Shazam Socializes with Facebook Friends
This post is by Alison McCarthy (@aliiimac). She's an intern at Hypebot.
Every day it seems like music is becoming more and more integrated with our online social networks.
For the last 2 years, over 100 million users have discovered new music through Shazam, identifying songs we're unfamiliar with, or songs that we know we've heard, but can't quite place. Once a user tags a song, the app allowed us to listen to a 30-second sample, find the song on YouTube, purchase it through iTunes, or share it on Twitter or Facebook.
Last week, Shazam announced a new layer of social music discovery: Shazam Friends, now available for the iPhone, with an Android version coming in the next few weeks. Allowing users to connect to their Facebook friends, with Shazam Friends, users can browse a real-time feed of songs that friends have tagged, see all recent tags from a particular friend in one list, and add friends' tags to their Shazam history and playlist.
This feature will undoubtedly increase the amount of time users spend on the Shazam app, as it streamlines music discovery with sociability. Instead of just tagging a song offline and having it exist on the Shazam app, the song can now be spread to our social network.
In recent years, iTunes, YouTube, Pandora, blogs, file sharing, and podcasts have all had major effects on the way we discover new music. However, personal recommendations from our family and friends – whether they're our "real friends" or our "Facebook friends" – continue to influence our taste. And instead of having users create a new network of friends from scratch, Shazam Friends conveniently connects us to our already existing social network.
Shazam's Facebook integration is yet another example of the growing social music space – just this month we saw the launch of Soundtracking, Roqbot, Music WithMe, and Soundcloud's integration with Foursquare.
Each taking a new spin on music as a shared experience, these tools are providing new ways for us to connect our social lives – whether online or offline – to the way we listen to, discover, and share music.
