The Rise of Shazam: From Humble Beginnings to Apple's $400 Million Acquisition

Extract

[...] In this document, we tell the story of Shazam in detail, from its humble beginnings to its transformation into a unicorn, this company embodies innovation, user engagement and product, as well as the creation of value. Shazam listens and recognizes the music being played around users and provides them with information about the identified track. I. Origin and Functioning of SHAZAM 1.1 Creation in 1999 It all started when Chris Barton wanted to identify a sound he was listening to and realized that no technological solution at the time could do so. [...]

[...] Thus, for the launch, the creators designed a service where users would only have to dial a four-digit phone number (which we obtained through a partnership with mobile operators) that would be routed to the IVR system, and then we would use text messaging to send the information to the user's phone with the song title and artist name. 1.2 Launch in 2002 The launch of Shazam in 2002 was carried out in London, at a time when smartphones and apps did not yet exist. The service was called 2580. [...]

[...] During the same year, Shazam was one of the first applications of Apple's brand new App Store. From then on, users could simply download the application instead of sending an SMS and, thanks to word of mouth, within a year, it had already been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. 8 Shazam reached unicorn status being valued at billion and after rumors spread that Snapchat was going to acquire it for a music discovery feature, Apple pulled the trigger and was eventually able to acquire Shazam. Apple acquired Shazam for 400 million dollars.9 2. [...]

[...] 1.3 Process of algorithm development Regarding the process of algorithm development, the founders of Shazam did things the hard way. In general, a technology exists before a team tries to commercialize it, except the founders raised funds before a functional algorithm was created, using only demos. 5 The algorithm was largely designed by Avery Wang, with the help of the other team members, but they were more focused on fundraising and the commercial side. Wang examined the hashing algorithms used in text search engines, he studied previous research on content recognition, but concluded that none of the known techniques would meet their needs. [...]

[...] Presentation of some numbers In 2019, Shazam reached 1 billion app downloads. It is used to identify more than 20 million music tracks every day.10 More than 70 billion songs have been tagged since its launch in 2002.11 It records more than 200 million active users per month.12 The funding rounds tied to Shazam's launch Before and after the launch, Shazam has carried out several funding rounds13 : - 1 million of dollars in August 2000, then some providential investors signed some checks for $250,000. [...]