New Shazam Feature Will Reveal the Most Popular Moment of a Song

[jecowa]

Glad that 🍎 bought Shazam and is continuously improving it with additional integrations & features

I added this Shazam button to my lock screen & that’s pretty much the ONLY way that I’ve been accessing Shazam - because u don’t even need to find & open the Shazam app. You don’t even need to unlock your iPhone! It’s as easy as it possibly can be with this button:

why can't you use Siri to access Shazam, on Android phone, all you have to say is "ok Google Shazam this"

You can use Siri to use Shazam while the phone is locked. Just say, “What song is this?”.

 

[svish]

Interesting. Will definitely try it out. Expecting to see it in the app versions too in the near future.

 

[Justin Cymbal]

The trouble with just doing the music recognition part is it won't throw the song into the linked Apple Music playlist until the Shazam app is properly opened. At least, that's how it is for me

That actually seems like a benefit - enabling the user to have control over when the song actually gets transferred (from the Shazam app to 🍎Music playlist)

Chances are you’re pressing that lock-screen button when you’re out and about (and NOT connected to Wi-Fi) so by having Apple require you to then open the Shazam app BEFORE it begins initiating the transfer (to your 🍎Music playlist) the user can then choose to either wait until they are back at home (or connected to Wi-Fi) OR initiate the transfer right-then-&-there (if they have unlimited data or if cellular data is not a concern)

Many people have LIMITED cellular data plans - Mint Mobile currently offers unlimited calling/texting (and 5gb a month of data) for only $15 a month and anyone on that plan would very quickly go through 5 gb if doing exactly that⬆️ so the ability to enable users to have some level of control (over when their data is used) could potentially be of value to anyone on a limited or low-data plan

I’d venture to guess that the actual song recognition aspect of Shazam uses a very minimal amount of data (probably even less so than the subsequent transfer of that song to the 🍎Music playlist) the latter of which is even most likely unnecessary (to be done in conjunction) with the initial (recognition) part and therefore waiting until Wi-Fi (becomes the phone’s data source) would seem like a non-issue and/or a preferred method for most users

Even users like myself (whom limited data is not a concern) but where the issue at hand is rather the data QUALITY itself (the actual cellular connection)

Especially when driving where tower hopping can render connection dropouts in rural areas or if just simply in a location with only 1 bar of service - where one can very easily accomplish the actual song recognition aspect (because it’s probably not very data inducive to begin with) but then even attempting to do anything else on their phone turns out to be very slow - so simply getting the recognition done ✅ turns out to be relatively easy, enabling you to go back to doing what you’re probably already doing to begin with (socializing with friends & family) which is what one does if there’s no internet while driving/hiking/camping in rural areas

that’s what we do anyway when cell phone service sucks 😃😎 otherwise you’ll watch your battery 🔋 drain 1-2 percent every 5 minutes or so - not a great idea for non-essential phone use - the more bars/better cellular connection quality, the lower the usage of the battery. Wi-Fi will always be the most energy efficient way to use your phone tho

you would be surprised at how little something like pressing that Shazam button (on the lock screen) uses data - compared to opening a modern application (like Shazam) that are inherently designed around the notion of everyone having “fast” connections and absent ANY consideration for users on a limited-data plan - because the vast majority of smartphone users simply aren’t on such plans anymore

Many modern apps are way too much of an overkill in terms of the un-practical (design aesthetics) and use orders of magnitude more data than is reasonably necessary (to accomplish the actual task at hand) that’s why it seems like the interface design of so many apps is constantly changing (oftentimes to the despise of users) most likely because those companies are probably not collaborating enough with other employees within the different teams in those companies (prior to the app updates becoming published)

the more input (from various backgrounds & perspectives) from as many people as possible with regards to ANYTHING being decided upon in life, the better the resulting outcome will be. That’s just a basic anecdote of life

To reiterate on your use case, it seems as if you just continue going about your music recognition task the way that you’re used to doing - by initiating the song recognition (from directly within your Shazam app) than it seems as though this new (lock-screen) option/feature should have no affect on your use case - but rather serves the ability to function as a NEW available option - potentially to those whom cellular data IS an issue (or users on a low-data plan like that $15 mint plan)

 

[adrianlondon]

That actually seems like a benefit - enabling the user to have control over when the song actually gets transferred (from the Shazam app to 🍎Music playlist)

Chances are you’re pressing that lock-screen button when you’re out and about (and NOT connected to Wi-Fi) so by having Apple require you to then open the Shazam app BEFORE it begins initiating the transfer (to your 🍎Music playlist) the user can then choose to either wait until they are back at home (or connected to Wi-Fi) OR initiate the transfer right-then-&-there (if they have unlimited data or if cellular data is not a concern)

I'm pretty sure the amount of data transferred while you send audio data to Shazam and it sends you back the song details and album art, is much much greater than it sending a track identifier to Apple Music. It's not downloading the track.

In fact, that probably uses no data at all, as it'll update the playlist in the cloud as I won't have AM open at the time.

 

[CarlJ]

What a useless feature. First you hear a song, decide you like it, realize that you can probably shazam it, try to shazam it, fail, get closer to whatever is playing it, try again. By then a whole minute could have gone by. This data is useless.

Yep, worse than useless, if creators or marketers or recording industry executives try to draw any conclusions from this. The conclusions will always be flawed, but they'll make decisions about what to promote or record, or try to emulate in new songs, or such, from it.

 

[CarlJ]

That actually seems like a benefit - enabling the user to have control over when the song actually gets transferred (from the Shazam app to 🍎Music playlist)

I think you may be misunderstanding the process? If you use music recognition, whether from the control center / lock screen, or inside the Shazam app, a small sample of recorded sound is uploaded to the server to do the pattern matching, but "transferring" the song from Shazam to Apple Music is simply a matter of sending an identifier (more or less the song title and artist, an identifier similar to a URL in size) from one app to the other, and that can happen entirely on-device (though both apps will sync their respective databases to iCloud, also a very small data transfer).

There's no case where a multi-megabyte song file is getting moved around from one app to another, or downloaded by either app, unless you've somehow got Apple Music configured to automatically download every song on every playlist you have (if you do, and you're worried about data caps, you'd probably want to disable that - you can tell Apple Music to not use cellular data in the settings).

For what it's worth, I happily use Mint, and I keep track of how much data each app uses each month. Shazam is absolutely miniscule compared to a lot of other apps. I Shazam'd perhaps a dozen or so songs last month, directly in the Shazam app (so they transfer to Apple Music) and Shazam used 34 MB of data - that's 0.034 GB.