Shazam
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Shazam
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| Founded | 1999, London — launched 2002 as the "2580" dial-in service |
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| Acquired | 2018 by Apple (~$400 million) |
| Does | Identifies any song from seconds of audio |
| Built into | iOS Control Center · Siri · the free Shazam app |
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Shazam answers the oldest question in music — "what song is this?" — by acoustic fingerprint. Born before the smartphone as a London dial-up service (call 2580, hold up the phone, get a text), it became one of the App Store's launch-era icons and, after Apple's 2018 acquisition, a system feature: a button in Control Center, a question Siri answers, an app with the ads stripped out.
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Shazam's magic aged into infrastructure: tens of billions of recognitions feed Apple Music's discovery charts, predict hits for the industry, and link every identification to Apple's storefronts. The acquisition is Apple's model small deal — a beloved single-purpose tool, kept free, wired into everything.