Apple has completed its acquisition of Shazam
nr.apple.com
nr.apple.com
I've been planning to do more write-ups from past hackdays, such as building a functional Shazam experience in client side JavaScript and other visualisations. For example one time, I repurposed a WebGL globe to plot music recognitions over it. I don't have access to the Shazam tag stream anymore, but you can get a feel for how this looked as I've applied near real-time Wikipedia edits on the globe instead: https://umaar.com/globe/
a) Include Node.js scripts for converting raw big data (the raw Shazam stream) into something usable for visualisations.
b) Contain Node.js scripts & utilities for automating the creation of maps focussed on particular geographic locations.
c) Contain client side JavaScript for displaying all the individual map tiles onto an interactive map & Google Maps API code to query for places of interest (like a club, shopping center) which may explain heavy usage of Shazam in a particular location.
For the globe, which is unrelated to the datamaps, here's the original WebGL globe which someone did in 2011: https://github.com/cedricpinson/globetweeter
The Wikipedia edits version of the globe I did: https://github.com/umaar/wiki-globe - happy to do a write up of this if people think it'll be useful.
This thread is a good one, though, so we won't bury it as a dupe.
With all that said, PLEASEEEEEE don't ruin it, Apple. Specifically meaning I love it's integration with Spotify. I will be bummed if that goes away for an exclusive Apple Music integration.
The user value to time investment ratio is off the charts for Shazam. I love music and what they have done for it, especially in the context of other music apps like Spotify et al.
Second the Don't Ruin It Apple plea, but congrats to the creators on a well-deserved exit.
I used Shazam a long time ago, so dunno how it had changed, but it certainly isn't a novel idea.
and Google will do it passively without ever needing to open it as an app.
Not saying I agree with this, but given how most acquisitions go, other services don't survive long. Apple Music has an Android app, but that's more of a halo effect kind of thing to get people in the ecosystem and (eventually) switch to iOS.
A generalization if I ever saw one.
Here's a recent book of them, to help you get "in" on the "hip slang" of tomorrow:
And the original Senator Claghorn that Foghorn Leghorn was channeling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBE92naflJ0
1) That I've lost interest in music myself (I didn't).
2) That whether some other people might not lose music was disputed. Perhaps you imagined me as some strange creature in a cave that has never heard or known of people that maintain their interest in music to their late age.
3) That the fact that some other people don't lose interest in music is relevant. I was making a general statement ("it's also rare"). Most people do lose interest in music compared to their younger years. That's not some fringe claim, it's borne out by buying patterns and studies. People tend to stick to the music of their youth time and again. Even the new artists they discover tend to be of the same genres and styles in vogue when they were younger.
It doesn't mean "older people have no use for Shazam".
It means "as it has been observed statistically, _most_ older people don't seem to have a use for Shazam and any random older person is more likely to fall into that category than the rest of the older people".
Carl Craig is old too.
>Have you never heard an old song you half-recognized and thought “huh, what band is that again?”
Yes, but this is not such a large part of the older demographic's lifestyle for the app to matter much to them.
Old people also want to send their dickpicks too, but they don't flock to Snapchat.
But, honestly, I don't know how all this is controversial, unless someone is 20 and all their friends are too.
I'd expect anybody over 30 or so to verify that even if music is still a big deal for them, it's not as much for most of their friends as it was in their teen years and early 20s.
Unless you're 30 and all your friends are eg. DJs and techno-heads or heavy-metal fans still rocking those leather pants, the usual course is that they are more interesting in their careers, families, new babies, and binge watching TV and surfing, than following music, even if that was a big part of their identity in their teens. Is that inaccurate?
/s
/s
Behold, the average HN user I was referring to
This data would be incredibly valuable to companies trying to market and sell music. Like labels, and now, Apple. Not to mention keeping that data now out of the hands of others.
There is another reply to me that snarkily opines that the average HNer doesn't engage in social events, which is a bit humorous really because a more correct statement is that most people are socializing at social events, not doing inference on background music. I can say that I have never, ever seen another person pull out shazam in public.
It also makes sense if the scope of the product is not enough for it to make anyone pay for it (except as part of a larger product).
