Indie music world embraces Shazam
Several indie music aggregators have closed a deal with UK based Shazam, who for a number years has been the market leading mobile phone based identification service. In case you didn’t know, Shazam allows users to use their devices to tag and identify songs they hear anywhere. This deal makes lots more indie music recognizable by the service and will thus also be purchasable. Yep, the good thing about this service is that it provides buy links in order to purchase the track or to stream it using Spotify.
We’ve been using it a lot and got to know a load of artists which we had never heard of before, the Belgian radios really being utterly full of rubbish these days. As of mid 2011 Shazam had around 150 milion users and was live in over 200 countries. Talking of a widespread community that labels would like to tap into.
Shazam is not the only one on the market and in the face of new competition from the likes of Soundhound (featured app in Apple’s clunky 12 Days app) they are now broadening their business by tagging TV shows or commercials in order to link to mobile related content.
The app is available with LyricPlay, which brings you a full-screen visualization of lyrics that play in time to the music you’re tagging. Kinda like karaoke on the road.
Here are the basic features:
- Save & listen again (with 30 sec preview)
- Buy tracks easily on iTunes
- Watch music videos and concerts on YouTube
- Share music with friends on Facebook & Twitter
- Learn the lyrics you thought you knew
- Discover new music from your Shazam Friends and Shazam Charts
- Find out when an artist is on tour or has a new album available – via e-mail
- Use it when you don’t have a signal
The fact it keeps you updated on new releases is a feature I especially adore. You can easily imagine this service being linked to your database of stored music to learn when a new album will be released. Now that would be a power machine.
Anyone?
