Shazam launches Australian chart show, finally makes profit globally

Shazam and Foxtel’s [V] Hits have teamed up for a new weekly extended Sunday countdown called Shazam Chart Show.

Launching on October 23, and broadcasting between midday to 4pm, it counts down the highest trending Shazamed tracks in Australia playing back the Top 50 music videos.

Additionally, weekdays from October 24 at 5pm, [V] HITS will play the Top 10 Shazamed songs of the day.

Fraser Stark, Group Channel Manager, Foxtel Arts & Music Channels said, “[V] HITS has it covered for the latest in charts and music videos.

“Following the success of Tweet the Beat on [V] HITS, the channel is extending its partnerships with popular digital platforms that have an ear for music.

“By teaming up with Shazam, [V] HITS viewers can see more of the most popular songs from home and around the world, some of the greatest hits from past years, as well as discover new artists and fresh tracks to fall in love with.

“It’s great that we can now bring the fun and immediacy of Shazam trends to [V] HITS.”

Steve Sos, Sydney-based Asia Pacific VP for Shazam, added: “It is great to be partnering with Foxtel and [V] HITS on such an exciting and innovative opportunity given the undeniably strong brand fit between the two brands.

“The idea of curating the social currency that Shazam’s daily data represents into a video based chart show seemed like an obvious way to further engage existing fans of both platforms as well as music lovers Australia wide more broadly.”

Australia is one of the London-based Shazam’s Top 10 territories. Two years ago it had reached eight million Australian users, a quarter of whom were active, and used 12 million times a month.

The app has over 100 million global users, who hit the Shazam button over 20 million times a day – and makes it a foremost music discovery platform.

Shazam Entertainment reported overnight that after 17 years, it has finally turned a profit this first quarter. It declined to reveal specific figures.

Its mobile apps have been downloaded 1 billion times, with 30 billion total Shazams since launch.

But its revenues are not coming so much from music but from advertisers like Nike and Air New Zealand, who pay to use its image-recognition and sound-recognition technology in their marketing campaigns.

Until recently, much of Shazam’s revenue came from driving users to the Apple iTunes Store to buy the songs they identified through its app, and taking a commission for it.

According to Shazam CEO Rich Riley, Shazam has been responsible for 10% of the music industry’s download sales. It sends 1 million clicks a day to streaming services including Spotify and Apple Music.

But with consumers switching to streaming from downloads, Shazam moved to an ad-based model.

This has been an extremely successful move, says Riley, explaining that ad revenue has grown so much faster than from its music streaming partners – and hence put the company in the black for the first time.

Plans for Shazam are to expand to developing countries, embed its app in social media platforms, and make its recognition technology faster and more accurate.