Wired
On August 19th, Apple’s music recognition platform Shazam celebrated its 20th anniversary today. In the past 20 years, the Shazam platform has accumulated more than 70 billion songs. Now it has been built into your music. iPhone, as a music recognition engine.
Shazam was first launched in the UK in August 2002 as a text message service, where users needed to dial a designated phone for voice recognition and receive the song and artist’s name in a text message shortly after. Since then, Shazam App has been launched on Apple’s App Store and acquired by Apple in 2018.
According to official data, Shazam achieved 2 billion installs in May this year and surpassed 70 billion cumulative recognitions this month.
What many iPhone users may not know is that when you ask Siri what music is playing, Siri will call Shazam’s ability to identify songs. You can add the “Music Recognition” function to the shortcut menu of your iPhone Control Center through Settings – Control Center, so that when you encounter music you like while chasing dramas or watching videos, you can directly pull down the Control Center and click the Shazam shortcut button. It can also be directly identified.
It is precisely because of its functional properties that Shazam has been serving as a witness and recorder of the development and change of popular culture in the 20 years since its birth. Today, Apple officially created a special Apple Music playlist. This playlist contains the songs that Shazam has recognized the most every year in the past 20 years. If you want to know how the public’s taste for pop music has trended in the past 20 years? Or if you find good music that you don’t know, you can go and listen to it.
In today’s age of algorithms, Shazam can actually help you get out of the information cocoon. I don’t know if you open the music app every day and find that the music recommended on the homepage is similar to the music you usually hear or the singers have a high degree of overlap. This is the same as the short video app. The app developers hope to let you use the software longer , so keep recommending content you might “like”.
However, the types of music itself are rich and the boundaries are very broad, and different genres may also merge with each other to create new sparks. Therefore, the types of music that most people like are very diverse, and they will be moved by works with completely different styles. When you hear a piece of music that you have never heard and like very much, and use Shazam to identify it, Shazam will also create a new recommended song list tailored for your identification results in a special app, which is also quite useful. The feel of Apple’s Genius playlist in the iPod era.
After Apple acquired Shazam, Apple, which is rich in its own music genes, also operates a series of Shazam special playlists in Apple Music at a weekly pace, and timely passes the current global popular music trends through Apple’s professional editors.
This is also particularly important for the global promotion of some regional artists. The 2021 Shazam’s longest-running No. 1 song on the global charts is from a Nigerian singer, making it the second song in Shazam history to be recognized more than a million times in one week. But in normal times, it may be difficult for you to actively listen to a Nigerian artist.
