Shazam mobile music hits one billion milestone

Probably the best known music application in the world, Shazam has a big announcement today. Since its announcement last October that it had acquired 50 million users, it has now grown to 75 million users – and has identified its one billionth song.

Shazam?

The core of the Shazam service is that it can allow your smartphone to identify a song that is playing. Your phone just needs to be able to “hear” it, and Shazam will give you a track name, album and artist. It has a good selection of value-added services built around that, but music identification and discovery is the core offering.

Getting bigger, faster

Last October, Shazam announced it had 50 million customers – 15 million of which had been picked over the last 8 months. Now it has announced 75 million – 25 million of which have been picked up over the last 8 months. So not only is Shazam gaining users, but it is gaining them at an accelerating rate.

Incidentally, the billionth song was “Gettin’ Over“, by French DJ David Guetta.

Andrew Fisher, Shazam’s CEO said: “2010 marks ten years of Shazam’s innovation and leadership… our one billionth tag is testament to our ever growing fan base of users that enjoy Shazam’s unrivalled music experience…. Thanks to our loyal fan base and support from our partners Shazam has achieved an impressive 100% growth in the last year. We are confident that the user growth we have seen in the last six months will continue throughout 2010 and that we will exceed 100 million Shazamers by the end of the year.”

What we think?

Shazam must be dizzy with good news these days. This announcement comes on the heels of 1,000,000 downloads over Ovi alone and comScore declaring that Shazam was the most popular app in Europe. And I’m not surprised. Shazam almost embodies what it is that makes mobile applications so useful. They let you take advantage of your phones built-in capabilities in a way that you wouldn’t have thought of before, but that makes you think “oh yes, I wonder why no one thought of that before”.