Not long since the two music giants, Spotify and Tencent Music, have agreed to swap up to 10% of each other's stock, another giant in today's music industry, Apple, has confirmed to buy the promising music recognition app Shazam. Both Apple and Shazam have announced their statement officially, quoted by a variety of media including TechCrunch, Financial Times and so on.
According to TechCrunch, the deal had been in the works for about five months and is in the region of $400 million.
More about Shazam
Shazam is a song-discovery service that can identify music, movies, advertising, and television shows around users, based on a short sample.
It uses a smartphone or computer's built-in microphone to gather a brief sample of audio being played, then it compares the sample against a central database for a match. Whenever it finds a match, information such as the artist, song title, and album will be sent back to the user. Due to its popularity among millions of users, Shazam has become one of the iOS App Store's top 10. It has claimed to connect more than one billion people over 10 years to reach one billion tags, then 10 months to reach two billion and three months to go from 10 to 12 billion.
Meanwhile, Shazam has developed some other partnerships such as Spotify and Snapchat, which had also shown interest in buying this London-based start-up company.
Why does Apple favour Shazam?
According to BBC, some believe that the technology itself is not the real value of this acquisition - Apple could easily develop its own version. However, since Shazam has gathered data from its millions of users for more than a decade, a valuable database seems to be more lucrative for Apple. After all, Shazam had a post-money valuation of over $1 billion, much more than the $400 million to be paid by Apple.
Moreover, compared with Spotify, Apple Music has a weakness for listening tastes due to a lack of data. With Shazam's massive database, Apple Music will be able to offer recommendations with as high a degree of accuracy and precision in the future, making it as competitive as Spotify in the marketplace.
As the top two global streaming platforms continue to compete for subscribers worldwide, today, users can subscribe to Apple Music in 114 countries while in only 60 countries services from Spotify are provided. With Spotify cooperating with Tencent and Apple purchasing Shazam, it will not be easy to tell who offers the best service in the future.
