The handy music discovery tool Shazam has turned 20 years old. Doesn’t time fly! To celebrate, app-owner Apple has released a really basic playlist.
The 20 Years Of Shazam Hits playlist on Apple Music chronicles the most Shazamed songs for each year of its existence. As you’d expect it’s pretty standard stuff. There’s some Adele, Ed Sheeran, Train, Gnarls Barkley, and the Black Eyes Peas among the big hitters featured among the twenty songs.
Apparently, millions of people needed to know who sang Rolling in the Deep and Shape Of You. However, the most Shazamed song of all time, is Tones And I’s Dance Monkey with a whopping 41 million requests.
Drake is the most Shazamed artist ever, with over 350 million, while its presence in Stranger Things led to Kate Bush’s Running Up The Hill reaching an all-time peak for the app, earlier this year.
Back in the day, when the service launched in 2002, users had to call an actual phone number and hold the phone to the speaker in order to identify the song. Years late, the UK-based service became one of the first third-party apps ever to launch on the App Store.
These days it’s racking up over a billion song recognitions a month and has a button built directly into the iPhone‘s Control Center. In that time, it’s also spawned a Beat Shazam TV show hosted by Jamie Foxx.
Apple purchased Shazam almost four years ago and it’s become a useful accompaniment to the Apple Music streaming service. Once you’ve discovered the song, you can immediately begin listening on Apple Music, for example.
“Shazam has played an impactful role in my career,” said singer-songwriter CKay in a press release published by Apple. “It allowed millions of people all over the world to discover me and my unique Nigerian sound. It made me a global sensation even before I started to perform all over the world. The story of CKay cannot be told without Shazam connecting me to the world.”
You can listen to the Playlist here. Have you discovered any of your favourite artists through Shazam? Or do you use it to discover who sang the godawful racket infecting your eardrums? Let us know @trustedreviews on Twitter.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
