How does the music-identifying app Shazam work its magic?

It's actually technically not that hard to get something like this working. Monetizing is trickier. I don't see how they will make enough money from it.

Didn't know they were still going after 7 years.

bmelton• 17 years ago

I haven't tried anything like it, so I can't comment on the difficulty of creating the fingerprinting technology, and frankly, I'm not all that impressed with Shazam. But as I understand it, Pandora uses the same Music Genome data to make its suggestions, and that is REALLY magic.

jkincaid• 17 years ago

I've heard a couple times that Pandora doesn't really rely on the Music Genome any more because it has so much other listener data it can use to determine relevant matches. Haven't actually asked Pandora about it, so take that with a grain of salt.

jamesjyu• 17 years ago

Pandora actually uses a mix of human and algorithm for the Music Genome. They have a whole team of musicians just cataloguing and categorizing music based on various metrics. That's why they're usually very accurate.

DrJokepu• 17 years ago

Actually I have to completely disagree. Technically this is very hard to get right, monetizing it is a lot easier.

It is quite hard, believe me. Definitely not a weekend project. When it's as simple as recognizing clean audio, it's indeed not very hard. The problems start with (a) background noise (b) karaoke and mono audio input as without stereo channels removing the vocals is very hard (c) radio stations and television broadcasters often speed up songs a bit to fit in the timeslot.

The monetizing bit is a lot simpler. I can't really talk about that because of NDAs I've signed but as a hint, think about B2B instead of selling it to consumers. What big companies need to track music? How could audio recognition help them?

jaytee_clone• 17 years ago

melodis.com (the maker of midomi) is a lot more impressive than Shazam.

Here's a brief description about its proprietary search technology.

http://sev.prnewswire.com/multimedia-online-internet/2007012...

Here's an article that compare the features of both iPhone apps.

http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/11/05/app-app-shazam-midom...

rufo2• 17 years ago

Shazam works much better than Midomi in my incredibly informal, anecdotal experiences... never got any of the extra midomi features to work when I could use them, either.

eb• 17 years ago

When was the last time you used Midomi?

I think it's pretty well established that Midomi is faster and has better music recognition than Shazam. There's a few video comparisons out there that show this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-EK50DWDn0

http://revision3.com/appjudgment/ip_mau_shazamvsmidomi

How does the music-identifying app Shazam work its magic?

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