Google really does mean business in 2017 when it comes to parking its tanks on Shazam’s lawn. The company’s recently-unveiled Pixel 2 smartphones include a feature to automatically identify music that’s playing around their owner.
Now the company’s voice-assistant Google Assistant can perform a similar trick, simply by being asked ‘What song is this?’ or ‘What song is playing?’. On devices with a screen, it’ll show a card with the song title, artist name, lyrics and links to YouTube, Google Play and Spotify.
Shazam has been here before in terms of the threat of big-tech rivals: in 2014, Facebook added a feature to its mobile app to identify a song playing in the real world and append it to a status update. We’ve heard little of that feature since.
Meanwhile, Shazam has also been forging relationships in the tech world: its partnership with Snap, Inc to embed music identification into Snapchat, for example. So while Google’s Shazam-style features can certainly be seen as a threat, it’s too early to judge what kind of impact they’ll have on Shazam’s business.
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