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posted by martyb on Saturday December 09 2017, @01:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-can-name-that-tune-in-2-notes-—-Gomer-Pyle-USMC dept.

Apple is buying music recognition service Shazam. The Shazam app basically uses your microphone to listen to a snippet of whatever music is being played in your vicinity, identify the song, and store it along with a timestamp. But the company was also working on visual recognition technology similar to Google Lens:

Apple is finalizing a deal to acquire Shazam, the app that lets you identify songs, movies, and TV shows from an audio clip, according to TechCrunch. The deal is reportedly for $400 million, according to Recode, which also confirmed the news.

For Apple, the obvious benefit of acquiring Shazam is the company's music and sound recognition technologies. It will also save some money on the commissions Apple pays Shazam for sending users to its iTunes Store to buy content, which made up the majority of Shazam's revenue in 2016, and drove 10 percent of all digital download sales, according to The Wall Street Journal.

A side benefit is if Apple decides to shut down the app, it will hurt competing streaming services like Spotify and Google Play Music, where Shazam sends over 1 million clicks a day, the WSJ reported. Shazam also has a deal with Snapchat. It's unclear how the acquisition will affect any of these agreements.

Related: The Shazam Effect


Original Submission

Related Stories

Google Announces "Lens" Augmented Reality Service 14 comments

Google has announced an augmented reality service that overlays information on top of objects seen by a smartphone camera:

On Wednesday, the search giant announced a big push into augmented reality, which overlays digital images on what you'd normally see through a camera.

The new technology, announced at the company's I/O developer conference, is called Google Lens. It's a way to use your phone's camera to search for information. For example, point your camera at that flower and Google will tell you what kind it is. Point it at a book, and you get information on the author and see reviews. Ditto with restaurants: You'll be able to see reviews and pricing information on a little digital card that appears above the building on your phone's screen.

[...] Google Lens marks a big, ambitious attempt by a mainstream company to get into augmented reality in a way we haven't much seen yet. Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram (owned by Facebook) use AR for now to make you laugh and smile with filters like rainbow vomit or Iron Man masks. That stuff is important, but Google is taking a different approach when it comes to AR: utility.

Indeed, photo filters are very important.


Original Submission

Music Streaming Service Tidal Offers Free Trial as Financial Issues and YouTube Loom Large 27 comments

Two weeks after various outlets reported that Jay-Z's music streaming service Tidal was having money problems, Tidal will offer a 12-day free trial (Dec. 25 to Jan. 5):

Tidal is getting into the holiday spirit. The streaming service is opening up its platform to anyone and everyone for 12 days beginning on Christmas, with no credit card required (a usual requirement for free streaming trials). The free trial will cover Tidal's Hi-Fi tier as well, so if you've been wanting to try out high-fidelity music, now is your chance.

Meanwhile, YouTube has done some work behind the scenes to launch a new attempt at getting people to pay for music:

After years of bickering over rights, YouTube has finally signed all three of the major music record labels into long-term deals. This week, Universal and Sony both reached rights agreements with the Alphabet platform, joining Warner Music Group. Though YouTube still needs to make deals with companies like the Merlin consortium of smaller labels to be fully comprehensive, the way is now paved for it to launch its hotly-tipped streaming service next year. [...] YouTube's anticipated streaming service, dubbed YouTube Remix by Bloomberg, could seem a little late to the party. With Spotify readying for an IPO and swapping stakes with Tencent, Apple music firmly established and Tidal, well, just being Tidal, streaming is already a crowded space.

Alphabet has tried to crack the streaming market before, launching its own premium Google play music service in 2011, but it's not exactly been a smash hit with a market share even smaller than Amazon, Deezer and Tidal's. It launched YouTube Music Key in 2014 to offer ad-free music videos, and this morphed into YouTube Red in 2016. Hopes that this would change the music scene were dashed, however, as YouTube Red gravitated towards entertainment videos instead. The chances are, Alphabet will look to combine its Google Play service with a premium YouTube service for music fans.

Apple Completes Acquisition of Music Recognition Service Shazam, Will Remove Ads 9 comments

Apple closes its $400M Shazam acquisition and says the music recognition app will soon become ad free

Last year, [TechCrunch] broke the news that Apple was buying the music recognition startup and app Shazam for about $400 million, and nearly one year later, the deal has finally closed. Today, Apple announced that it has completed the acquisition, and that it would soon be making the service ad free to use for everyone, removing the app's ad-supported free tier.

[...] It's not clear how Apple longer term will integrate Shazam's core product into its service — a pretty clever piece of technology that can identify a song by hearing a fragment of it. The two main directions appear to be to let it continue to remain a standalone app longer term, or to subsume part or all of it into a bigger Apple Music offering. (The two are not mutually exclusive.)

At $400 million — a figure confirmed to us by several sources when we were first reporting on the deal — Shazam is one of Apple's biggest acquisitions both in music and overall, and it underscores the amount of investment that the iPhone maker is willing to put into expanding its role as a force not just in hardware, but in the services that run on that hardware.

Also at The Verge.

