@@Jason-se6dh I remember using Shazam by calling 2580, then holding the phone near the speaker and receiving the track info via sms text; its that old! ✌🏼
The biggest surprise in this video is that Shazam was launched in 2002 and the only way you could use it before smartphones were a thing was by dialing a number and letting it listen to the music before it sent you a text message. Can you imagine just how excited people were about this back in the early 2000s?
It’s so amusing when Shazam gets a song wrong, but now I understand how that happens, given that those peak points might have the same pattern in two different songs. But it happens very, very rarely. In the overwhelming majority of cases, it gets it right, and I’m often even amazed at how it recognizes a song that’s local to the Southeast Asian country where I live.
@@1gorSouz4 It’s the peak points. If two songs have a few spots where they have the same frequency and level, but are very, very different in between those spots, they’ll still match if Shazam so happens to choose those matching spots as the peak points for its search. It rarely happens to me, but when it does it can be really amusing. Like I’ll be searching for the title of a hard rock song, and it will give me a schmaltzy boy band ballad 😄
Shazam was the first app I was truly impressed with when I was a kid. I used to dream of such service when I was a kid. I certainly did not know Shazam was already there when I was a small baby lol. It was a pretty impressive technology back then and it still is.
Best app ever. So many foreign songs I can get access too, and finally know the names of those songs I never caught when I first heard them on the radio in my youth. Love using it while watching movies or shows.
The acquisition of Shazam by Apple was brilliant, now they can easily reroute users to Apple Music through Shazam, you can only understand the significance if you can imagine the implications if Spotify had this kind of tech.
Well, Spotify did have a similar thing, back when they were partnering with Sony with their TrackID (before Sony shut it down), and also with Shazam before Apple acquired it. (I still remember back when that I could open the song directly on Spotify.)
This was way ahead of its time. It feels like a similar technique to transformer networks like GPT, but matches probability across the two dimensions of a spectrogram (time/frequency) instead of text (offset/token). Amazing in hindsight, and very unappreciated at the time!
I have to admit, when I first heard of Shazam, I thought it was too good to be true and that it wouldn´t work well. Then I got disappointed over missing good songs that I heard in restaurants when I didn´t hear enough lyrics to google them well. I finally installed Shazam and now I almost never miss a great song. Very useful for the musician and songwriter to find more musical influences and inspiration!
Man, back in High School I would use this app when I would hear a good song on the radio station that many restaurants would use for their lobby. I discovered so many artist through this app. But I never knew they existed before the smartphone. Mindblowing.
Love Shazam. I do think there should be a secondary algorithm happening in the background for things like live music that would still recognize the song. Often times there's a classical piece being played but no context (movie trailer, live music) but since it's not in the Apple Music catalog, it can't identify it. Another odd one is that during Apple Events, they usually use 2-3 songs in their presentations, but they're not immediately available to Shazam -- they really should be sending the songs in advance to their Shazam team so it's served up immediately rather than having us go back to the Event to rewatch and re-Shazam the song. Shazam doesn't have to be disclosed on the new products, just which songs are being used (theoretically their legal teams have to clear usage rights anyhow).
SoundHound used to be really good at this, you could whistle the melody of an obscure song and it’d match it nearly every time. This was back in 2015, it looks like they pivoted since then though.
Does anyone know how to have a song list? have them written... and not be scoring one by one. or how to transfer them to RUclips? How to transfer them to spotify deezer? thank you
@@shadowbyteeIt's just automatically done on Google products. It's part of the Google Assistant. If you use a Google phone, as opposed to something like an iphone, stuff like this is just built in. And like most things that deal with the "brains" of a device, it's going to be much better on Google. For example, call screening and stopping spam calls is far more effective on Google phones.
Yay! Nice work guys!! i’ve waited so many years to say that. This was a truly amazing achievement and i just love that i had guessed exactly how it worked. Yessss!! lol. I love using Shazam to identify and then BUY my music. I will never choose to stream my music from a service because MY music collection is an expression of ME. Shazam helps me grow. And if you guys are filthy rich finally…. It couldn’t have happened to better people. Congratulations!!!!
Shazam is truly a story of nearly falling, nearly going bankrupt, and incredible resilience over many years. Until Apple purchased the company and combined with its Music. At that point, The hierarchy of power in the App store is about to change.
