SPOTLIGHTm

Shazam for iPhone

What is it?

Shazam is similar to the music identification feature of Verizon’s V Cast Music with Rhapsody, which gives cell phone users the ability to identify songs that they hear on the fly. By holding up your iPhone (and now G1) to a speaker, Shazam returns the artist, song title, album, and record label for the song being played. If connected via WiFi or computer, you’re able to download the song via iTunes.

How Much Does It Cost?

Free.

Who Is It Good For?

Music fans looking to discover some new music. People who frequently listen to the radio or hear music at bars and actually intend to purchase music or find out who sings particular songs. It’s a strong application for general music fans looking to expand their music IQ with a simple application.

Summary

Shazam continues to be one of the most popular applications on the iPhone store and it’s generally well-received by users and press alike. And while there are competitors, like Midomi, there’s not too much not to like about the simplicity of Shazam’s interface and purpose. The application is there to help you identify songs and that’s exactly what it does. There are some downsides, like the inability to identify live music and a catalog with some missing tracks here and there, but for the majority of us who listen to mainstream music, Shazam is an excellent, simple application that can help you track down music that you hear while you’re out and about. It sounds like Shazam will one day become a paid or subscription service, which might send many users running for the hills, but for now, it’s free and it works.

Keep It or Delete It?

Keep It.

While we’re continuing to see more applications that attempt to “do it all” in the “me too” following that seems to take over anything and everything it can, Shazam is an application that sets out to do one thing and do it well. And for us, there’s nothing wrong with that at all.

The premise is simple: Open Shazam, hold your phone up to a speaker, get “tags” (which are basically results).

Once you get a “tag,” you’re able to email the song to friends (i.e. “Here’s the name of that song we heard in the car today!”), attach photos to the tag, or just keep it in “My Tags” - which is essentially just a list of the different songs that you’ve identified using Shazam. The results are generally pretty accurate, but we’ve found a few songs with the wrong album covers, album titles, and other mix ups here and there (wrong videos associated with the song being a big one). Regardless, it still serves its general purpose extremely well.

For us, we only tested Shazam using computer speakers and our tinny laptop speakers, where it performed very well. One of our team members took Shazam to a concert last weekend, only to find that Shazam does not work with live music, as advertised. As stated above, this application is for the album version of songs and isn’t there for karaoke, concerts, or anything other than the studio version of songs that would be available on iTunes (if you have a WiFi connection or are connected to a computer).

What’s nice about the added features are also some of the few big misses for the application. For certain songs, Shazam will try to link to what it believes to be useful YouTube videos related to the song or ideally, the music video for the song. Unfortunately, what you’ll often end up with are user-generated videos that are not the official music videos and oftentimes these videos aren’t even for the song you’re looking for. Despite the fact that Shazam links to iTunes for its music library, it seems a little silly to not be able to view the actual music video some other way.

No Love for Taylor Swift's "Invisible"

Another problem we ran into was a slightly limited library when searching. While we rarely ran into problems with any big songs, we searched for Taylor Swift’s “Invisible,” which is a song that was on the re-release of one of the biggest country albums of the year, only to pull up no results.

We tried again - no results.

We tried again - no results.

While the song has only been played a modest 32,000 times or so on imeem at the time of this posting, the song is legitimate, from a major label, and a major artist who isn’t anything close to underground. Shazam works, but it’s going to have some holes here and there, we just happened to find one of them.

Despite some holes here and there, along with some associated content that is a noble attempt that often misses, Shazam still does a good job with what it sets out to do. There have been way too many times when all of us have been in the car and the radio DJ doesn’t identify the one song that we were trying to figure out the name for or times when we’ve been out shopping and think it’s too embarassing to ask someone working at Macy’s what the name of the song is on the Muzak player.

Shazam answers the question of “What’s the name of this song playing?” It’s a simple question and Shazam is a simple answer.