'It's important we move beyond music' says CEO Andrew Fisher.
It's been a crazy couple of years for Shazam. The company may be one of the veterans of the mobile entertainment industry, but in recent times it's felt like a startup rocketing to prominence on the back of a successful app.
More than 50 million people have downloaded Shazam's mobile apps – with CEO Andrew Fisher keen to stress that the big number is about more than just iPhone.
2010 has already seen some significant announcements by the company. At the recent Midem music industry show, Shazam revealed that more than 260,000 digital music tracks are bought every day via its apps – a big deal for an industry desperate for digital growth to combat the decline in CD sales.
In recent weeks, too, Shazam signed a deal with Dockers to be used in the clothing brand's Superbowl ad campaign, linked its mobile app to Pandora and Last.fm, and then this week unveiled its Shazam Audio Recognition Advertising (SARA) program. More of which later.
ME started with the API integrations when we sat down with Fisher at Mobile World Congress this week. “If you're a service provider in the music landscape, you can't give the consumer everything they want,” he says.
“We've identified the properties that people are downloading at volume, and making it easy to navigate into those applications from Shazam. It's all about convenience, and the feedback has exceeded our expectations.”
However, Shazam won't be throwing its doors open with an API for everybody. “We have to be very careful about who we integrate with, and the quality of the experience,” he says.
“The key thing is also that we don't run a mobile storefront ourselves, which removes the competitive tension. Most other players have ambitions to have a storefront, but we sit as a neutral within all that. We can be a friend to lots of people and drive traffic into lots of properties.”
Fisher also says Shazam is enjoying the shift in its relationships with operators and handset makers, fuelled by the growth of the service in the last two years.
“The big shift for us is that people are supporting our brand,” he says, pointing out that in the past, Shazam's partners tended to want to rebrand its service as their own.
“What's changed is that they're saying 'you've got critical mass, people identify with your brand, so we're happy for it to be Shazam'. They're also happy for us to control the roadmap, which is ideal when we're rolling out new featuers like Pandora and Last.fm, or ticketing functionality. We're in control now.”
That said, Shazam is still having to please its different partners, including the handset makers.
“Our heritage is working with carriers, who always wanted to differentiate themselves and have a unique service. Mobile is still fixated in differentiation – every handset maker wants to know how we can make a different flavour of Shazam for them. We work very hard to do that – to put a new feature out on a certain platform, or integrate into an asset that a particular partner owns.”
But it's SARA that was the big news this week. It debuted with the Dockers Superbowl ad, which let people tag the music, and then go through to a Dockers competition site on their phones.
In essence, SARA lets people tag TV ads rather than just music. Tagging a pizza ad might take them through to a two-for-one coupon for example. It can also be used to tag TV shows themselves - tagging the dialogue would take users through to a branded site.
“It's basically interactivity with broadcast media,” says Fisher. “This is repositioning for the company, because it's not a music experience – it's an advertising experience. Our mission is to make Shazam ubiquitous – it's primarily about discovery, but there are many other ways of using Shazam beyond discovering a song. This is taking us into the biggest emerging category, which is advertising, and then marrying that with traditional media and broadcasters.”
It's an interesting move for Shazam. You could say it's risky, given that Shazam's strength in music is what brought it those first 50 million users. Could diversifying make it lose focus on what's currently its core business?
“There is a long way to go with developing the music service,” says Fisher. “But it is important that we move beyond music. We want to stay in the mainstream, not be a niche technology provider.”
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