

The Shazam Effect (2014) - ascertain
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/12/the-shazam-effect/382237/?single_page=true

======
nirkalimi
I remember posting this awhile ago. Here is the Original Thread if you are
looking for more comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634357](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634357)

Great article regardless. Glad to see more peoples take on it.

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fchollet
So basically, labels are now treating music production as an optimization
problem.

And because they're terrible at this type of optimization problem, they're
getting stuck in a local minimum (the space is anything but convex), which
happens to be repetitive, awful, and targeted at the largest common
denominator.

Treating music as an optimization problem may not be a bad thing in itself,
the issue is being unable to solve the problem properly.

~~~
wmkn
Are they really terrible at it? You seem to assume that the global minimum to
the problem is an artistically perfect song. For record labels the global
minimum is the song that makes the most money. If that song happens to be
repetitive and awful, so be it.

~~~
fchollet
If so many people are unhappy with the state of the pop music landscape, then
that is not a global minimum. The space of possible music is immense, you
could invent so many new genres. By not exploring the unknown, they are
missing out.

Iterating endlessly on a single recipe is just not how you build a sustainable
artistic business. It makes money in the near term, but it is doomed in the
long term. The music labels and Hollywood will have to realize this at some
point.

~~~
AustinG08
The music labels will never have to 'realize' this because, short of a
cultural revolution, it will always make the most money. I'm a musician, I am
very picky about the music I listen to. My wife? Not quite as picky. She will
hear a song on the radio, like it, and become a fan of that song. Her, along
with probably 90%+ of the general public don't carry the same snobbery that I
do, and have no guilt liking a Nickelback or a One Republic song. Edit: I
meant One Direction, but same thing.

~~~
girvo
I'm a music snob, but One Republic have a couple of decent pop-rock-ish
tracks. Your point is very spot on though.

I presented and DJ'd on a community radio show for a few years, and had a bit
of a cult following around here, however my main focus was local talent, and
was decidedly not the mainstream nor even the mainstream-indie like Triple J
plays. My audience was limited by that.

People don't really want to hear new things on the whole, and if they do, they
want the new thing to sound like the old one.

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davidu
Every time I read an article about Shazam, I'm deeply skeptical of the claims.

Example: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/08/20/shazam-
hit...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/08/20/shazam-
hits-100-million-active-users-as-it-gears-up-for-ipo/)

Article makes it seem like Shazam has metrics like a social network, but my
experience, and everyone I've ever seen is that it's rarely used -- and simply
to quickly identify a song.

This latest one in The Atlantic implies people use it far more frequently then
I think they do, and I'm again, very skeptical. And even if they do, they
don't shazam hits they know, or songs about to be hits, but they shazam that
random song they can't identify -- not sure that's an indicator of hit'ness.

From user numbers, to capital raised, to stories like this, each time I read
about Shazam, I say to myself "Gosh, I really love the app, but can it really
be this big and lucrative?" I feel like I'm missing something.

I hope I'm wrong.

~~~
mintone
Think about the kind of data that they would collect.

I personally rarely use Shazam, but when I do, it's more often then not a song
I don't know at all rather than trying to remember a song's name.

So someone like me hears a song and wants to identify it. Then another person,
and another. So you have three people in a specific location at the same time
looking to identify a song. That would suggest that those people like what
they hear. You know what the song is so you know interest has piqued. If you
cross reference that with radio plays at that time you have a new metric that
you couldn't measure previously - reaction to a radio play. It's incredibly
interesting because of the type of data it collects, which to be honest I
think the article explains explicitly and very clearly!

~~~
pbhjpbhj
It's only just struck me that it can also catch copyright infringement as
location of public performance of a work that's not authorised can be
established - especially if more than one person used Shazam to ID the work.
Interesting.

Perhaps this was obvious to everyone else.

Personally I've never used it.

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gcb0
Shazam is wasting a LOT of money to try to sell that image.

they have 2min ads on feature films showing music news.

i bet this is but paid PR. they are desperate.

the music id business is so dead. Google, apple, yahoo... everyone does it!

~~~
geographomics
Apple uses Shazam as the backend for their music identification service on iOS
8, so at least they're not having to compete there.

~~~
gcb0
Had no idea about that.

<troll>but agreeing to apple terms, show that a company is already in bad
position to negotiate. :) </troll>

now let the downvotes begin.

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bsder
Nice PR piece for Shazam. Does anybody do actual reporting anymore?

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unicornporn
An article from 2014 (that I remember reading). Perhaps that should go in the
title here...

------
spatten
> ...it has been downloaded more than 500 million times and used to identify
> some 30 million songs ...

That doesn't sound right. On average one identification for every 16
downloads? I'm guessing that second million should be a billion.

~~~
idlewords
My reading was '30 million distinct songs', not 30 million identifications

~~~
spatten
Ahh, good point. That makes more sense.

------
lumberjack
Is there some write-up on the algorithm used?

I'm currently in the planning stage for a similar project and this might end
up being really helpful for me.

EDIT: Thanks guys.

~~~
anonova
See "An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm"[1], a 2010 paper written
by one of the Shazam developers. The analysis itself doesn't seem
complicated[2] but having a large enough database to compare against is
probably the hard part.

[1]:
[http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf](http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf)

[2]: [http://www.royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/06/creating-shazam-in-
ja...](http://www.royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/06/creating-shazam-in-java/)

------
cpeterso
Media measurement company BigChampagne tried to do the same thing by
monitoring file-sharing networks.

------
mkagenius
Any reason why would Shazam be significantly faster than Twitter or the likes
in detecting trends?

~~~
mintone
I would imagine that it's good because it doesn't require any more information
that what a song sounds like. A user hears a song they like, records it there
and then and that shows 'interest'. Twitter on the other hand needs a name /
artist.. you can't really analyse a tweet saying "I like that song that goes
du du dud dud dahhh"... but Shazam actually can.

------
golemotron
> The trick, he discovered, was to turn a song into a piece of data.

I cringe and then laugh inside whenever I see tech writing like this.

~~~
jasode
I didn't see a problem with it. The magazine is "The Atlantic" which has a
general readership.

If one writes a program to analyze Shakespeare text, he might describe it as
_" converted the text into a multi-dimensional vector space"_ or _" mapped
ngrams into a point cloud"_ \-- and that would be acceptable lexicon for a Dr
Dobbs Programming Journal or possibly ArsTechnica. However, for The Atlantic,
it seems reasonble for a journalist/editor to write that as _" convert the
plays into data."_

Yes, Shakespeare the text itself was already "data" so in a pedantic analysis,
saying "converting data to data" seems pointless but that's not the level of
indirection the general readership is at.

~~~
andrewflnr
Even for a general audience, "data" is uselessly broad. Such a reader would be
better served by a better explanation of the acoustic fingerprint idea, or
even nothing at all. As it is, the article promotes the idea that "data" is
some sort of magical thing, and that's harmful.

------
dghughes
I'm not clicking since is is the Atlantic so I'm not sure what was discussed
but...

I'm on the cusp of deleting Shazam as useful as it is it's getting more spammy
as the days go by too many notifications of junk.

~~~
pervycreeper
>I'm not clicking since is is the Atlantic

Context? What did they do?

~~~
dghughes
Very spammy at least on social media such as reddit and HN breaking a rule
(official or not) of not submitting your own material it should come from a
user not the website.

They get around it by making up a username or pay someone to submit.

Physorg is another terribly spammy site often with misleading headlines.

Both phsyorg and the Atlantic have been banned from reddit at least once if
not multiple times I'm not sure about on HN.

