Shazam identifies over a billion songs per month, says Apple – Times of India

A few years ago Apple had bought popular music app Shazam. Over the years, Apple has integrated Shazam into iOS and now the app has hit a new milestone. The app — used to identify songs — has hit the billion ‘Shazams’ per month mark. Overall, since its inception the number has now hit a whopping 50 billion.
“With 1 billion recognitions a month, Shazam is one of the most popular music apps in the world. Today’s milestones show not only people’s love for Shazam, but also the ever-growing appetite for music discovery around the world,” says Oliver Schusser, vice president, Apple Music and Beats.
It took Shazam 10 years to reach its first billion tags. Less than 10 years after that, Shazam has crossed 1 billion monthly recognitions and has successfully matched over 50 billion tags with over 51 million songs.
Interestingly, Shazam was launched as a text messaging service back in 2002. The first-ever Shazam result — received via text message — was “Jeepster” by T. Rex. The 50 billionth Shazamed song was Evangeline’s Mandopop song. So far, Tones and I’s “Dance Monkey” is the most Shazamed track of all time.
Like most of Apple’s services, Shazam is designed to protect users’ privacy. When a user initiates Shazam’s music recognition, a digital fingerprint of the audio is created and, within seconds, matched against Shazam’s database of millions of tracks. The digital fingerprint is generated on device, and raw audio is not sent to Apple. This ensures the whole recognition process remains secure and the users’ privacy is protected.
At this year’s WWDC, Apple announced ShazamKit which enables developers to integrate Shazam’s audio recognition technology directly into their apps, making it possible to match not only music to Shazam’s vast catalog of songs, but also to match any prerecorded audio to custom results developers create.