Music recognition app Shazam has surpassed the milestone of 300 million monthly active users worldwide.
Apple, which acquired Shazam for $400 million in 2018, doesn’t often publish specific user stats about its apps, so today’s news offers a rare bit of insight into the growth of the Shazam platform.
In August 2022, Apple revealed that the app had surpassed 70 billion song recognitions, and at the time, reported that Shazam had 225 million monthly active users worldwide.
In June 2021, the app surpassed 1 billion Shazams per month, and in May 2022, it surpassed two billion lifetime installs.
Shazam first launched as a text message service in the UK in August 2002, letting users identify songs by dialing “2580” on their phone and holding it up as a song played.
They were then sent an SMS message telling them the song title and the name of the artist. Crazy by Gnarls Barkley was the most Shazamed song using the “2580” text service.
In July 2008, the Shazam app launched on Apple’s App Store and arrived on Android in October 2008. Shazam was acquired by Apple for $400 million, in September 2018.
Apple says that Shazam, one of the longest-standing apps on the App Store, “has been one of the earliest and strongest signals” over the past 20 years “of what the world is listening to”.
The company also notes that some of the fastest-growing areas for Shazam’s userbase are in countries in Africa and that African genres have been some of the “fastest-growing” genres on the platform.
Rema’s Calm Down was No.1 on the Top 100 in 2023 Shazam chart, after spending more time atop the global Shazam chart over the past year than any other song.
Rush by Ayra Starr and People by Libianca also ended the year among the world’s top Shazamed songs.
The remix to Calm Down featuring Selena Gomez finishes the year at No. 12 on the global songs chart — the highest entry ever for a song by an African artist.
Apple says that the global reach of K-Pop also continued to increase on Shazam this year, and that the app’s user numbers have seen a notable growth in South Korea.
More K-Pop songs have made it to the Shazam global charts in 2023 than in any previous year, with emerging band FIFTY FIFTY reaching No.3 on the Shazam global charts, marking the first time a K-Pop act other than BTS or one of its members has charted this high.
Música Mexicana also saw significant growth on the app in the last 12 months, with the only five tracks from this genre to enter the US Shazam Top 10 all doing so within the last year.
Elsewhere at Shazam, the app recently added a new hub that allows its users to discover personalized live music events within their area.
The new feature, called ‘Concerts’, makes use of users’ Shazam history to deliver curated event recommendations. This provides users the ability to browse, search, and filter by artist, date, location and explore trending concerts all in one app.
In 2021, Apple Music started using Shazam’s technology to identify tracks in DJ Mixes so that rightsholders get paid.