Previously: Apple Buys Music Recognition Service Shazam for $400 Million


Original Submission

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday December 09 2017, @03:11PM (7 children)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Saturday December 09 2017, @03:11PM (#607695) Homepage

    People still buy music from Apple crap? Well, i guess it's back to the tried-and-true method of remembering that snippet of catchy lyrics and then Googling that. Or doing the bare minimum of somehow querying the Apple stuff to get the name of the song, then downloading it somewhere else. You could ask your one gay friend with the Mac or iPhone to give you a hand with it.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 09 2017, @03:22PM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 09 2017, @03:22PM (#607697)

      Yeah, some of us still buy music from Apple (albeit only very occasionally, myself). Why shouldn't we?

      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Saturday December 09 2017, @06:18PM (4 children)

        by bzipitidoo (4388) on Saturday December 09 2017, @06:18PM (#607728) Journal

        Here's the list of sources I try to keep, for obtaining music, books, and so on:

        1. Borrow from friends
        2. Buy used
        3. Borrow from the public library
        4. Buy from Humble Bundle
        5. Record it off the radio or TV
        6. Download it from a source that may or may not be pirate.

        Notice that buying from iTunes is not on my list. Nor is the private record and bookstore. Often, I skip straight to step 6, knowing that the first 5 don't have what I want or that it will be a very long wait. I do not know for certain that what I download is pirated, and do not care to inquire.

        What it comes down to is, don't we want to use our technology? Must we continue to put up with this insanity of artificial scarcity? There are other ways just as good or actually, far better, to compensate artists for their hard work. Clearly, the MAFIAA does not want to change with the times, wants the 1980s back, when there were CDs but not CD burners, and no Internet or mp3 format. We should not accept their crippling restrictions on what is possible, just so they can continue business the way they want. Apple was somewhat on our side when they pushed the MAFIAA into accepting 99 cent downloads. But Apple should not be trusted much. They have their own long history of lockdown and walled gardens going back to the 1980s, when the more open PC platform very nearly pushed them and their proprietary MacIntosh hardware out of business.

        • (Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday December 09 2017, @06:35PM (3 children)

          by frojack (1554) on Saturday December 09 2017, @06:35PM (#607731) Journal

          There are other ways just as good or actually, far better, to compensate artists for their hard work.

          The guy who skips directly to #6 wont be using any of those "other ways", so just stop pretending,

          --
          No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
          • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday December 09 2017, @07:14PM (2 children)

            by bzipitidoo (4388) on Saturday December 09 2017, @07:14PM (#607748) Journal

            You quoted me! Since you seem to be such a believer in copyright, I eagerly await your payment to me for the use of my words.

            • (Score: 3, Touché) by frojack on Saturday December 09 2017, @07:34PM (1 child)

              by frojack (1554) on Saturday December 09 2017, @07:34PM (#607760) Journal

              Since there was no price mentioned, I took what you freely gave, and offered my comment enhancing services free of charge. You agreed to the terms of service, and so did I.

              Oh, look, no star after your name. So much for those "other ways" you so loudly proclaim.
              Maybe see how one of those "other way" [soylentnews.org] is currently working out.

              --
              No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
              • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by bzipitidoo on Saturday December 09 2017, @09:15PM

                by bzipitidoo (4388) on Saturday December 09 2017, @09:15PM (#607795) Journal

                There was a star after my handle, because I did in fact support SoylentNews. However, it seems to have expired.

                But seriously, do you support the current copyright regime? If yes, why??

    • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday December 11 2017, @06:05PM

      by Freeman (732) on Monday December 11 2017, @06:05PM (#608357) Journal

      I find that those with an Apple computer, tend to wall themselves into the entire Apple ecosystem. Which includes iTunes. In fact, most of the time, someone has adopted one wall ecosystem and just uses that. Whether it's iTunes, Google Music, or whatever. I find eMusic to be an interesting solution, but they aren't anywhere near as big as those two.

      --
      Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
  • (Score: 5, Informative) by frojack on Saturday December 09 2017, @06:32PM

    by frojack (1554) on Saturday December 09 2017, @06:32PM (#607730) Journal

    Shazam has been on Apple and Android for like forever, and they used to be good until they packed it full of ads a few years ago, at which point it seems like everyone abandoned them for other similar solutions. Google Baked it into their Google Now (aks "Ok Google") app which they then proceeded to break and fix several times over the years. Sound-Hound outperformed Shazam and then proceeded to add annoying Ads on the notifications. A dozen streaming music services have added this capability to their apps.

    This is an app most people will use once or twice a year. None of them will never launch quick enough to capture that fleeting background music, and most are totally stymied by a live performance or even a substitute drummer.

    Why did Apple need to buy Shazam for their technology? It wasn't that great, they had no unique secrets, and that ship has sailed.

    Recode also recoprts that

    That price would be a significant discount from its last round of funding, which valued the company at around $1 billion; the company had raised at least $140 million since 2002.

    When a company has been around for 15 years and is still raising money with "rounds of funding" (venture capitalists) rather than earning it, you can much guess that the product is going nowhere. You can bet the owners are breathlessly whispering "Thank you Jesus" for this offer, because they were losing money and swirling the drain.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
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