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Apple Acquiring Shazam and Says 'Exciting Plans' Are Ahead

Maybe Apple is buying them so Apple Music can offer better personalized playlists for music discovery.
 
Apple is so close to having a great music ecosystem. Only problem is the iOS app UI itself sucks now. All they had to do was leave it the same as before, but no, someone decided it would be great to hide the shuffle/loop buttons, add in some other unintuitive control flows, make all the animations 1/2 speed, and make it lag from Apple Music. iTunes on Mac isn't so bad except that it keeps wanting to update.
 
It's just Apple trying to diversify their income flow like what they are doing now with Apple Music since they know "hardware sales" from iPhones won't peak forever.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/21/14691586/apple-ecosystem-walls-nilay-patel-show-notes

  • Apple has some weird incentives around the iPhone right now — as sales taper off, the company has publicly said the next plan is to extract more revenue from every iPhone owner. Part of that is services like Apple Music, but another big part of that is the huge iPhone accessory market — and Apple is setting itself up so that its own products have major advantages over everyone else.
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I was at STUMP and I think this was even before Shazam was released/public and someone walked up to the Mic and said he knew the titles of the songs and when Mark ask which one he said all of them. It was amazing then and still is.
 
Michael Goff said:
Take a look at all of Google’s acquisitions that deal in AI. There are quite a few. So are we now saying Google can’t improve Assistant without buying things simply because they’ve bought more than one company that deals in imagine recognition?
Click to expand...

Ah, you spoiled my fun. I was waiting for someone to find fault with Apple making acquisitions before dropping the Google hammer.

- Since 1988 Apple has acquired 92 companies (inc Shazam if it’s confirmed).

- Since 2001 Google has acquired some 210 companies (I might be off by a couple, but it’s over 200 for sure).

Of all the tech companies out there, Google, BY FAR, is the leader in acquisitions. Literally every single product they have (outside of Search), was acquired. Their rate of acquisitions per year is 4X higher than Apple.

Android, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, Docs, Ads - all acquired. Further, each of these major products has had numerous follow-up acquisitions to add additional functionality.


If acquiring companies is somehow bad, or implies a lack of innovation (buying tech instead of developing it yourself), then Google is the least innovative tech company out there. All they do is buy tech and incorporate it into their products.
 
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I have a feeling that Apple's idea of 'exciting plans' is to have Siri always listening and telling you what song it's hearing directly on the lockscreen. If I'm not mistaken, a few Android phones (or maybe just one) already do that. That seems more like a gimmick than a useful feature to me. Maybe it's just me, but there's only about one time per year that I want to pick up my phone and find out what song is playing around me. I certainly don't want a feature like that to be always-on, cluttering up my already mess of a lockscreen.
 
Shazam on my Apple Watch has helped me discover a lot of new music with a simple tap at places where shouting "WHAT SONG IS PLAYING" to Siri would have been comical at best and embarrassing at worst. Voice interaction for simple tasks is often far from ideal... adjusting volume on my AirPods is another example (thank goodness for Apple Watch for being able to do that without Siri, with iPhone tucked away in pocket).

Back on topic: if Spotify integration disappears, there are handy apps to transfer playlists from Spotify to Apple Music. They work surprisingly well: I use Houdini.

That said, I'd prefer they keep Spotify integration – mainly because I like Spotify's user interface better than Apple's for music. However, this may be because I'm simply accustomed to Spotify and not because Spotify is better.

I suspect reality is that Spotify integration will be gone in favor of Apple Music. If so, I can live with that.
 
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