Speaking to the UK’s The Guardian newspaper at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Shazam’s marketing boss revealed that last month twenty percent of iPhones in the United States used its media discovery and recommendation software. It gets better as even more fans overseas in countries like France and UK used Shazam on their Apple handset, as much as forty percent of them.
And with iPads growing stronger and the next iPhone looming around the corner, any increase in the installed iPhone base is bound to reflect positively on Shazam’s numbers. On Monday, Shazam announced it passed 300 million active users globally, 90 million in the United States alone.
The company also launched an update to its iOS client with a revamped iPad interface, a much faster tagging and more streamlined sharing features…
David Jones, Shazam’s executive vice president of marketing, speaking with The Guardian.
Twenty percent of all iPhones in the US used Shazam last month, and in some European countries like France, Germany and the UK we’re seeing closer to 30 percent or 40 percent.
And we’re currently adding at least two million new users a week, and more than three million some weeks.
By the way, Shazam users tag about ten million songs each day.
But how does the company make money?
Well, tagged content previews comes with in-app links to YouTube, but also Apple’s and Amazon’s content stores, where one can purchase songs Shazam discovered. Currently, people are buying songs to the tune of a run-rate of about $300 million of sales a year.
Shazam earns an unknown commission on these sales.
He also noted that competition in the living room is getting fiercer with each passing day, with both new entrants and incumbents such as Zeebox and GetGlue picking up steam. Shazam’s mobile apps can also tag television shows in the United States and the firm said lots of people use Shazam apps to interact with television.
The vast majority of Shazam-driven content sales is music, but television shows, Hollywood movies and mobile applications are growing as well. Non-music tagging in Shazam is cool because the company creates special content for every programme on 160 American TV channels.
This content gets shown to the user within the app when he or she tags the show: episode descriptions, quizzes, tweets, cast information and playable clips of every song on the soundtrack. And big events like the Super Bowl, Grammys and Oscars get even richer experiences with polls, predictions and video highlights.
Support for television programming will be rolled out in European countries as well, Jones confirmed, first in the United Kingdom and then throughout Western Europe. The company also charges brands for a call-to-action in their ads to get people to tag them.
If you’re a big advertiser, a typical Shazam campaign will set you back a minimum of $75,000, but these can cost all the way up to $200,000 for a campaign that runs for a couple of months.
So with 200 campaigns where we’re getting paid low-six-figures on average, this is already a double-digit million business on its own. Shazam for TV advertising is going to become our primary revenue stream very quickly, and that’s the way we’re going to grow to being a multi-billion dollar company.
A free Shazam universal binary is available from the App Store and Google’s Play Store. There is also a paid for iOS and Android client called Shazam Encore that comes without advertising and includes a few premium features.