appears to have a close connection with its subject . it may require cleanup to comply with wikipedia s content policies particularly neutral point of view . please discuss further on the talk page . february 2016 learn how and when to remove this template message shazam entertainment ltd. founded 1999 ; 17 years ago 1999 united states founders chris barton philip inghelbrecht dhiraj mukherjee avery wang headquarters london england u.k. number of locations 7 offices 2014 area served worldwide key people rich riley ceo andrew fisher executive chairman products apps website www.shazam.com shazam is an app for macs pcs and smartphones 1 best known for its music identification capabilities that has expanded to integrations with cinema advertising tv and retail environments . 2 shazam entertainment limited was founded in 1999 by chris barton philip inghelbrecht avery wang and dhiraj mukherjee . 3 shazam uses a smartphone or computer s built in microphone to gather a brief sample of audio being played . it creates an acoustic fingerprint based on the sample and compares it against a central database for a match . if it finds a match it sends information such as the artist song title and album back to the user . some implementations of shazam incorporate relevant links to services such as itunes spotify youtube or groove music . in december 2013 shazam was one of the top ten most popular apps in the world according to its ceo . 4 the shazam app has more than 100 million monthly active users and has been used on more than 500 million mobile devices as of august 2014 . 5 in october 2014 shazam announced its technology has been used to identify 15 billion songs . 6 in october 2016 shazam announced its mobile apps have been downloaded more than 1 billion times and users have performed more than 30 billion shazams since launch . 7 contents 1 features 2 devices 3 function 4 history 4.1 partnerships 4.2 early days of the service 4.3 smartphone app 4.4 desktop app 5 similar apps 6 similar recognition service 7 patent infringement lawsuit 8 funding 9 references 10 further reading 11 external links features edit shazam offers two types of applications a free app simply called shazam and a paid app called shazam encore . in september 2012 the service was expanded to enable tv users in the us to identify featured music access cast information and get links to show information online as well as added social networking capabilities . 8 in february 2014 shazam announced a redesign of the app which included a new look and additional features including lyric viewing options access to music videos and related videos unique recommendations improved biographies and discographies and additional functionality for use with tv shows . the update also featured a news feed and auto shazam a feature introduced in december 2013 which runs in the background of users mobile devices to automatically identify media . 9 in july 2014 shazam announced the launch of shazam for mac a desktop version of the app which when enabled runs in the background and automatically recognizes any song played on or near the computer including songs playing in the background of tv shows or youtube videos . 10 apple s launch of ios 8 in september 2014 came with the seamless integration of shazam into apple s intelligent personal assistant siri function . 11 devices edit shazam is a free or low cost application that runs on android ios blackberry os and windows systems . the application is similar on most phones and the result is shown on the screen complete with details on artist album title genre music label lyrics a thumbnail image of the song album artwork links to download the song on the amazon mp3 or itunes store and where relevant give the option of playing the song on rdio and show the song s video on youtube . shazam is also available for mac as a desktop application . 10 on 24 april 2015 shazam was also confirmed as a new optional app on watchos launching on the apple watch app store . function edit shazam works by analyzing the captured sound and seeking a match based on an acoustic fingerprint in a database of more than 11 million songs . 12 a spectrogram of the sound of a violin . the target zone of a song scanned by shazam . 13 shazam identifies songs based on an audio fingerprint based on a time frequency graph called a spectrogram . shazam stores a catalogue of audio fingerprints in a database . the user tags a song for 10 seconds and the application creates an audio fingerprint . once it creates the fingerprint of the audio shazam starts the search for matches in the database . if there is a match it returns the information to the user ; otherwise it returns a song not known dialogue . 14 shazam can identify prerecorded music being broadcast from any source such as a radio television cinema or music in a club provided that the background noise level is not high enough to prevent an acoustic fingerprint being taken and that the song is present in the software s database . history edit the company was founded in 1999 by barton and inghelbrecht who were students at university of california berkeley and mukherjee who worked at a london based internet consulting firm called viant . citation needed in need of a digital signal processing specialist the founding team then hired wang who was a phd student from stanford university . as of september 2012 update wang is the only member of the original team to remain in the company 3 and serves as shazam s chief scientist . 