Basics on Shazam Music Identification App

Shazam music app identifies music around you. It helps identify, explore and share music. This app is available in the Apple and Android stores. But how can an app identify music so accurately? Shazam music recognition app uses sophisticated audio identification technology to identify the music you hear, the name of the artist, track, and watch videos. It even lets you buy or stream the song on your device. Shazam creates and stores audio fingerprints that consist of numerical data for over 15 billion songs. Shazam is owned by London-based Shazam entertainment. It identifies music playing around you; explore your favourite music, discover songs, lyrics, artists.

If you are at a café, shopping mall and you like the music that is being played there, start the app and tap the Shazam button. At that instance, a digital fingerprint of the audio is created, which is then matched against Shazam’s database of millions of tracks. It gives the name of the track and the artist and information such as lyrics, video, artist biography, concert tickets, and recommended tracks.

Brief history of Shazam

Shazam came into being in 1999 by Shazam Entertainment Limited, United Kingdom. In the early stages, it used to identify songs through a phone call. When the call ended, the caller would receive the song title and artist’s name via text message. In 2002, Sharam was launched in the U.S. on AT & T’s wireless network in a joint venture with Microphone. Then in 2008, Shazam was launched for iPhones on the App Store. This enabled users to access it in iTunes, making it easier to buy the songs they identified.

Shazam added more features like identifying TV shows, advertisements, and partnering with companies like Saavn, Rdio, National CineMedia, Sun Broadcast Group, Snapchat and many others.

By 2012, Shazam entertainment service had over 225 million users across 200 countries.

By 2017, Apple acquired Shazam for $400 million.

Now, Shazam has over one billion app users and 12 billion tagged songs and shows.

How does Shazam work?

Shazam uploads the audio fingerprint to its server. It runs a database search for matches there. If it is a match, it returns the song info with options on where to stream or buy it, along with the identifying information.

An audio fingerprint is a condensed digital summary of audio signals. It is used to identify an audio sample or to locate similar items in an audio database. Shazam audio identification app creates unique fingerprints for songs on its database by using certain data points identified with a spectrogram’s help.

A spectrogram is a three-dimensional graph used as a representation of sound. It depicts the change in frequencies over a period, considering amplitude and volume.

Integration of all these technologies helps ignore most of the information in a song and focus only on the few defining notes, search its database and provide accurate matches for song queries at an incredible speed.

But how is it able to identify songs in noisy places?

An app like Shazam makes use of song recordings free from background noise and distortion to create fingerprints for its database. It creates fingerprints for its database by using song recordings free from background noise and distortion. When you record a song at a noisy place with the Shazam app, it creates an audio fingerprint of the recordings by identifying the notes with the highest energy on the recording.

But there can be times when Shazam is not able to identify a song?

When the recording is distorted: When the background noise is too high, it distorts the data on the Spectrogram. This makes the audio fingerprint of your recording will be different from that of the original song. In this case, Shazam returns the message – “Song not known” dialogue as it cannot find a match for the audio fingerprint.

Shazam is also not able to identify music during live performances due to fluctuating intonation and no band or individual can perform the song track as it was recorded. If humans can be error-prone, apps have an excuse.

Shazam also has difficulty in understanding voice recordings and humming sounds. When you hum a song, Shazam creates a fingerprint for it. But it is understood as an attempt to resynthesize that song, therefore the algorithm fails to match the recording.

 

So is Shazam only a music identification app?

Yes, it is, but now it also has competitors like SoundHound, Musixmatch Lyrics, and Genius. But along with song recognition Shazam recognizes television shows and advertisements. You simply need to tap the big, blue button and you’ll get the title, artist, or other relevant details for the identification.

Along with song recognition, Shazam lets you enjoy:

• It lets you sing along with time-synchronized lyrics to identifiable tunes.
• It lets you connect to Apple Music and Spotify to add songs to your playlists.
• It lets you check out music videos from Apple Music and YouTube.
• It lets you view top charts for your locality/country.
• It gives recommendations based on your tags.
• It shares tunes to discover through Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.
• It enables Auto Shazam to keep looking for songs.
• It makes you use the app without an internet connection and identify songs anywhere.

Shazam features

• Shazam features a simple user interface. Open it and click on the Logo button to start listening to music and find other tracks from that artist. Use the search panel to identify the playlists and recommended section.
• Use settings to connect your Apple Music or Spotify accounts and make changes to your preferences.
• The Shazam app also has an Auto Shazam feature which constantly listens for music and ID. You need to long-press the Shazam logo to activate this.
• Shazam saves what it hears and then finds a match when you’re back online. It is well integrated into iOS, with shortcuts like Siri commands and a Control Centre item.

How to use Shazam music identification app?

1. Long press the button to tag a song and get the details you want. When the app identifies the song that you tag:

• You can immediately click the lyrics button at the top to see time-synced lyrics.
• You can share it on social media – Facebook, Whatsapp, and Email
• You can click the More icon (three dots), open it and buy it.

2. Make Use of Auto Shazam

When you enable auto Shazam, the app will continue listening to songs until you explicitly disable it.

3. Listen to your Shazams

You can listen to all the songs that you’ve tagged by swiping up on the main screen and tapping Play All Shazams at the top.

Why you’ll love it?

It lets you find new songs in songs, listen and add to Apple Music playlists, follow along with time-synchronized lyrics, watch music videos from Apple Music or YouTube, and enable dark themes. Shazam works anytime, anywhere. It uses a popup to identify music in any app – Instagram, YouTube, TikTok. It also works offline. Auto Shazam continues finding songs even when you leave the app. Shazam finds out what is popular in your country or city with Shazam charts. Users recommended songs and playlists to discover new music. Open any song directly in Spotify, YouTube Music, and Apple Music. It also lets you share songs with friends via social media. 

What is the cost to build a music recognition app like Shazam?

Shazam music recognition is available for free, while Shazam Encore is available for $2.99. The paid version is ad-free. The cost to build a music recognition app like Shazam comes around $9,375 – 38,000 .

Conclusive: Want to build a song recognition app?

Shazam stores a catalogue of audio fingerprints in a database. It captures sound, seeks a match based on acoustic fingerprint from amongst a database of millions of songs. If it finds a match, it sends information such as artists, song title, and album back to the user. Get in touch for music identification app development!