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Apple May Acquire Music Recognition Service Shazam
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It has already dropped support for Napster and am now using Soundhound because why not let's break the monopoly
They should buy SoundHound that way they could get Hound- a digital assistant much better at conversational multistep analysis than Siri or any one else.
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People always say this but when you see comparisons they still don’t seem that different to me.
I really don’t want my iPhone to constantly have the mic on sending hashed audio to the cloud.
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I used to like Shazam. But then came that terrible Shazam game show.
I think the idea is to do it locally, like Google does on the Pixel 2 - I don't think there's any way to constantly send it to the cloud without killing your battery in a couple hours.
Apple's music problem is not an issue they can "buy" their way out of. They could "sell" their way out of the problem though by getting rid of Beats and all of the staff and IP associated with it. Shazam wont fix their issue. Apple went from a digital media hegemon to last place behind Spotify overnight, with a Clunky iTunes app that kept changing its UI every 5 min for the worst. No streaming till it was too late. Poor support for user-created playlists etc. And terrible, terrible music exploration. But we got a single radio station (of one type of generic music) and expert "DJ" curated playlists that get updated once every month or so. Wow.
Apple didn't just shoot themselves in the foot with Beats acquisition, they blew their head clean off.
Apple didn't just shoot themselves in the foot with Beats acquisition, they blew their head clean off.
How does pixel do it locally? The database of hashed songs is immense - it can’t possibly fit on-device.
Didn’t really look into it just now but apparently it downloads an approx. 50MB list of songs that is region specific and updated every week.
https://www.androidauthority.com/how-google-pixel-2-now-playing-works-808768/amp/
Yes. It's like "Xerox" or "Kleenex". You "Shazam" a song. Also, imagine all the advertising data they could mine from it.
Me too, then I realized that Tim Cook's Apple has no vision and everything made perfect sense!
It's one thing to argue that Apple Music is worse than Spotify. That does seem to be a common sentiment.
But it's a whole other dimension to argue that selling Beats somehow solves all that. Like… how? They'd end up with far less staff, they'd lose significant time reorganizing, they'd probably lose plenty of money, and a better Spotify competitor still won't magically appear.
I am still not understanding the acrimony behind the Beats acquisition.
In one fell swoop, Apple gained a music streaming service, which it could quickly repurpose for its own needs. Beats headphones are a profitable line of headphones which should quickly pay for itself, and you get Iovine and his connections with the entertainment industry (Apple was clearly "overpaying" to acquire him), which play into Apple's recent attempts at original video content (cringe-inducing as they may have been).
Who else would you rather Apple have bought over? Spotify would have cost too much for too little benefit.
You do have a point in that Apple likely did pivot into music streaming too late. My guess is that they were reluctant to enter the market as there was clearly little to no money to be made from this (Spotify has yet to turn a profit till this day), but as time went by, it became increasingly clear that iTunes was becoming less relevant and music streaming was the future, like it or not.
Either way, what's done is done, and now that Apple is in the music streaming business, it will likely be in the game for the long haul, and certainly has the resources to sustain said service indefinitely. I won't be surprised if Apple ends up being the last man standing.
Yup.
Maybe that would have been better — they'd be number one in music streaming.
That said, they're already number two. That's not bad at all!
Maybe they were a little too worried about cannibalizing their iTunes sales. That's always a tough one.
Apple is possibly buying Shazam for their image recognition technology.
http://news.shazam.com/pressrelease...-up-a-new-world-of-shazamable-content-1168520
In short, this is Apple pushing further into AR. It was never about the music.
Nobody said anything about "audiophiles."
The removal of the headphone jack is a massive inconvenience and idiotic, especially Apple STILL doesn't make anything to address the inability to power the phone while listening to music. How much insult do you take before you call a company out on this? Apple makes the iPhone with an ever-smaller battery, in pursuit of "thinner" devices that are WORSE to hold and nobody asked for. Then Apple markets functionality (like the Watch) that require you to keep battery-sapping functions like Bluetooth on, consuming more battery power. Or using location-aware apps, which require GPS; this saps even more battery. And in iOS 11, Apple now tries to prevent you from even attempting to turn Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off, by lying about their status in the control panel and turning them back on... over and over and over.
So now you're on your road trip, navigating and listening to music... good luck getting out of the state before your phone is dead. OR you can plug it in, forgo the audio, and hope you hear the prompts (and forget about music).
And also nobody said this is only about headphones. It's about billions of sound-reproduction devices around the world that take one thing as their input: analog audio signals. We're talking car stereos, home stereos, boom boxes, hotel-room docks, TVs, PA systems, guitar amps, mixers... come on, think it through.
Not to mention that the phone will always have a D/A converter and analog amp in it, because that's what its own speaker (not to mention your ears) requires. So to simply block users from connecting to it is a petty, anti-customer, and inexcusable move. Stop floating these ridiculous apologist excuses for something that any self-respecting person should reject as offensive and absurd.
The removal of the headphone jack is a massive inconvenience and idiotic, especially Apple STILL doesn't make anything to address the inability to power the phone while listening to music. How much insult do you take before you call a company out on this? Apple makes the iPhone with an ever-smaller battery, in pursuit of "thinner" devices that are WORSE to hold and nobody asked for. Then Apple markets functionality (like the Watch) that require you to keep battery-sapping functions like Bluetooth on, consuming more battery power. Or using location-aware apps, which require GPS; this saps even more battery. And in iOS 11, Apple now tries to prevent you from even attempting to turn Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off, by lying about their status in the control panel and turning them back on... over and over and over.
So now you're on your road trip, navigating and listening to music... good luck getting out of the state before your phone is dead. OR you can plug it in, forgo the audio, and hope you hear the prompts (and forget about music).
And also nobody said this is only about headphones. It's about billions of sound-reproduction devices around the world that take one thing as their input: analog audio signals. We're talking car stereos, home stereos, boom boxes, hotel-room docks, TVs, PA systems, guitar amps, mixers... come on, think it through.
Not to mention that the phone will always have a D/A converter and analog amp in it, because that's what its own speaker (not to mention your ears) requires. So to simply block users from connecting to it is a petty, anti-customer, and inexcusable move. Stop floating these ridiculous apologist excuses for something that any self-respecting person should reject as offensive and absurd.
