It’s official now: Apple is buying Shazam – a music recognition service. A recent rumor had suggested that the Cupertino based fruit company was working on its largest acquisition to date. The rumor had suggested that Apple was ready to buy Shazam music recognition service very soon.
The rumor had suggested that the deal was already finalized and that an announcement could be made before the end of this year or even as soon as this week. Apple has now made the acquisition official by saying that “We are thrilled that Shazam and its talented team will be joining Apple.” While this deal is expected to be huge, even in terms of the $3 billion acquisition of Beats all those years ago, both companies remained silent about the financial information.
Apple has confirmed its Shazam acquisition in a statement to BuzzFeed News and other publications:
“We are thrilled that Shazam and its talented team will be joining Apple. Since the launch of the App Store, Shazam has consistently ranked as one of the most popular apps for iOS. Today, it’s used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, across multiple platforms,” said Apple’s spokesperson Tom Neumayr
He further added that “Apple Music and Shazam are a natural fit, sharing a passion for music discovery and delivering great music experiences to our users. We have exciting plans in store, and we look forward to combining with Shazam upon approval of today’s agreement.”
Shazam has released the following statement upon its acquisition by Apple:
“We are excited to announce that Shazam has entered into an agreement to become part of Apple. Shazam is one of the highest rated apps in the world and loved by hundreds of millions of users and we can’t imagine a better home for Shazam to enable us to continue innovating and delivering magic for our users.”
For those unfamiliar, Shazam is an intelligent service capable of recognizing any musical track as it is playing. The service is extremely helpful in identifying a song that’s playing in a public space or on the radio and you wanna know the name of the song and its artist. The Shazam app not only identifies the name of the song, its artist and other details, the app also integrates with Spotify and Apple Music and allows you to easily add that identified track to your desired playlist. Both Apple Music and Spotify offer a separate Shazam list to make it easy for you to see what you’ve discovered using the app.
Shazam is a UK based company and it was founded in 1999. Initially, it was launched as a phone-based music recognition service that allowed its users to call into a special number to identify songs. Nowadays, the company has turned into an app-based service for mobile operating systems. The Shazam app has been downloaded more than 1 billion times across multiple mobile operating systems.
Shazam is not going to be something new on iOS. Siri on iPhone or iPad makes use of Shazam when a user asks her to identify the song being played in the surrounding. All the returning details are provided by Shazam.
At this point, Apple has not revealed its future plans for Shazam. But, we might not have to wait long to find out more about Shazam’s future once the deal is finalized.
[via BuzzFeed News]