Shazam has crossed a major milestone. According to Apple, the song recognition app has surpassed 1 billion song matches per month, bringing its total to 50 billion tags since its inception in 2002.
Since Shazam’s start as a text message service, its number of song matches per month has continued to grow, reaching exponential heights in 2008 when it launched on Apple’s App Store. Shazam reached 1 billion total tags in 2012, and has now achieved the same rate per month less than 10 years after crossing that milestone.
“Shazam is synonymous with magic,” Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and Beats, said in a statement. “Both for the fans getting a song recognition almost instantly, and for the artists being discovered. With 1 billion recognitions a month, Shazam is one of the most popular music apps in the world. Today’s milestones show not only people’s love for Shazam, but also the ever-growing appetite for music discovery around the world.”
The song that helped Shazam cross the 50 billion mark was Evangeline’s Mandopop song “框不住的愛 (不插電版).” So far, Tones and I’s “Dance Monkey” is the most Shazamed track of all time, and the first song to ever be Shazamed was “Jeepster” by T. Rex.
Shazam’s song recognition process is designed with user privacy in mind, creating a digital footprint of the audio and matching it against a database containing millions of songs. The raw audio is not sent to Apple, which ensures that the process is secure. Besides its song recognition capabilities, Shazam also allows users to interact with and share audio content across devices and mediums.