That's not the case for an app you might take out a couple of times a day (at best) to check some tune for 10 seconds.
I'm not the original commenter, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest—they use it to find out what a song is that they hear & like?
I also use My Shazams as a potential mix list. If I have an item in My Shazams, it caught my attention for some reason. Just putting those tracks together into a set has worked out pretty well. It gets tricky if I'm using my phone as the streaming source. At that point, I usually just take a screen grab. If it's an individual track, I have artist/track name, and if it's a mix, I can use the playhead position to narrow down which track it was later.
So a pretty narrow demographic for the feature though...
Also, diabetes narrow? 30 million have it in the US, I'd say those are way more than DJs that need to recognize tunes, and have much more motive to use an app that helps them keep track of something that can have huge impact on their health...
If you're only going to take one person's usage then, yeah, I guess it's pretty narrow. How about another example for from the same person. As a video editor I'm constantly having to find "hip/trendy/cool" music for video edits. These clients typically like music that I do not normally listen to, but I know it's something they would like when I hear it. I'll let it live in My Shazams until one day I need to find something. I've impressed more than one client with the ability to pull out a "fresh" song for them. Clients appreciate that sort of thing.
How about it? We've just added video editor looking for cool music to DJ. We could add tens such cases more, but all those combined are still narrow demographics.
If only Soundcloud/Mixcloud integrated it so you saw the current track while the mix played - likely avoided for copyright deniability?
In fact, as an uploader, you can still see it (I don't know why), but not as a listener. As an example, here's a screenshot of me viewing my own upload: https://imgur.com/a/REpxOgx
Editing tools still allow you to post accurate timestamps: https://i.imgur.com/gZabJUx.png
There's also a browser extension that modifies Mixcloud pages to display the tracklists again, but they're useless since no uploader has an incentive to go through the painful process of entering timestamps, and that process is now crowdsourced anyway thanks to 1001tracklists.
This looks to me like an acquihire for the ML/AI/DL talent. So basically, yes they will be diverted to other projects.
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[1]: https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
Just to jog people's memory, patent threats were sent to others doing similar things [0]. Not sure if that represents Shazam or not, but if so, they'll fit in perfectly with Apple.
I've never heard of Apple threatening individuals in the Open Source community -- am I missing something?
Not particularly. With conditionals added, we can differentiate any behavior and pretend similarities don't exist.
I was at a live jazz concert last night, and the trio started playing a riff on tune I recognized but couldn't exactly place. SoundHound nailed it (Sonny Rollins "Four"), while Shazam had no idea.
On a sidenote: It's surprising that Google isn't more useful in those searches either. Often I have to search for rare releases by relying on lyrics and Google's results are plain terrible. I understand that the lyrics are probably nowhere listed and idnexed, but considering that even the rarest releases are uploaded by someone on Youtube, some kind of auto transcription feature would be very helpful.
Sure, it's a niche interest, but the Discogs user base is still huge.
I don't think the overall UX, song recognition, tag tracking will be ruined
> Specifically meaning I love it's integration with Spotify. I will be bummed if that goes away for an exclusive Apple Music integration.
Well that was pretty much what Apple paid for. I can already see that all my shazam tags automatically show up in Apple Music for me. Clearly this is just becoming another growth channel for Apple music which means their Spotify integration will likely be diminished or end.
That was happening before the acquisition as well
I've never used Shazam, but I used a similar feature on my LG Chocolate back in the day. How is Shazam any different than what my LG Chocolate did (aside from the Spotify integration)?
Expecting people to know how is it different from an LG Chocolate is just absurd...
That said, Shazam is actually older, having started as a shortcode service in the UK way back in 2002.
How exactly did this come to be?
That's the anthology I want to read.
It's also pretty garbage for classical music.
I remember Adam Neely (A musician/jazz composer/youtuber) mentioning in a Q&A, that for songs they played live for a television broadcast, backing tracks were added underneath and it was mixed as close as possible to the originals, among other reasons for the purpose of them being better "shazamable".
What are you referring to here?
