Apple's Shazam is trying to predict what you will listen to in 2025
Apple's Shazam is trying to predict what you will listen to in 2025
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Shazam announces its 50 artists to watch in 2025. Instead of telling you what song was playing just now in the elevator, Apple's Shazam is once more looking into the future at who it calculates will be your next favorite. Shazam does know its stuff — in November 2024, it was announced that it had been used more than 100 billion times since it was launched in 2002. True, that figure must include all the times you get "No song found," but it's still impressive.
It's also a bit like alchemy. All of those millions of songs, recognized within just a few bars. The service has come a long way, too, with the original version being something you called while holding the phone up to the speaker. Then in 2008, it got an iOS app, and in 2017, it got acquired by Apple.
Throughout it all, few have asked how it works and the more used to it we got, the fewer who even wondered. It's done by digital fingerprinting, a series of markers that identify various parts of a song such as tempo, and then comparing those to a very large database.
If that's an over-simplified explanation of something that's actually very subtly nuanced and complex, the next thing Shazam is doing is easy to understand. It's taking its database of music, and more specifically leveraging its record of just how many people have asked it about how many songs.
