Shortly after receiving approval of the deal from the European Commission, Apple has completed its acquisition of music-recognition app Shazam. Its first move: to announce that the app will “soon offer its experience ad-free for all users so everyone can enjoy the best of Shazam without interruption”. This, of course, includes ads from streaming services that aren’t Apple Music.
Since its heyday as an app driving download sales from Apple’s iTunes store, Shazam has been reorienting itself around affiliate payments for driving new subscribers to the various streaming services.
Apple’s announcement of the acquisition’s completion included some stats: more than 1bn lifetime downloads of the Shazam app (which we knew about) and the fact that “users identify songs using the Shazam app over 20 million times each day”. That’s double the 10m daily identifications that Shazam was being used for back in 2013 (according to its head of music content at the time, Will Mills).
Meanwhile, TechCrunch reiterated its previous claim that Apple is paying around $400m for Shazam, yesterday. That would be quite the drop from the firm’s $1bn valuation in 2015.
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