It doesn't recognize you singing because it doesn't have the same spectral content as the full song. Shaman doesn't really identify tunes, it identifies recordings. (And it is amazing to me that it works at all)
I wish someone would do the same thing for commercials on TV. Auto detect the commercial and advance the DVR by its exact duration
They've had it for years now. I was skipping commercials on my HTPC back in 2007-ish. I think the older Tivo's also had this ability.
AFAIK that's not the case of Shazam where a read-only database would be enough. Sure eventually you have to manage multiple versions of your app and be able to gradually update your DB, but that's still simple stuff compared to the problem of how to make money.
Not really "magic" how it works but still pretty amazing that I can pull the phone out of my pocket any time I hear a song I like and immediately see the band/title.
Is it on by default? Cos that sounds really creepy.
[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8q8ee3/shazam-kee...
That's really sweet—I wonder how much storage that requires? I would have expected it to require a lot, but if it's on a phone, then maybe not that much?
For anyone else finding this as implausible as I was, apparently the Pixel has a local database of 17,300 tracks. Still pretty impressive though.
https://uk.pcmag.com/news/91606/googles-pixel-2-phones-recog...
https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/09/googles-next-generation-mu...
https://github.com/jvbalen/soundofshazam/blob/master/sound_o...
And an example output (try Shazam-ing it!):
He also got some legal threats just for publishing code he created himself.
[0] http://royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/06/creating-shazam-in-java/
I think it's a good thing, because often there are good comments in response to downvoted comments. Letting people delete comments would make the discussion hard to follow.
It was informative to myself at least.
Separately: there was nothing wrong with gnulinux's comment. It was obviously posted for the pleasure of sharing information, and didn't put down either the GP or Shazam.
I actually bought Shazam on android after repeated attempts at getting google to find music in the same way - they're laughably bad.
that said, i still prefer shazam because it's an actual app, whereas google's implementation is a button that sometimes appears in the google app, and sometimes doesn't, seemingly at random.
Shazam was founded in 1999-2000 ish and was live by 2002, longer ago than many people realise. The fingerprinting method they used was a novel one, and they successfully deployed it in a couple of years, with a database of two million tracks, in a system that could be used by dialling a number from any phone. It's an extraordinary and rare example of taking a research method and getting it to work at scale in the face of real constraints, in the process producing something that most people would never have imagined could be done.
Would really be interested if someone has tried other approaches and can comment.
This is a really nice paper as well, but the Shazam method is more exciting because of its focus on the search part of the problem. Audio fingerprinting wasn't an entirely new field of course - the Philips paper also cites several prior publications.
The big limitation of all these methods is that they are robust to EQ and other degradations but not at all to variations in timing between frames. So they work well for identifying different instances of the same recording, but not at all for matching different performances, or for "query-by-humming".
The interesting thing is: most of these songs are on YouTube, so in theory Google could build a better Shazam.
The remaining thing I don't understand now is how the heck they managed to negotiate the license for all the songs they have in the database. A friend of mine had a major website for lyrics, and he got some legal trouble from the record companies. When he tried to buy a license to display the lyrics, after some back and forth, they basically said they're not interested in licensing. This was in the early 2000s before streaming took off. Since that time I have the impression that often legal and social problems are much harder to solve than technological ones.
(o) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_%28application%29#Early...
I have worked on integrating a shazam like library inside an app. We have looks at more than 12 solutions before finding a company with a song recognition library good enough to be called shazam like. It is by no mean a small feat you can reproduce during a weekend.
1)New song is released
2)It starts being "shazamed" by various people - it's becoming trendy
3)Large stores that differntiate themselves by being trendy want to play trendy songs first
4)They pay Shazam to tell them which songs are trendy
5)The stores play them
6)Customers "shazam" those songs in the store
7)Customers view the store as trendy
8)Now four instances have profited: Shazam, the store, the musician and the customers (for having found a trendy song very early on)
Predicting a Billboard Music Hit with Shazam Data - Cait O'Riordan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcTPvxo8SXY)
The different 'shazam'd songs were also connected to locations and user demographics so if you wanted a track that was going to be big in a specific community you could get a good guess.
Probably, one of the best results from this acquisition.
>Exclusive?
>Start charging money?
>Patents?
Not to mean that people shouldn't make money, but acquisition means that there will be change.
