Shazam, the world’s leading mobile discovery company, today announced that it has passed the major milestone of 100 million users. Over the past six months Shazam has grown its user base by 25 million and expanded beyond music to enable its users to interact with broadcast media and advertising.
“When Shazam launched creating the mobile music discovery category, we couldn’t have imagined that over 100 million people in 200 countries would be using our service, or that Shazamers would be actively interacting with television programmes and advertising” said Andrew Fisher, Shazam’s CEO. “Shazam’s growing popularity and ubiquity has established our leadership position as the best way for consumers across the globe to discover, engage with and share new content via their mobile phones.”
Shazam’s expertise and leadership in changing the way people discover content, purchase products and share their experience using mobile devices is now being harnessed by major broadcast networks such as NBC Universal and HBO– as well as major consumer brands, such as Levi’s Dockers and Lynx, through its innovative Shazam Audio Recognition Advertising (SARA) program launched in February this year. When viewers see the Shazam logo on screen, they are encouraged to Shazam the television programme or commercial where they can interact with special programming content, buy products, and enter promotions.
“Shazam has become a key facilitator of consumer access to their music of choice; more than that, it has demonstrated that its role as a mobile customer acquisition vehicle for the music industry is transferable to enable high levels of direct response activity across content in general.” Says Windsor Holden, Principal Analyst at Juniper Research.
Expanding beyond Shazam’s musical roots, Shazam has already been recognised with an award for Dockers ‘Wear the Pants™’ Super Bowl campaign by the Mobile Marketing Association with a Global Mobile Marketing Award for ‘Best Cross Media Integration Campaign’. The campaign was the first to incorporate SARA and enabled viewers to directly interact with the TV commercial via the Shazam mobile App.
“To have the first ever SARA campaign recognised by the MMA is a testament to the innovative opportunities Shazam can offer any brand marketer. Shazam’s creation and leadership of this important new marketing category and our ability to continually innovate our service to appeal to a growing number of consumers and marketers makes us confident we have a significant amount of additional value to bring in the future,” concluded Andrew Fisher.
Launched ten years ago as the first mobile specific discovery service, Shazam has evolved into an App phenomenon – so much so, that ‘Shazaming’ has become a verb, widely adopted by consumers for ‘content discovery’.
Shazam was recently recognised as the Best Management Team by the Sunday Times in its Tech Track 100 awards 2010 and ranked as the top company in The Guardian’s Tech Media Invest Top 100 2010. The company has offices in London, Palo Alto, New York and Seoul.
