Business
21:02, 09-Dec-2017
Apple to buy music-recognizing app Shazam: report
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A music app that lets users identify any song, TV show, film, or advertisement may be on the verge of being bought by Apple.
The tech giant is in talks to buy Shazam to bolster its streaming music service, technology news site TechCrunch reported Friday.
Apple has declined to comment on the report but reports said the deal could be completed within days.
Apple said in September that its streaming service had more than 30 million subscribers – a rapid rise but still trailing industry leader Spotify which said it had 60 million paying users as of July and 80 million more on its free tier.
Since its founding in 1999 as a text-message-based service, Shazam has offered a high-tech solution to listeners' longtime agony over not recognizing music on the radio or in bars, letting users identify songs through their phones' microphones.
Shazam, which is based in London, said last year that it had reached one billion downloads on smartphones.
But it only recently started to see profitability by incorporating advertisements and tying up with other tech firms including Spotify and Apple, to which it refers traffic.
Apple, which earlier revolutionized online music with iTunes, in 2015 launched Apple Music as the market turns to streaming, which offers unlimited on-demand listening.
Meanwhile, Stockholm-based Spotify announced on Friday that it and China's Tencent were taking minority stakes in each other – a likely sign of Spotify's growth ambitions in the world's most populous country, where it is not yet present.
Source(s): AFP