Wow! Very impressive DjMeku! You deserve to be on this video instead. You must be very rich nowadays, such a genius idea using MatLab with the Windows algorithm. I am lost for Words Meku, just super duper cool. Peace bro.
Little secret .. shazam is my favorite app after Spotify, I mean, works like magic. I wonder if Spotify will ever integrate Shazam into it, so it makes it even easier for us users to identify the song and add it to our favorite list. ❤❤
I remember when I first used Shazam, back in 2007, when the first iphone was released, people were in shock and awe at the "magic" of Shazam. It was such a fun time to show people how accurately it worked!
i once worked at a company that they wanted to create something similar to sazam. The algorithmic development and research was pure pain, they hugely underestimate the complexity and cost of the project
I still miss TrackID from Sony though, they were the true competitor to Shazam back in the day. Sadly Sony sold Gracenote and no longer have the access to their tech.
I used TrackID on my old Sony Ericsson in 2007 and it worked great so i was not amazed by Shazam once i tried. It was just another music recognition app.
Wasn’t trackID and Gracenote just comparing the number of tracks and their individual lengths to a database to fill in the Album info and track names? what’s funny is that Gracenote had LOTS of duplicates so it would ask you if your disc was Van Halen or The Cincinnati Pops .. lol. Anyway, screw Sony. lol. Evil empire. they ruin everything. (sorry)
@@GalaxyT25 Yeah, corporate overlords at Sony often ruins many great things. But they usually made the best things. TrackID, for example, they had a very good song recognition when their competitor was still having a hard time to guess a song and sometimes giving wrong results. While TrackID would give the result accurately and instantly. All other alternatives are also evil corporations like Google and Apple (who owns Shazam), though. Well there's SoundHound, but I never used it.
Shazam is in my notification bar of mobile phone. Ready to capture music which i hear while sitting in restuarant or watching videos on RUclips. Yesterday night i searched two songs which were being played at restuarant in which i was sitting.
I remember blowing people's minds in 2002 when showing them what happened when you dialled 2580. In the UK, I'm sure the return text cost £1, so I soon went through my phone bill showing people this!
What's the name of the song at 2:53 ? Edit: Wow, they explained how shazam works using this song, giving us its name at the end. Unexpected wholesomeness.
*_There is one song that Shazam couldn't identify that I've been trying to know for 3 years... Then I tried to ask google and boom! I got it. Can't believe I didn't think about asking google 3 years ago._*
Still love Shazam, but the quality of the matches has declined massively in the last year or so - it truly needed seconds to find a match, now it takes 4, 5 long attempts. I hope an update is on its way to fix that.
Shazam is a poignant example of ideas maturing faster than technology. If you can imagine it then start building. The infrastructure to support it will come in time.
Shazam is one of the most brilliant innovation of all time. Kudos to the founders of this app
Good thing Apple acquired Shazam
Have you seen GPT-4?
@@apache937how old is Shazam, and how old is gpt 4?
@@Jason-se6dh I remember using Shazam by calling 2580, then holding the phone near the speaker and receiving the track info via sms text; its that old! ✌🏼
@@apache937 this is fundamentally the same technique as GPT4! It just took us programmers a while to figure out how to use it efficiently in reverse.
Shazam was the first app that I ever used that truly felt like Magic. I had no idea that they were around in 2002.
True,same
Like at that time I used TrackID as an app on my phone, also I live in Sweden and I don't think Shazam was available here at the time
@@savagesarethebest7251 ooh TrackID was preinstalled on Sony phones until they discontinued it. And I used SoundHound too back then.
For me it was trackID
I used Shazam on Nokia smartphone
Shazam being created in 2002 is mindblowing to me. Amazing!
This explains how being way ahead of time can be bad sometimes!
Literally the most ambitious app to date.
Had to read it twice to understand it correctly xD
Most ambitious app made by a small startup for sure. But making an app like Google Maps is much more ambitious of course.
The biggest surprise in this video is that Shazam was launched in 2002 and the only way you could use it before smartphones were a thing was by dialing a number and letting it listen to the music before it sent you a text message. Can you imagine just how excited people were about this back in the early 2000s?
