Fact that Shazam is 18-years-old made me curious, and found the following on Wikipedia:
>> “Initially, in 2002, the service was launched only in the UK and was known as "2580", as the number was the shortcode that customers dialled from their mobile phone to get music recognised. The phone would automatically hang up after 30 seconds. A result was then sent to the user in the form of a text message containing the song title and artist name.”
Nifty little tool. Felt like the future.
[1] https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
(Here is Shazam in a chip from 1988:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFth9K_IvwA
Now imagine you have a magnitude better signal fidelity and 10e8 times the storage and processing power)
There was another service around the same time called Any Question Answered. This was before high quality internet on phones, and you could SMS them reasonably complicated questions and (at first) get good replies. Notable successes were their getting me ownership information for a pub, and telling me which local shops had an iPad in store. Service degraded significantly over time.
It's the brand, mindshare and music store/service lead gen that's more difficult to replicate. Why get rid of an icon that's already on everyone's phones that could be a funnel to apple music instead of spotify?
Note: I've never heard of soundhound though, so it might be popular in some places. Shazam is like the name-brand of music recognition though, to the extent of being a verb.
Shazam has an augmented reality based advertising platform.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/09/19/siri-partners-with...
Yes, deep neural networks have proven remarkably useful for machine perception, but you would still need to collect a colossal amount of audio data, fingerprint all of it, build a low-latency processing infrastructure for making inferences, and convince a hundred million people to install your software to feed you copious real-world training data that you can use to improve model performance.
Also, it works a lot better than being able to find "slightly distorted" versions. It can catch a song in a noisy room where you can barely make out the song to begin with. Couple months back it found a song when there was a very loud crowd yelling over it. They're also able to determine differences between versions of songs pretty well. Some remixes might sound very close to the original.
Other thing you might be missing is just how fast it is even on a slow mobile connection.
The smart money, though, is on the main chance: you don't understand the purchase, or the problem domain, or both.
In this case I think you are overestimating the progress in NN and search, and underestimating the signal processing. Have you tried this with any significant corpus?
"Whack it through a FFT and do correlation " seems like one of the obvious solution to the toy problem version, but this is exactly the sort of thing that usually falls apart in practice.
Is anyone keeping a running list of products that HN commenters have suggested could be built in an afternoon/weekend?
Ones I've seen so far: Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, and now Shazaam.
Then we'll talk.
https://www.toptal.com/algorithms/shazam-it-music-processing...
What's not straightforward is recognizing cover songs and the like. But that's not only non-trivial but AFAIK can't be done.
I'm not disputing they overpaid. However, long to short, building the technology is the easy part, and just a fraction of the brand / product value.
Just buy a month of premium ($10/month or $5 if you're a student) and try it.
I actually find Spotify apps to be far worse than iTunes at least on iOS. And the Apple Watch app for Apple Music is really impressive.
I hope Spotify fixes their security woes. Either way I have no reason to leave Apple Music now.
Personally I think Spotify's recommendations, radio stations, and app (both mobile and desktop) are just more pleasant to use than Apple Music and iTunes.
It goes to show how the switch from radio (station directed programming) to streaming (user directed programming) has put a huge crimp in music discovery and music promotion.
The business is/was connecting resale opportunities to brands and artists[1] so you'll have a fairly significant sales and marketing effort although typically you will pay sales people for performance so their compensation will track revenue.
But to give you some things to think about, if you have an engineering team of 15 engineers, median salary $120K, and an 'overhead' (office, health plans, insurance, etc of 60%) then that is $200K/engineer/year (or $3M/year or $48M for 16 years [2001 - 2017]) that is just integrating cost per engineer over time using constant engineering. You can put any function in you want for head count (does it grow exponentially? does it grow in chunks? etc) and then add a C-suite team (higher median salary) and an 'overhead' team (IT, marketing, HR, etc) and you can burn through that fairly quickly.
It is a useful thing to build models for this stuff as your 'pre-operationally-cash-flow-positive' costs are really the health and future of your company.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/12/the-sha...
A good app looks like it only takes a few engineers to maintain, but in likelihood there's a lot of complexity, even that's outside of the core "platform" software going on.
Salaries for - Chief Twitter Feed Monitor, Chief Assistant of The Twitter Feed monitor. The Special Secretary to The Assistant of Twitter Feed Monitor, etc etc etc
Best outcome for all in that case would be acquisition. (Just ask Flux)
This could just be Apple’s way of acquiring more patents and mind share through Shazam brand.
At the level Apple is at and the hordes of cash they have in bank, it probably makes business sense to buy Shazam just for the patents.
Music is at my fingertips from a variety of apps. My biggest problem is discovering new artists or songs.
Good catch. Cheers mate.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2016/04/20/shazam-for-brands-user-...
[2] https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7526322/shazam-1...
Even if selling data and/or advertising, do they need (say) a 200 people sales team.. ?
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1441816/000104746917...
[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1576942/000119312517...
Given that Apple seems to compensate junior engineers with compensation packages north of $300k, it wouldn't be too surprising if they overpaid for Shazam too. Apple also has $74.2B in cash and short-term investments, so paying $0.6B for Shazam doesn't really move the needle.
http://coding-geek.com/how-shazam-works/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870408
My guess is it supplements the data with songs from your Google Music and youtube history.
Then again, it does have 48M fingerprints, so that's only ~3.3KB/fingerprint. Maybe Google has a decent subset in a reasonably-sized package.
If the last round had a strong liquidity preference then it wasn't really valued at $1 billion, and those investors might have even come out ahead.
This feels like a natural acquisition to compete w/ some of Googles offering w/ the latest Pixel 2.
The fact Shazam is 18 years old is crazy. Pre-dates "apps" with the "2580" service and was one of the first apps on the iPhone.
I don't want to be anti-apple because I like most of their stuff but iTunes is complete garbage compared to Spotify.
With the stuff they have now they will never catch up.
I suspect it’s due to end soon, and they realised once it’s gone they would just become a feature of music streaming services. Good to get out now while there is still some exclusivity for Apple to milk.
Hoping this doesn't mean there service is degrading because I've really benefited from it over the years.
I used to use it to identify music in shows or soundtracks, but it started just saying "Breaking Bad Episode 4" which while more accurate was less helpful.
Shortly after that everyone else had music discovery natively anyway.
It's also a nice acqui-hire; Spotify already snatched Echo Nest a few years ago, so they get to catch-up with Shazam.
