Shazam reaches 250m-users milestone and expands TV offering

In early August, Shazam said its users had tagged more than 5bn songs, TV shows and ads. Now the app has hit another big milestone: 250m downloads. Shazam is also adding 2m new users every week.

The 250m milestone is accompanied by a significant expansion of Shazam’s social TV features in the US, though.

Until now, users have only been able to tag specific TV shows and adverts that Shazam has signed a deal to identify. From today that changes: the app will be able to tag any TV show in the US, much as it can tag any (well, almost any) song.

The app will serve up cast details, soundtrack info, news, tweets and trivia, and specific content for some programming – e.g. statistics and scores for sports.

“No other app has our scale when it comes to offering the opportunity to engage with the media that interests them the most, whether it’s music or television,” says CEO Andrew Fisher, as Shazam reaches for social-TV market share against competition like Zeebox, GetGlue and IntoNow. Shazam will continue to work directly with networks and producers to run bigger campaigns.

Is music the poor relation? Shazam is always keen to stress that it’s not, even if it’s the TV features that are most likely to spark a lucrative acquisition of the company at some point.

Music will also benefit from another piece of Shazam news today: full integration of Facebook’s Open Graph, with tags shared to timelines, and new users invited to login with Facebook when they first start the app.

With 10m tags a day on Shazam, Facebook’s ticker will be rolling fast when the new social features kick off in a few weeks’ time.

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