We weren't excited at all, because barely anyone knew it existed 😂
It’s so amusing when Shazam gets a song wrong, but now I understand how that happens, given that those peak points might have the same pattern in two different songs. But it happens very, very rarely. In the overwhelming majority of cases, it gets it right, and I’m often even amazed at how it recognizes a song that’s local to the Southeast Asian country where I live.
I have gotten a song completely wrong at least once, and what baffles me is that the 2 songs weren't even similar!
I've done hundreds of Shazams and it's never once gotten one wrong. Maybe I'm lucky.
@@1gorSouz4 It’s the peak points. If two songs have a few spots where they have the same frequency and level, but are very, very different in between those spots, they’ll still match if Shazam so happens to choose those matching spots as the peak points for its search. It rarely happens to me, but when it does it can be really amusing. Like I’ll be searching for the title of a hard rock song, and it will give me a schmaltzy boy band ballad 😄
They made an app before even App Store existed. Woahhh Crazy.
What do you find crazy about this?
@@QnJhbQ everything
There were tons of apps before an App Store existed. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Palm actually had an App Store 10 years before Apple did.
Adding Shazam to the control centre on iOS was a brilliant move
I also knew the prescence of shazam thanks to the control center! it was really mind-blowing experience when i first used it
@@hnrbdrhit does save the searches when I use it in control center.
@@hnrbdrh It can actually saved your searches just hold it down it will show history
An actual app that is useful. No longer do I lay awake at night trying to remember the name of a song I heard
What if something's stuck in your head and you have no source of the music?
@@FosFatei just google it. I searched every 80’s song with whistling until i found Winds Of Change
@@FosFate You can "Mhhh.." it out using Google though. It won't help if you are tone deaf though.
@@FosFate Google has a 'search for a song' option that lets you hum the song, and it works pretty well.
gone are the days of remembering lyrics and searching on google. Even better that it helps identify music without lyrics.
It's amazing how early they started. Just unbelievable!
Shazam was the first app I was truly impressed with when I was a kid. I used to dream of such service when I was a kid. I certainly did not know Shazam was already there when I was a small baby lol. It was a pretty impressive technology back then and it still is.
Best app ever. So many foreign songs I can get access too, and finally know the names of those songs I never caught when I first heard them on the radio in my youth. Love using it while watching movies or shows.
This app is definately the definition of magic
I remember using shazam on nokia s60 symbian phones. 😊
Fascinating! What a great piece of technology!
The acquisition of Shazam by Apple was brilliant, now they can easily reroute users to Apple Music through Shazam, you can only understand the significance if you can imagine the implications if Spotify had this kind of tech.
Well, Spotify did have a similar thing, back when they were partnering with Sony with their TrackID (before Sony shut it down), and also with Shazam before Apple acquired it. (I still remember back when that I could open the song directly on Spotify.)
This was way ahead of its time. It feels like a similar technique to transformer networks like GPT, but matches probability across the two dimensions of a spectrogram (time/frequency) instead of text (offset/token). Amazing in hindsight, and very unappreciated at the time!
I have to admit, when I first heard of Shazam, I thought it was too good to be true and that it wouldn´t work well. Then I got disappointed over missing good songs that I heard in restaurants when I didn´t hear enough lyrics to google them well. I finally installed Shazam and now I almost never miss a great song. Very useful for the musician and songwriter to find more musical influences and inspiration!
Man, back in High School I would use this app when I would hear a good song on the radio station that many restaurants would use for their lobby. I discovered so many artist through this app. But I never knew they existed before the smartphone. Mindblowing.
I remember having to dial 2580 on your keypad to use it before smartphones 😆
Basically magic
This is one of the best series WSJ does on YT and they should double down on it.
What a fantastic app!! It's so useful. I had no idea that Shazam was launched in 2002
Thanks Shazam for helping me find songs that i like when it comes across me suddenly.
This service always felt like magic, and it is so fast, too.
Shazam felt like magic when i first used it. Hope everybody who kept the company alive eventually became millionaires.
3:38 Coffeeshop Moment
When I was using it for the first time I was feeling so thrilled and I still am a bit thrill to this day
as a software engineer shazam is the most impressive technical achievement comes to mind, it requires both highly advanced science and engineering
@3:38 that artwork is great
Wow! This is so amazing to learn the story behind Shazam. I'm using this service since 2011, the Era of Nokia phone. ❤
I had no idea it was around already in 2002, great insight WSJ.