15 rich riley who claims to have accidentally invented the toolbar 16 in1998 99 joined shazam as ceo in april 2013 to increase the company s growth 17 after over 13 years at yahoo 18 and with more than 17 years of experience as an entrepreneur and internet executive . 19 i look forward to extending our dominance in media engagement from our roots in music to our leadership position in second screen tv and want to ensure that shazam is the company that helps people recognize and engage with the world around them riley said in a statement at the time . 18 riley replaced andrew fisher who was hired from infospace into the ceo role in 2005 to strengthen industry partnerships and grow the userbase . 3 fisher is now executive chairman . partnerships edit the first partnership was with entertainment uk part of woolworths whom they approached to digitise their music catalogue of 1.5 million songs in return for permission to create a proprietary database . as the service grew to have a worldwide userbase it needed to keep its database up to date which it does by having relationships with labels globally . 3 by december 2008 the database had grown to 8 million songs . 20 in february 2013 shazam announced a partnership with the music store beatport adding its library of electronic music to the service . 21 on 3 april 2013 shazam announced an exclusive partnership with saavn an indian online music streaming service . the deal will add nearly 1 million songs in indian languages to shazam s database . 22 23 24 25 in july 2014 shazam announced a partnership with rdio that allows shazam users to stream full songs within the app . 26 in addition to music shazam has announced collaborations with partners across television advertising and cinema . in may 2014 ncm media networks announced a partnership with shazam to incorporate shazam into firstlook pre show segments that run in regal amc and cinemark theaters . 27 in november 2014 ncm and shazam announced that ncm firstlook pre shows are now shazam enabled on over 20 000 movie screens across the united states . 28 in august 2014 shazam announced the launch of resonate a sales product that allows tv networks to access its technology and user base . the news included the announcement of partnerships with amc a e dick clark productions and fuse . 2 shazam recently announced a partnership with sun broadcast group on shazam for radio a new offering that will allow radio stations to push customized content to listeners on sun broadcast s over 8 000 radio stations in the u.s. 29 shazam is not affiliated with the eft network shazam inc. shazam announced that they would be in partner with manor racing during 2016 . early days of the service edit 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 . 3 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 . 30 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 . 31 in 2006 users were charged 0.60 per call or had unlimited use for 4.50 a month as well as an online service to keep track of all tags . 30 smartphone app edit shazam for iphone 2.0 debuted on 10 july 2008 with the launch of apple s app store . the free app simplified the service by enabling the user to launch itunes and buy the song directly if the user was on a wi fi connection 32 at the time itunes did not allow music downloads over 3g . it was also possible to launch the iphone youtube app if a video was available . 33 in 2008 the service struggled to identify classical music . 34 shazam launched on the android platform in october 2008 . the android app connected to amazon s mp3 store instead of itunes . 35 alongside the ios 3 update in july 2009 shazam updated its app to include a number of new features marking the tag with gps coordinates ; sending tags to others as postcards enabling them to buy the song ; and twitter integration . 36 the app launched on the windows mobile marketplace in october 2009 as a freemium offering with the first release of shazam encore . the free version was now limited to five tags per month users typically tagged ten songs per month . encore priced at usd4 .69 added several features such as song popularity charts and recommendations . 37 encore first appeared for iphone in november 2009 . 38 by december 2009 shazam was downloaded 10 million times in 150 countries across 350 mobile operators . around eight percent of users purchased a track after it was identified by the service . 3 its success led to a funding round from kleiner perkins caufield & byers in october 2009 . 3 39 in january 2011 apple announced that shazam was the fourth most downloaded free app of all time on the app store while rival soundhound had the top paid ipad app . 40 early adopters of the free application are still allowed unlimited tagging . 41 getjar an app store for android blackberry and symbian added shazam in november 2010 . 42 in january 2011 shazam and spotify announced a partnership for ios and android to help users identify music with shazam and listen to tracks through spotify . 43 while shazam already had facebook and twitter share buttons deeper facebook