Apple buys Shazam as if the head honchos at Apple haven’t been busy enough this year, Apple has released some exciting news just in time for the New Year. As a great start to 2018, Apple has brought Shazam, an App that helps you identify music through the use of your very favourite iPhone. Pretty popular it has been downloaded well over 1 billion times and is used well over 20 million times a day. Although, sadly for poor Shazam its popularity has waned in recent years with the App being at number 91 on the Apple iTunes chart and doesn’t even feature in the top 100 for the Google Play store chart. Originally, making money from affiliate fees when customers would hear their music and purchase it from Apple Music, it has struggled to find a sustainable business model as fewer people have downloaded music. However, it’s proven to the be the App that could with this deal five months in the making and rival offers from both Snapchat and Spotify.

Rumoured to have cost $400 million (or £300 million for us Brits), it is a natural extension to Apple’s portfolio as music is a pretty big part of their history – anyone remember the iPod? Apple executives have said, “Apple music and Shazam are a natural fit, sharing a passion for music discovery and delivering great music experiences to our users.” This will be Apple’s biggest purchase since it bought rapper Dr. Dre’s company Beats Electronics for a whopping $3 billion in 2014. So Shazam must seem like a steal in comparison. In fact, with the help of Brexit and the fall of the pound – they got an even better deal than they would ordinarily.

Founded in 1999 Shazam was born in Hammersmith, West London by some friends who were frustrated by that age old complaint. That moment when you hear a fantastic piece of music on the phone and don’t know who wrote it. Back in the day Shazam worked through the use of a special phone number. All you had to was simply put your phone to the radio, then you would get a text to tell you the name of the song. Obviously, this process has been slightly more refined thanks to the invention of the iPhone, which thanks to that and the incredibly hard work of the entrepreneurial owners who worked day and night to get the project off the ground, finally saw the company make profit last year…..it only took 14 years. These guys really do deserve it some fantastic success. In fact, they had planned to float on the stock market for $1 billion, but obviously partnering with Apple was the right move for this popular App. This is due to Apple music, which would be a natural partner with Shazam and would also allow Shazam to integrate with Siri – offering some really added value to iPhone and iPad owners. Not only that, but Apple is also pretty interested in Shazam’s unmentioned reality technology, which as Mac Rental Company have previously reported is a part of Apple’s long term strategy.

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