TechTheDay

Apple is one of the world leaders when it comes to technology. They created the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. They created Siri and invested in artificial intelligence technology to create it. They also used artificial intelligence technology to create the iPhone X. So it makes one curious why Apple went out of their way to purchase the company Shazam. And not only is Apple willing to buy the company, they’re prepared to pay as much as $400 million for it.

What’s Shazam?

Shazam is a company that developed an app with the same name. The app can identify any song that’s being played near the user. Of course, the phone must be connected to the Internet for it to work. Sometimes, though, the app can get the answer wrong or it can’t guess the correct answer at all. This is because either two songs sound alike or the volume of the song being guessed is too weak to be picked up by the app. In most cases though, the app will be able to guess the song no matter how obscure the song is. It can also do a lot of other things like creating a playlist of the songs you’ve searched. In fact, the app is so good, Apple’s Siri uses some of Shazam’s capabilities to identify songs when Siri is asked.

So no wonder the $400 million tag price: Shazam is brilliant and it is worth at least that much. But if Apple needs a music identification program, won’t just building one from scratch be cheaper? Apple is bigger than Shazam and if Apple needs servers to store snippets of songs or create an app to identify songs, then Apple can easily do that under a $400 million budget.Of course, Apple could have just been acting very lazy and wants to integrate an already-developed software, rather than just develop something on their own. But if they are being lazy, then this is the first instance of Apple doing it: Apple has always developed their own software.

Another Motive

So some have speculated that Apple has a different motive for buying Shazam. For example, some believe that the move to buy Shazam is related to Apple Music’s rivalry with Spotify. A rather good guess, because Spotify is big enough to beat back Apple Music, especially since Shazam already adds searched music to your Spotify playlist. Shazam is also able to refer people to Spotify and Google Play Music so buying Shazam would stop referring people to them and would exclusively refer to Apple’s music platform.

Another speculated motive has something to do with Shazam’s 100 million users. The data of these users is very appealing. According to a BBC report, Shazam has more than a decade’s worth of data about people’s listening preferences. Apple has less than Spotify so they’re planning to buy Shazam in hopes to be able to use all the collected data to compensate for their weakness.

Of course, there’s also the fact that Siri is already tapping into Shazam’s capabilities. If any of their competition gets hold of Shazam before Apple did, it would mean a huge blow for Siri’s available functions.

Whether Shazam will be exclusively developing for Apple and the iOS now remains unknown, although this should be expected. Apple gaining exclusive access to Shazam’s technology and data, while depriving referrals and a brilliant app to rivals for $400 million seems like a good bargain. However, we cannot discount the possibility that Google will be quickly developing their own version of Shazam. They also already have the database and enough data to be able to ignore the loss of Shazam in their lists of available apps should they actually make a Shazam replacement.