Shazam Wants To Extend Their Services Beyond Just Music

One of Shazam’s core features is its ability to identify songs being played on speakers just by holding your phone to the sound source. It also later gained the ability to identify TV shows the same way, but is the ability to identify songs and TV shows enough? Could Shazam be used for something more, something greater?

That’s what Shazam’s CEO Rich Riley has planned for the company. Speaking to Reuters during MWC 2015, Riley stated that he hopes to expand Shazam’s abilities beyond just music and TV shows, but unfortunately he did not state exactly what he had planned. According to Riley, “Shazam is already a verb. We want to expand the universe of what you can Shazam.”

However Riley did state that perhaps Shazam could soon be used and applied to objects to recognize, like maybe pointing Shazam at a food and somehow be able to pull up its nutritional information. Or maybe be able to identify a clothing brand by pointing your phone’s camera at a piece of clothing someone else is wearing.

To help fund their dream of expanding Shazam’s capabilities, the company has since managed to raise $30 million in funding from a variety of unidentified billionaires and financial institutions. Riley claims that the extra funds would go towards adding more employees to their list as well as signing additional partnerships with publishers and content companies.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Audio
Tags: shazam