I will be very disappointed if this comes to light, and the only integration we're left with is Apple Music.
Probably not likely, but probably not improbable either.
It's almost guaranteed.
Will they? Don't forget, the information flow is 2-way here, users get something useful out of it but Shazam (and now Apple) also learns what stuff is trending. If anything I actually lean towards them keeping or even enhancing Spotify and other service integration, at least as long as those services are viable: it effectively creates a direct channel into competing services that tells Apple exactly what stuff people want out of them, which they could then use directly in making Apple Music more competitive in turn.
Even if we take as granted that boosting Apple Music is a major concern to Apple, doesn't that at least maybe seem like an equally or more valuable way to do it? It doesn't make any users angry either or act as bad PR, they aren't taking anything away, and they get a massive information channel into every competitor and even real-world venues.
>And maybe no more Android support.
By the same token, if Apple wants to boost Apple Music in general then having information on music popularity and trends coming in from the population of Android users too also seems helpful.
The state of third-party apps on the Watch is awful. It usually takes 10 seconds for an app to start on a Series 2, and sometimes they just get stuck on that loading screen. If you manage to get an app running, the UI library has ridiculous bugs like accidentally enabled screen rotation where turning your wrist flips the content by 90°. (Unlike a phone, there's no reason at all for a watch to react to orientation changes.)
I could sort of understand these deficiencies for a hurried 1.0 product, but it's been three years and it's still this bad. There's no API for watch faces either. I get the impression that Apple truly doesn't want third parties on the Watch at all.
Congrats to Shazam though!
I think the idea that making Shazam ad-free “makes sense” is actually fascinating because if it were google or amazon buying Shazam, I would assume it would remain littered with ads.
[0] https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
People want certain sounds, and want more of that sound.
Shazam has been a key component of the discovery process.
I think our scale makes things very interesting. We currently index over 20 hours of video every second and to date we've indexed over 11.5B videos.
Feel free to reach out to me directly at r@pex.com.
[0] https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2018/06/22/video-search...
When Apple acquired Beast we heard about how Jimmy Iovine and Dre were going to bring their understanding and expertise to Apple's music service. This now seems to have been a lot of bluster though. Apple had such a head start with iTunes, missed the boat with streaming, spent a fortune on Beats and finally seemed to be getting serious about their streaming music offering. And the product has been somewhere between underwhelming and "just OK."
It's interesting to see that Apple's solution is to just buy their way out of their discovery problem. For a company with unlimited resources and great design skills it's strange that Apple is not really good at building services.
Back in the day, people didn’t realize the competitive advantage it gave MS to have a version for Macs. They could sell into large enterprises that may only have 5-10% Macs with a cross platform offering. Their competitors couldn’t.
My comment was more geared towards OP's "well, now they're going to cancel the Android version" when Apple literally just released a new version of Apple Music for Android with platform-specific features: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/09/19/apple-music-android-aut...
http://royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/06/creating-shazam-in-java/
It was either Google Music, Spotify or Apple Music that would have acquired it.
I’m a 100% sure this will end up as a deep integration with Siri and the existing Apple Music app.
Apple has always done well with its acquisitions. Buy small companies that do one small thing and do it extremely well, and fuse that with the Apple ecosystem, quality and rigor.
Congrats to the Shazam team for going with Apple. Google would have most definitely messed it up like they did with Songza. I will never forgive them for that.
I wonder if Apple will allow them to keep this feature.
It has to have been published "properly" though, which in the day and age of self-publishing directly to the net doesn't work so well.
http://willdrevo.com/fingerprinting-and-audio-recognition-wi...
The platforms will swallow our options until we have no recourse but to jump platforms.
Unless they make that too difficult, too.
I wonder if that will be more or less possible now. Maybe with a Shortcut?
It's literally a 30-minute commercial for the app (including a play-along game you do with the app).
I agree a drawback is there is no history. I take a screenshot of the results.
What happened 2 years ago that you think affected its recognition quality?
One specific thing I recall is that more false negatives started popping up - which is bad over UX (vs. no matches at all).
The change was (perceivedly) strong enough for me to stopping using Shazam.
