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Apple Using Shazam to Predict 50 Breakthrough Music Artists This Year

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Apple today launched a new Shazam Fast Forward 2025 website that will spotlight 50 music artists who are poised to have a breakthrough year.

Shazam-Fast-Forward-2025.jpg

The list of artists will be revealed on a genre-by-genre basis over the next five days, starting with dance/electronic artists today. Rising artists in the Latin, Country/Rock, Pop, Hip-Hop, and R&B genres will follow later this week.

"With more than 300 million global monthly users and over 100 billion global song recognitions since its launch, Shazam's unique ability to accurately predict the next breaking artist is unparalleled," said Apple, in an email.

Artists are selected based on Shazam's "uniquely predictive data and algorithms," coupled with the "expertise of Apple Music's global editorial team."

Apple said two-thirds of the artists who were in Shazam's predictions list last year went on to be in Apple Music's Daily Top 100 list in 150 countries.

A variety of Shazam playlists are available on Apple Music.

Article Link: Apple Using Shazam to Predict 50 Breakthrough Music Artists This Year
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/01/06/shazam-fast-forward-2025/
Not sure why they’re dragging this out instead of just releasing the entire list at once.

Anyway, that is an interesting concept, using Shazams to predict which artists are getting big. It makes sense.
 
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I'm oddly reminded of the old sci-fi film Minority Report, only instead of predicting murders ahead of time, we have a system that just predicts killer tracks? 🎶😎
 
FaustsHausUK said:
I'm looking at the Discovery Top 50 playlist and it looks like someone's cat ran over their keyboard chasing a toy. I love music, I work in music, and I have heard of one artist on this entire list. 😳
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I'm not familiar with many of them either. very international list

plus we're just out of touch ;)
 
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something interesting about this to me is what the categories say about the state of guitar based music

country and rock are single category and pop, hip hop and r&b are broken out in to their own three
 
Isn’t this a bit of a ”self fulfilling prophecy”, though, promoting these artists like this, giving them even more exposure?
 
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Apple said two-thirds of the artists who were in Shazam's predictions list last year went on to be in Apple Music's Daily Top 100 list in 150 countries.
Click to expand...

So what about the other third of artists that don't match? 66% is a terrible hit rate.

So now we're going to financially incentivize artists to create music to please the algorithms instead of our ears?

Might as well mic up a chorus of toilets flushing, it would be cheaper & provide a similar endgame.

The next inevitable step will be schmoozers hocking "AI" music generation software designed to please the algorithms.
I usually say "garbage in, garbage out" but in this case, it's "garbage out reinforces more garbage in".
 
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funkboy said:
So now we're going to financially incentivize artists to create music to please the algorithms instead of our ears?
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I suppose I misunderstood what this was.

I figured it based this on what people have Shazam search for, which tells it what music is pleasing people's ears
 
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nathansz said:
something interesting about this to me is what the categories say about the state of guitar based music

country and rock are single category and pop, hip hop and r&b are broken out in to their own three
Click to expand...
I noticed the same. Dance and Pop are distinct enough to be separate, but Country and Rock are not? R&B and Hip Hop together I get.

And yet all the arena anthems are still rock.... interesting
 
bobone said:
I noticed the same. Dance and Pop are distinct enough to be separate, but Country and Rock are not? R&B and Hip Hop together I get.

And yet all the arena anthems are still rock.... interesting
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I hear alot of 90s 00s hip hop and dance music in arenas
 
Interesting. Will be checking out the website over the next few days to see the artists unveiled each day.
 
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I wonder if publishing lists like this is almost self-fulfilling. I'm sure Shazam has some information about these artists that suggests they are on the upswing, but wouldn't publishing a list with Apple's reach get more exposure to these artists - thus making Shazam's prediction more likely to come true?
 
nathansz said:
I hear alot of 90s 00s hip hop and dance music in arenas
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I knew someone would take exception to that statement. ;) In reality - the large majority of those anthems are rock. 0 pop. And a very few hip-hop from the 90s in my experience. Mine are limited to certain sports however, so there very likely is a skew to my personal data.
 
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