After some strong rumours began circulating last week, Apple confirmed it has indeed acquired audio identifying app, Shazam, a deal worth a casual $400 million.
If you’ve never used it before, the program listens to short audio snippets in order to identify songs, movies, commercials, and TV shows. It always seems to come in handy when you least expect it, like when you need to know the name of that red hot song they just played on the bloody work radio.
“Shazam is one of the highest rated apps in the world and loved by hundreds of millions of users and we can’t imagine a better home for Shazam to enable us to continue innovating and delivering magic for our users,” the company told The Verge.
While they’ve been valued at a whopping $1 billion, the company are struggling with their current business model and as a result, only managed to bring in $54 million in revenue in 2016.
Exactly how the companies will work together is still a mystery at this stage, but it could revolve around improving the experience of Apple Music or by implementing deeper integration with iOS, similar to Google‘s song recognition feature on the Pixel.
Assuming there’s no regulatory issues, the deal is expected to close within the coming weeks.