Who needs shazam? Apple's just looking for more AI chops. G's already all over it.
Having song identification built into your iDevice is a nice value add for the consumer though
A few taps on my phone and a car shows up to my exact location in 2 minutes?! And that's it? No calling dispatch and hoping they'd show up eventually (sometimes they didn't). No fumbling with cash or tip or anything.
It was like magic.
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/09/nyregion/driving-a-taxi-d...
The change for taxi drivers has only started to come after Uber was already making it big, e.g.: "For what the union involved says is the first time ever, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) declared taxi drivers are legally “employees”"
http://www.peoplesworld.org/article/nlrb-declares-taxi-drive... (2015)
They're more like landlords than employees.
My uncle was a taxi driver around the same time (maybe a little earlier?) and was paid a livable wage plus benefits.
>"There are so many drivers available that it's an owner's market," said Edward G. Rogoff, a professor of management at Baruch College who studies the taxi industry. "Drivers are competing for these low-prestige, low-pay jobs, which pushes their incomes down further."
You also missed the main part of the article. Simple stated there were too many taxi drivers. Now I don't know about you but if I were to have that many people willing to work for me its either the pay is good or working conditions.
This sucks because like the article mentions, it becomes an owner's market. On top of this it's also NYC. No taxi driver is gonna be able to afford many of the places they get fares from.
>"In '87, '88, you could make $100 a day, maybe more," said Sam Khan, a 37-year-old driver from Pakistan. But now, he said with a grimace, "maybe $60, $65."
This is the same "Walmart doesn't pay its workers and destroys local businesses argument". People work there, and people shop there. Walmart didn't make anyone do anything, and neither does Uber.
In a free market, people do what is valuable to them. How can you say those people aren't? If it's not a free market, then how is it the corporations fault? Don't hate the player, hate the government.
This is why minimum wage and other laws exist.
See also: race to the bottom.
Effectively, Walmart/Uber/etc get to double-dip -- they pay their employees less than a living wage, and based on the US tax structure, don't have to pay for the government assistance programs that their employees end up needing to make ends meet.
But that was already the situation before Uber came to the market? For all we know, driving Uber might have moved some of the people less dependent on the government assistance programs.
This is not a settled question in economics. The idea that minimum wage laws help the poor is at the very least debatable.
Essentially, I believe that when the government thinks for the people like declaring a minimum wage the people tend to avoid thinking about it themselves.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Debate_over_conse...
Also, inflation. When everyone is making at least $15 /hr then that $15 means less than it used to. All costs of goods go up to match the new supply of "wealth". Burger flippers make $15 /hr but burgers now cost $10.
In more meta terms: manipulating the market is never easy if it's possible to do successfully at all.
When you're in financial difficulty - say your 0 hour contract doesn't bring enough money to pay the bills - you'll take whatever terms and conditions Uber is giving to you. Because you need to fulfill your basic needs.
I don't think that many Uber drivers are doing it by choice, they just don't talk about it to avoid bumming clients and getting a poor rating.
I'd like the slickness of the Uber app with a bit more ethics and I would be a good client.
Not only did I not assume that, the exact opposite is true.
Uber _just_ created all of their jobs; they didn't used to exist. Everyone started working there because they wanted to. It's valuable to them to spend their time driving. It's not like Uber forced closed other companies at a 1:1 ratio and force hired their workers for less.
These are all voluntary transactions.
Depends if it's a sellers' or buyers' market.
Ubers model works because they externalize a lot of operating costs to ignorant (under-informed) "contractors", and obscuring the economic realities from customers.
So I think it's fair to hate the player.
By removing the artificial market controls, people can voluntarily choose to get paid less, and make something (which is better than nothing).
I think people that complain about Uber not providing "basic employment rights and both minimum and living wages" don't really know what it's like to be poor. Talk to an Uber driver sometime, they're grateful for the opportunity to make some cash on their own terms.
Haven't you just walked into an argument for abolishing the minimum wage here?
(I'm not arguing for or against minimum wage. I'm just observing that the tone of your comment seems to suggest you don't like the idea, but this sentence seemed to be a good argument for it.)
It's not their second Android app either.