HOW IT WORKS
Music-recognition software
We discover how apps like Shazam work their magic
YOU WILL LEARN
> How music recognition software works on your devices
Shazam is Touch ID for tunes: it can analyse and recognise a song’s audio fingerprint
Key fact
> Apple completed its $400m acquisition of Shazam in 2018 and has been quietly integrating it with iOS and iPadOS ever since. You can get it to recognise songs via Siri or with the dedicated music recognition button in your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch’s Control Centre, and Shazam works from your HomePod too. You can also add Shazam music recognition to your Mac.
In recent years, Apple has quietly bought some of our favourite apps. It owns the weather app Dark Sky and is in the process of integrating it with its own weather widgets, it bought the reading app Texture to create Apple News, and it also acquired the music recognition app Shazam. We’ve been using Shazam for years to recognise songs, and because we’re bad people we’ve occasionally used it on our Apple Watch during too-difficult pub quizzes (ahem, only kidding). But we mainly use it as a force for good, to identify and save the great music we didn’t know about. Our Apple Music and Spotify libraries would be much poorer without it.