Shazam Celebrates 100 Billionth Song Recognized, Along With Other Impressive Records

22 years ago, Shazam, the world's most popular and beloved music recognition app, was born. 2018 marked a significant turning point when Apple acquired Shazam for $400 million to integrate the service into its ecosystem of operating systems and streaming platforms. After 6 years of being 'in Apple', Shazam has achieved an important milestone: 100 billion song identifications, along with a series of impressive records revealed.

To help give a better idea of ​​the scale and popularity of Shazam, Apple shared some interesting facts about the service:

1. 100 billion identifications, equivalent to 12 songs for every person on Earth.
2. It would take a human 3,168 years to recognize these 100 billion songs, assuming that person did nothing but recognize a new song every second.
3. Benson Boone's "Beautiful Things" was recognized 10 million times in just 178 days. At that rate, it would take 4,800 years for the song to reach 100 billion Shazam recognitions.

Modern Shazam is an application that supports song recognition based on audio input in real time, extremely fast and convenient, and is a service that is directly integrated into Apple's operating systems.

For example, if you have an iPhone with an Action button, you can map Shazam to it and quickly identify the music that's playing, (older iPhones can do this from Action Center).

But few people know that before it could be used as conveniently as it is today, in 2002, when Shazam was first introduced in the UK, this application required users to dial a short number and hold the phone next to the music source to perform identification. After that, users would receive the corresponding song name via SMS message.

Six years later, Shazam launched as an iOS app and by 2011, the app had achieved its first billion recognitions. Today, Shazam is available on all modern platforms as a standalone app that is renowned for its fast and accurate music recognition.

Lesley Montoya

Update 09 December 2024