Shazam turned 20 on Friday. (That’s your cue to feel old). And as such, the company has released figures from its archive, having just surpassed over 70 billion song recognitions.
Certainly, in the two decades it’s been up and running, it’s changed the way we discover music – “to Shazam” has become a verb in its own right, synonymous with identifying tracks. In fact, an estimated 225 million of us do it monthly now, from around the globe.
Launched in 2002, the technology initially involved users having to dial 2580 on their phone, before holding it up to the song that was playing. They’d then receive a text message – yes, an SMS text message – telling them what the song was.
By 2008, though, the technology was much improved, and Shazam was available as an app on the brand-new Apple Store. A decade later, in September 2018, the London-based company was acquired by Apple, becoming a great tool for the technology giant to get a sense of people’s listening and song discovery habits, as well as linking people to their own music streaming service.
By June of last year Shazam surpassed 1 billion song searches via its app per month, whilst in May this year, it reached 2 billion lifetime installs of its app.
In total, Drake is the most Shazamed artist of all time with over 350 million Shazams across tracks he’s either led or featured on. His hit track ‘One Dance’ is the most popular of those, with over 17 million Shazams.
‘Dance Monkey’ by Tones And I is the most Shazamed song ever with over 41 million Shazams. Prior to that, Gnarls Barkleys’ ‘Crazy’ – which became the first single to top the UK Singles Chart on download sales alone, where it remained for nine weeks – was the most searched-for track using the 2580 messaging service.
Notable firsts for artists on the app, meanwhile, include the following:
- First-ever Shazamed song: ‘Jeepster’ by T. Rex (April 19, 2002)1
- First Shazamed song on the iOS app: ‘How Am I Different’ by Aimee Mann (July 10, 2008)
- First track to reach 1,000 Shazams: ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’ by Eminem (September 2002)
- First track to reach one million Shazams: ‘TiK ToK’ by Ke$ha (February 2010)
- First track to reach 10 million Shazams: ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’ by Gotye feat. Kimbra (December 2012)
- First track to reach 20 million Shazams: ‘Prayer In C (Robin Schulz Radio Edit)’ by Lilly Wood & The Prick and Robin Schulz (October 2015)
- First artist to hit one million Shazams: Lil Wayne (February 2009)
- First artist to hit 10 million Shazams: Lil Wayne (June 2011)
- First artist to hit 100 million Shazams: David Guetta (May 2015)
Elsewhere, for those who admire speed, the fastest track to accumulate one million Shazams was BTS’ ‘Butter’, which took nine days to do so; Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shape Of You’, which incidentally is the most-streamed song on Spotify, became the fastest to reach ten million Shazams, after 87 days; and the aforementioned ‘Dance Monkey’ by Tones And I took 219 days to become the fastest track to reach 20 million Shazams.
