Shazam Reaches Major Milestone With Five Billion Tags

Shazam, the fourth-most popular iOS app of all time, announced today that fans have used their service to identify songs and interact more with TV shows and ads over five billion times. Marking the five billionth tag was P!nk’s new song “Blow Me One Last Kiss”. While Shazam’s roots are in music identification, the company has made significant strides in television and advertisements – undoubtedly accelerating their growth in the media engagement category.

It was last year that Shazam launched their Shazam for TV service, working with brands like Pepsi, Procter and Gamble, Sony, Toyota. Shazam also developed partnerships with broadcasters to create interactive second-screen experiences for major shows and live events including the Super Bowl, the GRAMMY Awards, the Billboard Music Awards, the MTV Movie Awards, and American Idol. Most recently – and perhaps most notably – the company partnered with NBC and the Olympic Games to give fans unique content on athletes, up-to-the-minute information on results, video highlights, medal counts, the latest tweets from the athletes, and the music during the broadcast.

“Shazam is achieving growth and customer engagement that is unparalleled, with more than two million people downloading the app each week and using it ten million times every day,” said Shazam CEO Andrew Fisher. “We have invested in our technology and developed strong partnerships with broadcasters, brands, artists and music labels to provide our fans with the most innovative way to discover, explore and share the content that interests them most.”

The company had initially built a reputation for itself with music recognition, which the company says is still at the core of its capabilities today. Given their impressive user numbers from all around the world, the company has created Shazam’s Tag Charts, which are said to be predictive measures of which songs and artists are resonating with the public and will become commercial hits in the weeks and months ahead.

“It took Shazam ten years to see its first billion tags, then ten months to achieve the second billion. And in just a year, we have gone from two billion tags to five billion,” said Fisher.  “We look forward to this kind of growth continuing as we give people more exciting reasons to use Shazam.”

Shazam has also invested to improve its tagging speed, identifying music and other content in as little as one second, and launched unlimited tagging in its free app for iOS and Android devices. 

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Hisham Dahud is a Senior Analyst for Hypebot.com. Additionally, he is the head of Business Development for Fame House and an independent musician. Follow him on Twitter: @HishamDahud