More than 100 Billion Songs Have Been Shazamed
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It’s been seven years since Apple acquired the music recognition service Shazam, and now it’s reached a significant milestone: it’s been used to recognize over 100 billion songs.
Apple announced the news today with some helpful comparisons to put that massive number in context. It’s 12 songs for every single person on earth, or one person identifying one song per second for 3,168 years.
To be clear, this milestone goes back to long before Apple bought Shazam. In fact, it predates even the iPhone or even the iTunes Store. As Apple explains in its press release, the music recognition service has been around since 2002; Apple launched the iTunes Music Store in 2003.
Shazam launched in 2002 as an SMS service in the UK, and back then, music fans would dial 2580, hold up their phones to identify music, and receive the song name and artist via text message. Apple
However, it was the iPhone and the App Store in 2008 that brought Shazam into the mainstream. Shazam was one of the first apps to hit the App Store, and by the summer of 2011, the service had crossed the one billion song threshold.
This monumental milestone not only reflects how much people enjoy using Shazam, but also their appetite for new music. Music discovery is at the core of everything we do, and we keep innovating to make sure music lovers around the world can tap the Shazam button no matter where they hear music playing!Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and Beats
After Apple acquired Shazam in early 2018, it slowly began baking the music recognition features into iOS and macOS, to the point where the standalone app is no longer even needed. It’s still available on the App Store for folks who want to take advantage of advanced music discovery features like concert and tour info, but if all you want to do is recognize songs, your iPhone can do that without any help from the Shazam app. It’s been available in the Control Center since before Apple made it customizable in iOS 18, and added It to the Smart Stack in watchOS 11. You can also easily call it up via Siri on your iPhone or Apple Watch just by asking “What song is this?”
Apple also hasn’t hesitated to embrace and extend when it comes to its music services. Apple Music was one of the first Android apps the company ever launched, and Shazam continues to be available on the Play Store for Android smartphones and even Wear OS smartwatches.
That means there are far more than merely Apple devices contributing to these 100 billion recognitions. From SMS requests in the neolithic smartphone era to modern Android smartphones, folks have been Shazamming away for over two decades across a wide range of platforms, and today, over 300 million folks use Shazam to identify a song at least once every month.
As for the most Shazammed song? That would be Dance Monkey, which Apple says has been tagged over 45 million times.
