Shazam could boost Apple’s music streaming service.
The music recognition service Shazam is integrated into Siri from iOS 8, identifying a song, TV show, film or ad in a few seconds. Shazam’s relationships with Apple are strong, also thanks to integration with Apple Music, allowing subscribers to play a song discovered by Shazam directly in Apple Music. Shazam is also a popular app with over 1 billion downloads across the different platforms.
TechCrunch is reporting from their sources that Apple is acquiring Shazam, and the deal will be announced next week. According to the publication, the deal would be worth nine figures, something around $400 million, but not as much as Shazam received from the funding in 2015 – $1 billion.
If Apple and Shazam have really reached an agreement, we can expect further integration of the music recognition service into iOS and Apple Music. Remember that Shazam is a huge source of traffic to apps like Spotify, which could be the reason for the acquisition as Apple may be trying to promote its music streaming app more aggressively. Apple Music still has only 30 million paying subscribers, while Spotify has over 60 million out of 140 million overall users.
Source: TechCrunch