CEO Andrew Fisher takes the stage
Shazam's CEO Andrew Fisher took the stage at ME's Monetising Mobile conference tonight, to talk about the music recognition service's experience on mobile.
It has 75 million registered users, and is currently adding 750,000 new ones a week, according to Fisher.
He talked about the need for utility applications to launch across multiple mobile platforms, whereas entertainment apps can pick and choose if they want.
Fisher showed off some research from VC firm Kleiner Perkins, which compared the user bases of iPhone and Symbian (75 million and over 1 billion respectively) with their daily downloads (12 million and 1.6 million respectively).
"Choosing your bets and understanding where you think the consumer is going to go is very important, but it's also very difficult to predict," he said.
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Fisher also talked business models, and specifically Shazam's freemium approach.
"We're big believers in mobile advertising," said Fisher, who thinks that most apps will ultimately have a free element supported by ads. "But there will be nuggets of content that they'll pay for," he added.
Shazam has a premium app called Shazam Encore, although Fisher also warned that it's currently a no-no to put advertising inside premium apps - something Shazam learned along the way.
Finally, he talked about future opportunities. "I encourage people to think about what their ultimate vision is for their company," he said. "For us, we have talked about using exactly the same technology you use for identifying music, for identifying direct response advertising."
Shazam's SARA project is its attempt to do this, which Fisher said could give it access to a new $70 billion market - the US interactive TV advertising market.
"We know this is going to take a lot of work to take to market," he said. Shazam is working with HBO already to make its shows taggable.
Fisher finished up by saying that Shazam continues to see an important role for operators and OEMs in promoting applications - especially when they have the power to put an app on the homescreen of millions of devices.
