digital music to the list of apples core competency, while they haven't stayed as relevant since streaming took off, you could make the argument that the initial success of the iphone could have been attributed to the fact that tons of people were locked into their music ecosystem via ipods, and the iphone was the only way to move said music to a phone.
Also note that apples services revenue, of which music is a part of, is large enough on its own to be a fortune 100 company.
The integration via Siri is fantastic. Instead of opening the Shazam app, you just ask Siri. In fact, there is little reason to have the app around if Apple buys them. Just make the integration native.
The Shazam app gives you a place to go back to if you want to see which songs you've recently discovered. It also works offline - it will look up songs when you open the app later. Not to mention that some people don't enjoy talking to their phones.
That's it. In face, I've not used Shazam often because it's really bothering to open Shazam when I curious about the song I listen. But if it's in Siri, the game is totally different.
If there's any possibility of somebody (e.g. a barista) overhearing me asking my phone to identify a song, I won't do it. Perhaps I'm excessively bashful, but I would find it embarrassing.
>>>Notably, though, both of the numbers we’ve heard are lower than the $1.02 billion (according to PitchBook) post-money valuation the company had in its last funding round, in 2015.
What happens here in terms of payouts? Who gets screwed and who comes out ahead, assuming this turns out to be true?
Basically it's who you'd think. Some investors will get their money back, some will get a bit more than others. The founders will be fine, but probably more due to their role than their stock.
Common stock will probably be worth $0, and the employees Apple wants to keep will get a new stock vesting schedule for Apple stock.
Same as if the purchase price were more than the valuation: whoever had the least negotiation power when they purchased shares.
Edit: maybe nobody gets screwed, except in that they may have expected a bigger return. The sale numbers quoted are both more than the investment total reported.
I switched from Shazam to SoundHound a long time ago like many others pointed out, SoundHound is just a better product. But geeze, money talks. With Apple's backing, how does SoundHound compete? Perhaps Google/Amazon should snatch up SoundHound to keep that competition going.
SoundHound has a number of beefy corporate partnerships already. They have a very intelligently designed API around their deep learning models that 3rd parties are using in their own in-house voice/music products (www.houndify.com).
I am curious what their end-goal is though. I think they can likely stand on their own if they play their cards right.
Does Google need better tech? I've personally not extensively tested these services (I'd actually love to see a thorough comparison of a big variety of songs), but I get the impression that Google already has a pretty good tech in place for doing this.
in my experience a/b testing shazam just has a way, way bigger database. It would easily identify really obscure stuff like 1970s Arabic psych rock or disco even if it wasn't even available in US online stores, and wasn't ever sold here. Same goes for gracenote, and the other systems that tried the same shtick
the database is the golden goose here, not the algorithm. it's similar to what made grooveshark more fun than spotify
You underestimate the world of music that isn't available via iTunes, Apple Music or Spotify. It's huge.
While Shazam is far from perfect for obscure music, it surprised me at times and iTunes or streaming services aren't even close.
To my shock, it was launched a few months ago and it barely had 5k views. The shock for me was how the hell a giant clothing company (H&M if I recall correctly) has such an underground song on.
So I started googleing around to find out how music in stores gets selected, and long story short, this is a multi-million dollar business and there are companies which create playlists according to your brand. These companies also scour the world for underground artists, because you want your store to have the best music before it's popular, so that customers perceive you as a trendsetter.
What is the success metric for these playlist companies? One of the task of store employees is to report how many customers they notice using Shazam in the store.