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.”
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?
Just buy a month of premium ($10/month or $5 if you're a student) and try it.
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.
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.
[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.. ?
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.
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.
