Shazam: A Music Lovers Favourite Mobile Application?

You’re in a noisy bar and a song comes on that you and your music savvy friend can’t recognize. What do you do? Shazam it! This new app will influence the way you interact with music. Before you know it, you’ll be hearing ‘shazam that song, will ya’.

Headquartered in London, privately held Shazam Entertainment has retained a start-up like mentality. They are passionate about creating the best music identification software on the planet. Innovation and collaboration drives this company’s success, and they are continually re-evaluating their product features with the hopes to revolutionize music discovery.

How it works: Hold your mobile device to the sound source, press the tag button, and wait. Shazam will return the song title, artist bio, album, record label, and even cover art. Overall, I would give Shazam generated results about a 95% success rate. The most valuable part of the service is its ability to identify very obscure songs, while distracted by extraneous background noise. Once Shazam identifies the mystery music, the user will then be given the following featured options:

Features:

1)Shazam provides a link that will send you directly to your iTunes account where you can purchase the song or album.
2)Shazam provides a link to the song’s music video on YouTube.
3)Shazam provides a share feature that lets you easily tweet or email your new favourite song to your online network.
4)Shazam lets you geographically track your music tags. So, if you want to remember where you were the first time you heard 'Home' by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, you can. Hopefully this feature will help to revive our fading music sentiment.

Geographical tagging and the ability to tweet and/or email your songs, are the latest features added. Clearly, they are trying to focus on increasing social accessibility to their users. With more than 50 million customers in 150 countries, Shazam Entertainment says it is trying to move ‘beyond music discovery by creating a new way for users to connect to each other through their music tastes and preferences’. I think it’s safe to say that we have come along way since the Walkman and the mixed tape.



What kind of review would this be without a little mention of the competition? Shazam’s rival application is called Midomi Ultra. The main difference is price - Shazam is free and Midomi is NOT, but yet both apps are Ad-Supported? Not cool Midomi. Midomi, however, also offers the lyrics to each song, as well as, the ability to share your musical favourites via Facebook. Both applications have approximately the same success rate, but on average Midomi is about 5 seconds faster at recognizing the unknown track. Check out this video by App Judgment for a music recognition show down. You’ll be able to best decide which application is right for you.



Shazam supports the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, BREW, J2ME, Symbian, and Windows Phone platforms. Overall, I give this application 2 thumbs up. I use it. I like it. I’d recommend it. It’s a very useful tool for anyone who cares even a smidgen about music. For another Shazam application review, please check out Andrea’s blog post here.