Shazam is Now Owned by Apple

Apple has officially confirmed this week that it has completed its acquisition of the Shazam brand. For those not in the know, Shazam is widely considered as one of the most popular music recognition apps today, and as revealed by Apple, a consistent chart topper in its App Store rankings.

Acquiring the Shazam mobile app should make a lot of sense for Apple, especially as a way of further strengthening its Apple Music streaming subscription service. Sure, brands like Apple Music have always banked on the extensive catalog of tracks they offer for consumers, but it is services like Shazam that continue to fuel music discovery, and in turn, help attract new customers to sign up for a subscription, or persuade existing subscribers to keep their accounts.

While it is true that Apple has confirmed the Shazam acquisition, the iPhone maker did not revealed any further financial details. But it bears noting that a week ago, TechCrunch had reported that Apple was about to close the deal with a buy out figure that is somewhere in the hundreds of millions range, likely between $300 million and $400 million. That might not compare to Apple’s $3 billion acquisition of Beats more than three years ago, but it is still a pretty big sum.

As mentioned earlier, Shazam is in the business of music recognition, particularly in helping listeners identify a specific tune that captures their attention, or naming that song they can not seem to remember. Indeed, music lovers can just use the mobile app to take a sample or part of the music that is playing, and the service will go ahead and scour its database of songs in order to identity the track. Over time, Shazam had expanded its core music recognition service, even going as far as sending listeners to other websites where they can download the music they were looking for. 

Quite obviously, Shazam was quite good at it. To date, the mobile app has accumulated more than a billion downloads, which is a mean feat. Not surprisingly, this success has attracted attention. According to TechCrunch, Shazam had been in discussions with other potential buyers, like Spotify (the leading music streaming subscription service provider in the world) and Snapchat, a few months ago. Apple had entered the picture about five months ago, and eventually was the one that got to close the deal. It might have helped that Shazam can already integrate with Apple Music, directing a huge chunk of its 100 million strong customer base to listen to tracks found on Apple Music, and even allows consumers to purchase songs directly from iTunes.