Brilliant innovation!! I got introduced to it when I bought Nokia Lumia 730 in 2015.
Love Shazam. I do think there should be a secondary algorithm happening in the background for things like live music that would still recognize the song. Often times there's a classical piece being played but no context (movie trailer, live music) but since it's not in the Apple Music catalog, it can't identify it. Another odd one is that during Apple Events, they usually use 2-3 songs in their presentations, but they're not immediately available to Shazam -- they really should be sending the songs in advance to their Shazam team so it's served up immediately rather than having us go back to the Event to rewatch and re-Shazam the song. Shazam doesn't have to be disclosed on the new products, just which songs are being used (theoretically their legal teams have to clear usage rights anyhow).
Yeah there are still many many popular songs which are indexed in RUclips Content ID system, but still not available on Shazam
SoundHound used to be really good at this, you could whistle the melody of an obscure song and it’d match it nearly every time. This was back in 2015, it looks like they pivoted since then though.
that's on purpose, as apple actually want you to go back and re-watch these keynotes. so don't hope for change in that department
I think Google Assistant can help with this
Does anyone know how to have a song list? have them written...
and not be scoring one by one. or how to transfer them to RUclips? How to transfer them to spotify deezer?
thank you
Google's variant can work even if you just hum the tune or speak some parts of the lyrics you remember
could google do that in 2002?
Yep, Google's music recognition is what I prefer to Shazam because of this.
What's the name of the Google variant?
@@shadowbyteeIt's just automatically done on Google products. It's part of the Google Assistant. If you use a Google phone, as opposed to something like an iphone, stuff like this is just built in. And like most things that deal with the "brains" of a device, it's going to be much better on Google. For example, call screening and stopping spam calls is far more effective on Google phones.
@@SanusiAdewaleDifferent companies excel at different things at different times
Yay! Nice work guys!! i’ve waited so many years to say that. This was a truly amazing achievement and i just love that i had guessed exactly how it worked. Yessss!! lol.
I love using Shazam to identify and then BUY my music. I will never choose to stream my music from a service because MY music collection is an expression of ME. Shazam helps me grow. And if you guys are filthy rich finally…. It couldn’t have happened to better people. Congratulations!!!!
Shazam is truly a story of nearly falling, nearly going bankrupt, and incredible resilience over many years.
Until Apple purchased the company and combined with its Music.
At that point, The hierarchy of power in the App store is about to change.
Amazing how Shazam has revolutionised , the way we discover music in the past 21 years , I believe its ones of the best apps created!
My final year project was based on this! I used FFTs & calculated eucledian distance using a sliding window algorithm in MatLab
Wow! Very impressive DjMeku! You deserve to be on this video instead. You must be very rich nowadays, such a genius idea using MatLab with the Windows algorithm. I am lost for Words Meku, just super duper cool. Peace bro.
@@johnnystrom1300 lol okay... Again, did this for my undergrad project back in 2012 & was "inspired" by Avery Wang's paper. Look it up
Thank you for this. I always wondered what algorithm the software used to identify music
Always wondered how it works, thank you!!
How are people over this tech?!! I will never get over being able to ‘catch’ songs like Pokémon ❤
Little secret .. shazam is my favorite app after Spotify, I mean, works like magic. I wonder if Spotify will ever integrate Shazam into it, so it makes it even easier for us users to identify the song and add it to our favorite list. ❤❤
Such a brilliant concept, very interesting story of resilience and dedication.
My most favorite app of all time.
I remember when I first used Shazam, back in 2007, when the first iphone was released, people were in shock and awe at the "magic" of Shazam. It was such a fun time to show people how accurately it worked!
Amazing resilience story!
Shazam is one of the greatest inventions ever
Shazam is clutch ! Great app and concept. Especially music lovers.
i once worked at a company that they wanted to create something similar to sazam. The algorithmic development and research was pure pain, they hugely underestimate the complexity and cost of the project
The best app ever. Glad Apple has it to support this great app.
Shazam was a great innovation
Shazaming since 2009 , I still remember the first song I shazamed: Bandoleros - Don Omar while watching Tokyo Drift on TV.
