Apple is stepping up its music game once again, this time acquiring music and image recognition service Shazam for a reported $400 million USD.
The intent to make this acquisition was first broken by TechCrunch last week, with Apple confirming to the website this morning in a statement that the tech giant has indeed gone and acquired the London-based Shazam.
Apple has not detailed how it plans on integrating Shazam, whose business generally revolves around music recognition. Since the app was launched it has seen over one billion downloads, and has been updated to include features such as sending users to other sites to download and listen to music, provide information on artists and music and the most popular songs, and it even has an augmented reality component that allows users to find content by taking pictures of images.
“We are thrilled that Shazam and its talented team will be joining Apple. Since the launch of the App Store, Shazam has consistently ranked as one of the most popular apps on iOS. Today, it’s used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, across multiple platforms. Apple Music and Shazam are a natural fit, sharing a passion for music discovery and delivering great music experiences to our users. We have exciting plans in store, and we look forward to combining with Shazam upon approval of today’s agreement,” Apple told TechCrunch in a statement.
While Apple did not confirm the price of the deal, it is reported to land in the $400 million region. Supposedly, the Apple deal has been in the works for the past five months, during which Shazam had also been in talks with other companies such as Snapchat and Spotify.
It makes sense that Shazam would be linked with Apple, Spotify, and Snapchat considering it already integrates with all three. Apple and Spotify reportedly gather one million referrals each month from Shazam, while Snapchat supports Shazam integration that allows users to recognize music over the app.
The $400 million price tag is significantly lower than the $1 billion valuation Shazam received in its last round of funding. That’s likely due to the only $54 million in revenue reported in 2016 since the company has struggled to find a viable business model.