Apple has completed the acquisition of music discovery app, Shazam. The app allows users to identify the music being played in your surroundings using the phone’s microphone.
The app remains a popular utility. It’s been downloaded more than a billion times, has 150 million active users per month, and is still used to identify 20 million songs a day, Apple says. Shazam app is currently the seventh most popular music app in Apple’s store.
“Apple and Shazam have a long history together,” Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music said in a statement. “Shazam was one of the first apps available when we launched the App Store and has become a favourite app for music fans everywhere.”
For all Shazam’s popularity, the company has not found a way to make money from its users the way social-media and some other popular apps have. Apple announced its acquisition of Shazam last December for a reported price of $400 million. That was below the $1 billion valuation that the company had after a 2015 round of private funding.
Apple may be hoping that Shazam’s frequent users will become Apple Music subscribers. Apple Music had 36 million subscribers earlier this year.
Currently, once Shazam identifies a song, it presents users with a large button to buy or play the song on Apple Music. There are also options to stream the song on Spotify and Deezer—Google Play, once an option on Shazam, is now absent—although those options are in finer print at the bottom of Shazam’s app display.
