Apple’s love story with Shazam. Now what?
Quick Introduction
Lately, we’ve been hearing only negative news about APPLE and their “less” successful 2018. The sales of the new iPhones have been way lower than expected, and Apple is reportedly cutting down on the production plan for the 3 new iPhones by up to one third. This is a huge question mark on the company’s current situation, and only to make things worse, they have lost the top spot of the “ most valuable companies in the world“ coming up just on fourth, after Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet (the company owning Google) who are the first three to top the list.
However, Apple is still said to be the most valuable brand in the world, according to Forbes. But today’s article is not going to be about the new iPhones or whether the company is going to get out of this hardship or even when. It is about an important move that Apple did a few months ago, and also about how it could help them win a battle they barely started.
Apple has officially announced the acquisition of Shazam a few months ago. Probably everybody knows already what Shazam is and how it works. Apple bought it for a reported 400 million $, and one of the most significant parts of this acquisition is the fact that they have also acquired all the patent rights coming with it.
The Second Chapter
Apple set about changing the music industry with the introduction of iTunes Music Store back in 2001. It was meant to help fight back the illegal downloading that was slowly killing the music industry. Now it was about time to start the second chapter of this revolution within the music industry:
Apple entered the music streaming market in 2015 with the release of its Apple Music Service. Since then, it has already reached about 50 million subscribers (as of December 2018). Of course, this is about half of what Spotify, its main competitor has, namely about 96 million paid subscribers (as of December 2018). Personally, I have used most of the music streaming services ,but right now I am only using Spotify, and I find it to be just a bit ahead, at least in terms of playlists and user interface. However, the competition is getting tighter at the top.
Re-directing you from the found song to the app
Up until this point, once you identify a song through Shazam, you have to option to open up that song in Apple Music, but also in all the other services, such as Spotify, Deezer and so on. But now that they have full control of the company, Apple could easily re-direct you to the newly found song only on Apple Music if they wanted to.
It’s all about multi-function integration
My bet on what Apple plans to do, and might implement it soon, would be the integration of the Shazam app within the Apple music app. It would have a certain icon within the apple music app which would allow you to use the song identification system ONLY if you have the Apple Music subscription. That is the key in this whole story: Exclusivity and Integration.
With so many people using Shazam, it is easy to imagine what people would do in order to get access back to the app. And that would probably just be to give up on your Spotify subscription and embark on the Apple Music ship (and also get the first 3 months for free if you’re a new client). Because these two services offer such similar benefits to the customers, it is quite difficult to choose a winner. But if one of them had the song recognition capability built-in, and the other one didn’t, it would probably be the deciding factor on the question of what should I choose.
Doing it the “APPLE WAY”
Yes, but there are some alternatives to Shazam, right? I’m glad you’re asking yourself this question . There are some good alternatives such as SoundHound , Musixmatch or Genius, but Shazam seems to be the best overall option and by far the most popular of these Music Recognition Apps. And after all, one of Apple’s unique selling point is the so called “hardware-software integration”. Whether we are talking about the MacBooks and the MacOS or the iPhones and the iOS, nobody beats APPLE when it comes to having full control of its products and the user experience.
At the end of the day, if one of the Music Streaming services is going to integrate an Music Recognition function within it’s app, I bet that would be APPLE.
