- Jan 8, 2011
- 22,361
The EU has approved Apple’s acquisition of Shazam (via Reuters), the music recognition and discovery service. Apple announced it was buying the company in December, but had to wait on EU approval which launched an anticompetitive investigation to decide whether Apple’s purchase would lock out competition and unfairly elevate Apple Music.
The acquisition was expected to complete, and now it’s official. The EU commission deemed that the purchase ‘would not harm competition in the bloc’.
In it's Early Days (ca. 2000)
Initially, in 2002, the service was launched only in the UK and was known as "2580", as the number was the shortcode that customers dialled from their mobile phone to get music recognised. The phone would automatically hang up after 30 seconds. A result was then sent to the user in the form of a text message containing the song title and artist name. At a later date, the service also began to add hyperlinks in the text message to allow the user to download the song online.
Shazam launched in the US on the AT&T Wireless network in 2004 in a joint offering with Musicphone, a now defunct San Francisco-based company. The service was free at launch with AT&T saying that it would charge USD0.99 for each use in future.
Shazam (application) - Wikipedia