Mobile discovery firm Shazam has announced some new stats today, with the big one being that users have tagged 5bn songs, TV shows and ads using its app.
Yes, not just songs any more: Shazam moved into TV a while back, and has been forging partnerships with brands and broadcasters in the US. That said the five billionth tag was a song: Pink’s ‘Blow Me One Last Kiss’.
Other figures: Shazam is still signing up 2m new users every week, and it’s overall user base is tagging 10m pieces of content every day. Overall, the company says it has 225m users – although that’s likely all-time downloads rather than currently-active users.
“It took Shazam ten years to see its first billion tags, then ten months to achieve the second billion,” says CEO Andrew Fisher in a statement. “And in just a year, we have gone from two billion tags to five billion.”
The real question is what happens next. Shazam has so far been successful in fending off disruption from direct competitors like SoundHound, as well as open alternatives like The Echo Nest’s Echoprint.
But with several rounds of venture capital behind it, what is Shazam’s exit strategy? Its move into TV and ads, rounding out its music offering, could make it a target for the likes of Apple and Google, but compared to some other startups, there has been very little public speculation about talks taking place in recent years.
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