Apple To Acquire Music Recognition Service Shazam
A new report claims that Apple is nearing a deal to buy the song identification app, Shazam, which could be on announced on the 13th of December.
One source describes the deal as in the nine figures; another puts it at around £300 million ($401 million). We are still asking around. Notably, though, the numbers we’ve heard are lower than the $1.02 billion (according to PitchBook) post-money valuation the company had in its last funding round, in 2015.
Shazam was founded in 1999 and has long been one of the most popular song identification apps on all platforms. Shazam announced last year that it had reached one billion downloads on smartphones. But, only recently did it start seeing profitability by incorporating advertisements and tying up with music streaming apps such as Spotify and Apple Music. It essentially directs the traffic from its app to these music streaming services by providing streaming links to a recently identified song.
It will be interesting to see how Apple implements Shazam into Apple Music and how it’ll affect the Spotify integration within the core Shazam app since Spotify is Apple’s biggest music streaming rival right now.
Apple said in September that its music streaming service had more than 30 million subscribers, a rapid rise but still trailing industry leader Spotify which said it had 60 million paying users as of July and 80 million more on its free service.
