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Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

Why would Apple pay for Shazam? It’d be totally trivial to recreate their service if you are Apple. My guess is Shazam have patents and Apple will stop this feature on Android, one of the most compelling features of the new pixel is always on Shazam equivalent.

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The usage-related data sets that Shazam has collected over its operational history are likely the biggest driver of value for this deal. Think about the insight you could gain by cross-referencing Shazam lookups with iTunes downloads. Probably lots of insight in how certain genre fan bases intersect, good predictive analytics on time-to-monetization of hot underground bands, etc

This is such a good point. Apple Music (and Spotify) are pouring money into people who stay on the beat. To this day this is still very analog (which in many ways is a good thing). But when your Apple or Google or whomever you must see the power of using basic statistics to do some part of this. (You could use ML too but that is super overkill most likely).

They are already contracting with Shazam to answer "Siri, what song is this?"

It could just be that owning the goose makes more sense than buying eggs at their volume.

No my point is why pay huge sums when if you have all the songs in the world at hand, watermarking and searching those watermarks is trivial. I looked into this a while back and the algorithms/libs to do this extremely accurately are available.

Obviously the problem is getting access to ever song and keeping it up to date with new ones.

Perhaps Apple is interested in Shazam's userbase and it's metrics (popularity of Shazamming various songs, etc.)

Seems for them the cost (financially and in terms of overhead) of building that team vs. buying a very experienced one was not worth it. They almost have ~$300 billion just sitting around.

It's naive to think that a company that has been operating for decades only has capability that is implementable in a weekend. Surely there are plenty of edge cases with certain songs/genres and how they mix with various environmental noises. That in addition to already having the system scaled, and having a team of people who are intimately familiar with maintaining that system.

Then there's also the userbase. Even if you successfully clone the app, most Shazam users won't even know it exists.

The basics might not be that hard, but you can be pretty sure that Shazam has perfected the tech in 15 years of operation while aquiring hundreds of millions of users in the process. Apple also has more money than anyone, it might just make more sense to just buy it and integrate the brand and userbase.

How does one look up what patents Shazam has? or is this a situation where it's possible but any patent worth a penny obfuscates the owner?

Shazam has an Excellent patent. Very broad coverage. A lot harder and less effective using other means for this purpose.

https://www.google.co.uk/patents/US6990453

A brief perusal, and that seems incredibly broad.

They probably have technology related to voice recognition that makes it valuable.

Surprised I haven't seen anyone mention this angle yet.

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