Hot Seat: Will Mills – Vice President of Music and Content Shazam
Ever wanted to know what that ear-worm song was? Well, yes, there’s an app for that. And it’s called Shazam. Chances are, you’ve used it – more than 350 million people have used it.
Shazam’s charm is its ability to identify songs at the press of a button. And with that, it’s become a big spinner for the global music biz. One in every 10 à la carte downloads sold globally are handled by Shazam, generating some $300 million in sales, according to the company.
Shazam arrived on the scene at the height of the Dotcom bubble. Its early incarnations were as clunky as the phones of the time. When a commercial launch began in the U.K. in 2002, you’d text a number (2580), hold the phone to the source of music and — Shazam — a message would arrive with the title and artist of the song. Shazam’s neat premise caught on, and it moved with the times to become the hugely successful smartphone music app that it is today. Shazam says its users are now tagging more than 10 million songs, programs and commercials each day.
The action isn’t all happening at the app. Shazam recently opened an office in Sydney, helmed by regional sales director Steven Sos, and its integrated ad campaigns have started popping up on Australian TV. Shazam also hired longtime Yahoo! executive Rich Riley as its new CEO, promoting longtime chief Andrew Fisher into the role as Executive Chairman – moves designed to help deliver an IPO. By the end of 2012, the service had raised $32 million in funding. Will Mills, Shazam’s London-based VP of Music and Content, shares with TMN a bunch of eye-popping numbers behind the service. And he’s confident there’s a whole lot more business to be done.
You recently announced your 300 million-user milestone. Where are your numbers at now?
We’d signed- up our 350 millionth user at end of year June.
So what sort of year-on-year growth are we looking at?
At the end of June 2012 we were at 200 million, which is growth of 75%. Shazam is an incredibly popular app. The core proposition is around music, but it’s broadened into advertising and TV. We’re seeing that more than 10 million people are installing Shazam every month on their device. They want to know, what is that song playing? That and the investment we’ve made in the music database and the team here, the speed, we’ve got the widest coverage of music. That’s netted out.
How do you explain that spike?
We’re always innovating and leading and that reflects in our popularity. There’s a feature where you can see dynamic charts in Shazam in real time. The month before that we introduced location maps, so you can zoom in and see a map around the world of songs being tagged. We always roll out features that add value for our users.
What do you know about your users? What percentage use it regularly, and how many graduate to making an impulse buy?
We have a gross figure of sales of digital goods by downloads that we sell, which is close to $300 million. Of that $300 million the total number of à la carte downloads is somewhere around a billion globally. The amount that Shazam drives is substantial (compared to) the total number of downloads that go on around the world. We have a daily sales rate of about 500,000. It’s a very large percentage of people who Shazam songs who go on to buy.
There isn’t really a big competitor in your space. Is that a large part of your success? You can’t stop competition, but when you get to the level of success that Shazam has had the market seems as though there hasn’t been competition. In the second screen space, there’s no one that has the scale of Shazam’s user base. And likewise in the music discovery space.
How many active monthly users do you have?
70 million.
And how many tracks are recognised by Shazam?
30 million plus
What are the most important growth opportunities for Shazam?
Clearly 350 million is a big number. But literally there are billions of phones out there in the world. But we think we’ve only just begun in terms of our growth. There’s much more room for us to grow as smartphone ownership grows. That’s probably one of the key drivers. In the newer markets in Asia pacific and Latin America, there’s huge upside in (penetration) of smartphones. The other thing is increased network connectivity, be it 3G or 4G as we move onto those networks. Obviously that makes Shazam work faster, you can download music faster or stream it faster, via our partners like Rdio.
We’re seeing Shazam integration into ads Down Under. Where is that business heading?
A couple of years back we noticed organically that a great song used in an advertisement or a television show would go into the upper regions of Shazam’s chart. People would use Shazam when they were watching television. So we developed a business that grew on that existing organic user behaviour that millions of people do; they get their phone out and use Shazam for TV commercials and shows and we build upon that and make a deeper experience for the brand or the TV show. We’ve done some campaigns with music. Swedish House Mafia’s track Greyhound was used in an Absolut Vodka commercial. When you Shazam’d that, we gave away free downloads. We’ve done more than 200 campaigns in the U.S., and many across Europe. It builds on existing user behaviour. It helps to connects with the two screens.
What are your main challenges?
One of the key strengths of Shazam is the depth and width of our music database. To that end we’ve done numerous deals with leaders who lead their respective categories. And literally hundreds of other (content) providers. The wonderful thing about music is that although there’s been a digital revolution and most of the world’s music has been digitised, there’s still a substantial amount that isn’t. That’s the challenge. There’s always new songs coming out, exclusives. We’re always trying to stay ahead of the curve and get music ahead of those tastemaker DJs. That’s when most people will be Shazaming it. For us, most labels reach out. Most are proactive and recognize what a big piece of the mix Shazam is for total sales. The savvier labels are switched on and they’re always reaching out to get their exclusive content (ingested) that they’ve had commissioned for adverts for first-plays, or indeed their entire catalogues. There are, as you go further around the world into new markets, places where the digital revolution hasn’t had that impact. So you have to reach out and spread the message.
Which markets are ripe for doing biz?
Clearly Asia-Pacific and Latin America are the two of biggest growing (regions) along with India. There’s some real opportunities there. Its early days for a lot of them in terms of a lot of those markets, particularly in Asia-Pacific, where it’s going to by ad-funded models. The (penetration) numbers are pretty overwhelming in terms of number of phone users.
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