Shazam was created in the late 1990s. — Shazam/AFP Relaxnews
Shazam was originally an SMS music recognition service. It is now one of the most widely used mobile applications in the world. And the service has reached a new milestone in its history by reaching 100 billion song recognitions.
That's equivalent to every person on Earth identifying 12 pieces of music with Shazam. Otherwise, a single person would have to identify one song on the app every second for 3,168 years to reach 100 billion. This figure is all the more impressive given that it has increased significantly since the summer of 2011. Back then, more than a billion tracks had been recognised on Shazam.
In a statement, Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and Beats, welcomed this "monumental milestone,” which he says reflects "how much people enjoy using Shazam.” Every month, 300 million users make use of the application to identify songs they hear in stores, bars or on television. So widespread is the use of this application that the verb "to Shazam” has entered everyday parlance to describe the act of identifying a song with your phone.
Shazam's popularity is largely due to its ease of use. The application is based on audio recognition technology. When a song is playing, Shazam records a short sound extract and converts it into a unique fingerprint called a "spectrogram,” representing the song's audio waveform. This fingerprint is then compared against a vast database containing those of countless musical tracks. If a match is found, information relating to the song is displayed (title, artist, album, etc).
In recent years, new features have been created to facilitate song recognition. For example, on recent iPhone and Apple Watch models, Shazam integrates with the Action button to enable users on the move to identify a song with a simple long press.
In terms of music, the most "Shazamzed” song of all time is Dance Monkey by Tones and I. It has been identified over 45 million times on the music recognition app since the track's release in 2019. – AFP Relaxnews