Awesome startup and app, great work everyone!
I still miss TrackID from Sony though, they were the true competitor to Shazam back in the day. Sadly Sony sold Gracenote and no longer have the access to their tech.
I also used TrackID ❤❤
I used TrackID on my old Sony Ericsson in 2007 and it worked great so i was not amazed by Shazam once i tried. It was just another music recognition app.
Wasn’t trackID and Gracenote just comparing the number of tracks and their individual lengths to a database to fill in the Album info and track names? what’s funny is that Gracenote had LOTS of duplicates so it would ask you if your disc was Van Halen or The Cincinnati Pops .. lol. Anyway, screw Sony. lol. Evil empire. they ruin everything. (sorry)
@@GalaxyT25 Yeah, corporate overlords at Sony often ruins many great things. But they usually made the best things.
TrackID, for example, they had a very good song recognition when their competitor was still having a hard time to guess a song and sometimes giving wrong results. While TrackID would give the result accurately and instantly.
All other alternatives are also evil corporations like Google and Apple (who owns Shazam), though. Well there's SoundHound, but I never used it.
Whoever did this man's makeup or cosmetic procedures needs a raise! This man looks younger over time.
Very interesting. Thanks for this insight.
Incredible
Love shazam. Always the first app I download in a new phone !
Shazam is in my notification bar of mobile phone. Ready to capture music which i hear while sitting in restuarant or watching videos on RUclips. Yesterday night i searched two songs which were being played at restuarant in which i was sitting.
It still feels like magic!
One os the basic apps you need to have, I love it!
Low-key still one of the best apps ever created and still good!
Ugh finally. I should of searched for this earlier
I love Shazam, I wish I could work there
Its facinating me that as a microbiologist the audio fingerprinting works just like the DNA fingerprinting.
My preferred App
I remember blowing people's minds in 2002 when showing them what happened when you dialled 2580. In the UK, I'm sure the return text cost £1, so I soon went through my phone bill showing people this!
What's the name of the song at 2:53 ?
Edit: Wow, they explained how shazam works using this song, giving us its name at the end. Unexpected wholesomeness.
Wow incredible
I have a dream... Shazam + whosampled in one app 🌚
Gonna build this
@@rahulbhagwat7930 can you afford the patent?
Im a programmer but oh boy i can imagine how stress the coding was.
*_There is one song that Shazam couldn't identify that I've been trying to know for 3 years... Then I tried to ask google and boom! I got it. Can't believe I didn't think about asking google 3 years ago._*
which song is it?
@@DaveFlash And so starts your own three year journey...
@@DaveFlashDarude - Sandstorm
I loved Shazam, untill google beat them to the game, Google can identify a song by just you humming it
Never heard of it, i only use Shazam
What's the name of Google hum app
@@shadowbytee Google.
@@shadowbyteeJust use Google assistant. Then Ask "what's this song?" And then hum or play the song.
@@faultboyJust use Google assistant. Then Ask "what's this song?" And then hum or play the song.
brilliant, I love shazam
Thanks. I love this app so much ^^
They made it before machine learning and AI was a thing. Truly Incredible ❤️
Iconic app
3:37 AYYOO WHAT IS THE BUSINESS OWNER THINKING
one of the best app ever❤❤
Thanks i always wanted to know that
HATS OFF!!!
It’s a very good app 👍🏼
Don’t forget the Belgian Philip Inghelbrecht who founded Hazam with Chris.
Googles search song is much better option because it can search song just by hum, singing or playing a song 🥰
Way ahead of their time
Awesome
this is so cool!!!!
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
nice
Wow
I once shazam humming with my mouth one song i can't remember and guess what it worked
It was absurd but it worked so nice technology
Still love Shazam, but the quality of the matches has declined massively in the last year or so - it truly needed seconds to find a match, now it takes 4, 5 long attempts. I hope an update is on its way to fix that.
Thanks, the 2039 works :)
NOW THIS IS TECH! none of that glorified gig economy bs
Shazam is a poignant example of ideas maturing faster than technology. If you can imagine it then start building. The infrastructure to support it will come in time.
Love shazam
Wow 😮
wow
It's lame but Shazam was one of the main reasons I finally got a cellphone in 2009. I was late to the game.
Kinda explains why it can't pick up cover versions.