Kevin Bostic
Popular music program Shazam is doing more letting users find out just what song that is playing; the company's executives say it's driving more than a quarter of a billion dollars in digital content downloads across the major online music outlets.
Speaking with The Guardian at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Shazam's executive vice president of marketing David Jones opened up on how well the service is doing. Shazam, which recently passed the 300 million user mark and added a new iPad app, tags about 10 million songs per day.
The service's users are tapping through to buy the content they're tagging as well, at a clip of about $300 million per year spent on services such as iTunes and Amazon. Most of that revenue is coming from purchased music, but TV shows, films, and apps are growing as a proportion of Shazam-originated sales.
Jones said that 20 percent of all iPhones in the United States used Shazam last month, with that figure between 30 and 40 percent for European countries like France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Shazam is currently adding about two million users per week, with some weeks topping three million new users.
The company plans to continue expanding its offerings, which include the aforementioned television and film tagging. Shazam has run more than 200 ad campaigns for more than 140 brands, with campaigns running between $75,000 and $200,000. Jones is confident in the company's ability to continue growing, but he sees a second-screen advertising market far larger than what the company currently brings in.
"While we're making a ton of money now," he told The Guardian, "compared to the billions of advertising that the networks sell, it's a smaller thing. That's the opportunity."
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10 Comments
I see articles like this and realize my understand of [I]freeium[/I] business models is lacking. I would have never guessed they made this much money.
would be great with Siri integration.
[quote name="iCache01" url="/t/156251/shazam-on-20-percent-of-us-iphones-generates-300m-in-annual-digital-sales#post_2286184"]would be great with Siri integration. [/quote] [INDENT]iCache01: "What song is playing." Siri: "One moment while I check on that for you." . . . Siri: "This is 'I Wanna Sex You Up' by Color Me Badd. It's already in your library and it's your most played song." [/INDENT] More seriously… [INDENT]iCache01: "What song is playing." Siri: "One moment while I check on that for you." . . . Siri: "This is 'The Stars' by David Bowie. Would you like me to take you to it in the the iTunes Store or save this as a reminder?"[/INDENT] That seems like a pretty powerful tool that will help iTunes Store sales but I wonder if Apple could do this on their own. There are already other companies with this same service. I think it's just waveform sampling which I think iTunes Match already does to determine your tracks. PS: I'd love for one that does this for video but the only way I could think of doing it is by taking the audio from a video feed but due to "dead air" that is common in audio conversations and not with music the sample would have to be much larger and still might run into too many possibilities.
I see articles like this and realize my understand of freeium business models is lacking. I would have never guessed they made this much money.
But they don't make this much money (if I understand correctly what you mean by this much). If I understand the article correctly, users purchased $300M of digital contents. I am guessing Shazam makes 5% of that? Still very nice "change".
[quote name="ankleskater" url="/t/156251/shazam-on-20-percent-of-us-iphones-generates-300m-in-annual-digital-sales#post_2286199"] But they don't make this much money (if I understand correctly what you mean by [B]this much[/B]). If I understand the article correctly, users purchased $300M of digital contents. I am guessing Shazam makes 5% of that? Still very nice "change". [/quote] Excellent point. I hadn't considered that aspect of their business model.