What is Shazam?

Shazam is a mobile music recognizer. It comes as an application on several mobile platforms including the iPhone and Android. You can also dial “2580” and hold your phone to the music, then Shazam returns the info straight back to you as a text. In addition, there is a Facebook application that allows you to share with your friends.

How Shazam recognizes music

According to the London-based Shazam website, the company started out in 2002 and is currently embedded in tens of millions of handsets.

The core music recognition technology enables a mobile phone user to identify music that is playing by Shazaming it. You can capture music played over the radio, TV, live concerts wherever music is playing even under noisy conditions. This is saved as a clip and this clip is run through a database of over 6 million tracks (according to Shazam extends back to the ’50s) to find an exact match. The system uses pattern recognition technology to identify performances from within the audio clip.  Shazam calls this fingerprinting. A similar type of technology is used to generate Genius Playlists within Apple iTunes 8.

Shazam iPhone  application

I’ve been using the Shazam application for several weeks now, but not in time to make by Top iPhone Applications blog post. Oh, and did I mention it’s free?

Shazam’s iPhone app was downloaded 1.5m times and identified 20 million songs in its first ten weeks.  The iPhone application expands upon basic music fingerprinting.  The Music is “tagged”, album art and more information on the artist is saved and the song can be bought on iTunes and related videos can be seen on YouTube.  The synergy between Shazam and iTunes is obvious and to see a great demo of the Shazam application in use, check out the Apple advertisement below:

Does it work?

I’ve been using it for several weeks and I will say that it hits about 90% of the time. I tried to identify the song in the promo for Friday Night Lights, but it failed to find it.  I ended up finding it by searching iTunes for “Friday Night Lights” and found the song Devil Town by Tony Lucca. This song was only available on the soundtrack compilation. However, I found it did match most of the time and it performs well in some seemingly adverse conditions. On Sunday I tried it at Lucas Oil Stadium and it identified the song playing over the loudspeakers even with all the crowd noise.

Try it out yourself! Does it work for you?