Apple finalising deal for acquisition of Shazam

Apple is finalising a deal for the acquisition of Shazam, the app that allows users to identify songs, movies, and TV shows from an audio clip, according to TechCrunch.

The deal is said to be worth $400 million, according to Recode, which also confirmed the news.

According to commentators, the obvious benefit of the Shazam acquisition for Apple is the company's music and sound recognition technologies. It will also save the commissions Apple pays Shazam for sending users to its iTunes Store to buy content, which made up the majority of Shazam's revenue in 2016, and drove 10 per cent of all digital download sales, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Another benefit from the deal is in case Apple decides to shut down the app, it would hurt competing streaming services like Spotify and Google Play Music, where Shazam sends over 1 million clicks a day, according to the WSJ.

Shazam also has a deal with Snapchat. It is not clear how the acquisition would impact any of these agreements.

But the real benefit for Apple may come from Shazam's augmented reality technology, say commentators.

Earlier this year, Shazam launched an augmented reality platform for brands, building upon the visual recognition technology it launched back in 2015.

Shazam's technology was introduced in 2002 as a dial-up service that would allow users to listen to a song for 30 seconds and send its user a text message identifying it. It went on to become one of the most popular mobile apps on Apple's App Store.

It even became a hit with music executives, who consulted it to see how listeners were responding to new songs, and used its maps feature to see whether that new track was doing better in, say, Buffalo or Detroit.

Though newer services like Spotify and Snapchat have taken off some of the shine from Shazam, it still remains a popular feature. The company said last year, that it had surpassed a billion mobile downloads and was used by ''hundreds of millions of people each month.''