Apple Buys Shazam For $400 Million, Plans To Make It Ad-Free
Apple has completed the process of acquiring Shazam, the popular music identification app. The deal closed at $400 million. With the deal, Apple also made the promise to users to make the app ad-free.
Shazam rose to popularity for its ability to identify songs playing in the background. This includes songs that may be playing on your radio, in a bar, or anywhere around you. The app only needs to listen to a fragment of the song. It can then provide you the name of the song, the artist and even the lyrics.
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Over the years, Shazam added a host of other features such as the ability to identify films and TV shows as well. It also uses AR features where branded codes can be scanned to unlock deals. Apple said that the app has always been one of the favourites and was in fact one of the first apps to be available on the App Store. It also added that Shazam has been downloaded over 1 Billion times in the app store.
It is also known that Shazam has been integrated into Siri. When a user asks Siri to identify a particular song, Siri goes to Shazam’s database to find out. It can be expected that with this move, we can see a deeper integration of the app into Siri and a higher usability.
This does not mean that Shazam will drop its support for Android. The statement by Apple says that the app will be ad-free for ‘all users’ which means that we will see continued support for Android.
