Shazam the track ID recognition app has been growing steadily over the last year, currently reaching 275 million users. The concept is simple – activate the smartphone app and it will record the music playing in background and quickly tell you the name of the track by matching the sound to the 25 million song database. Brilliant.
Yesterday, Shazam announced that it will be adding the whole Beatport catalogue to it’s database. The concept is supersmart, above all business-wise for Beatport. When you, the DJ is playing in the club, anyone in the crowd will be able to just point their smartphones towards the speaker and get the name of the track from the Shazam library. Beatport integration also manages to identify pitched up or pitched down tracks and ignore the effects such as delay, echo or reverb.
Back in the days – the old-school vinylist DJs would protect their rare 12″ by covering the name of the producer and the track. Some of the track were truly secret weapons who only a few people had the access two. In early 2000s Eric Prydz and some other talented producers made their own edits of their own tracks which they only played themselves – releasing a “weaker master” on Beatport. These two phenomenons added true exclusivity to some DJ’s music – ensuring their mixes were completely unique in many ways.
The Shazam integration definitely opens up the next social step in DJ evolution. On one hand you will be able to identify that perfect track the DJ is playing from the dancefloor – no need to run up and ask. On the other hand, nobody is longer safe – as long as the music you playing is available on Beatport – anyone in the room have one touch access to your secret weapons.
Beatport recently pulled it’s Iphone app off the App Store. I bet it’s being rebuild with full Shazam module, meaning that the next version will be able to instantly identify the track playing in the room and add it to your Beatport basket. So nifty, so easy, so sneaky.
This will definitely make some people very happy. While some even more angry – further fueling the “release on vinyl only” movement.
