Shazam offers mobile targeting to record labels

Shazam is introducing mobile retargeting for advertisers.

The offering to target users’ music and genre interests is initially only being offered to record labels, but is expected to be used as a commercial tool for brands in the future with Steve Sos, Sales Director for Shazam Australia and New Zealand telling TMN he is increasingly talking to creative agencies and brands about owning their “acoustic IP”.

“At the end of the day we’re a search engine as much as anything else,” says Sos. “Albeit we’re a search engine based on audio, and so what we have the ability to do is, if a brand has invested in a certain track, we have the ability to target an advertising message into the track when someone’s actually Shazaming that artist aswell.

“With a label, because we get that signal of intent in terms of Shazaming a certain artist, we can build a community or a device ID around people that Shazam a particular artist and retarget them via a News Feed push.”

The audio identification and streaming service launched ‘News Feed’ in February to increase activity from its 90 million global active users each month and in December last year unveiled an auto-listening function, which keeps Shazam listening for recorded music, even when the app is closed. Since the feature’s launch, Shazam has claimed users have spent 2.6 million hours identifying music and TV content.

The news feed was recently used for Australia’s Got Talent winners Justice Crew. The dance-pop troupe created a piece-to-camera video that was given a News Feed push to people that had recently Shazamed them as an artist and directed them to the video and other content. News Feed is currently the exclusive domain of the labels to build up utility and ensure users find out music related information first.

“We want to make sure it’s delivering on its purpose and that’s as a source of information,” Sos told TMN.

Of Shazam’s 450 million global users, 9.5 million are registered in Australia, and of the service’s 90 million global active monthly users, 2.5 million of those are active Australian users.