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SHAZAM..How the hell does it do that?

I have herd that this is going to have a monthly fee attached to it at some time but at this time it is free.
 
So what's the meaning of the no-cost small print for this app? My cynicism tells me that they'll start charging every time you wanna identify a track at a later date
 

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I hope not, but how do they make money with it now?

I tried it out and got like 15 for 15 in matches, from iTunes, to satellite radio to television show theme songs.
 
I think they should get a cut if you end up buying the song from iTunes and generate their revenue that way. I do not know if they do get a cut though.

If not, what would you be willing to pay for the service? I have heard that in the UK it is 99p for 1 use which seems way too expensive. I read speculation that monthly service would be $5-$10 per month. While I love this app I would not pay that.

I guess for me, $3 per month or around $40 per year would be my upper limit, but even then I would search out a free alternative.
 
i had something like this on my LG Chocolate thrrough verizon. It was teh ONLY thing that i missed when i switched to the iphone. the ONLY thing.. i'm SOOO psyched that its here now!
 
There's no way they'll keep it free, the amount of cost involved in owning every cd ever released and then running hugely complex decoding and searching algorithms must be ridiculous. Even if most of their userbase are on other phones letting iPhones use it for free must cause a huge amount of lost revenue.

Currently I think they do a subscription for the regular call up service that costs £3 a month or something like that, for 300 song recognitions, which isn't too bad actually. I just hope either they subsidise that with iTunes affiliate revenue, or they just do a one off app charge of say, 9.99.
 
I love both of them, but they do different things.

Shazam recognizes recorded music, and Midomi recognizes music that you hum or sing into it. Neither will work doing the other, which is a shame.

I'm glad they're both free for now, at least. :)



And I really wish there were a service like this for classical music. :( I would pay for that.
 
newappleboy said:
Will apps like this function on the touch? I suppose not, but am not sure. Have yet to purchase the touch, nor have I been home yet today to download iTunes 7.7 to play with the app store. Does it even separate which apps will not work on the touch but will on the phone?
Click to expand...

The application will probably open and "function" but without a microphone there's nothing it can do, so it'd be entirely pointless.

jW
 
I had this on previous AT&T phones, too. It was free for a limited time (30 days?) and then they wanted $10/month for the privilege of using it after that.

I use both Shazam and Midomi. I also wondered how they got their money and hoped it was through some kind of "commission" on iTunes sales directed by those apps. If it becomes a pay-to-play service, though, I'll be done using these apps. There are usually other ways to ID music that I don't need to pay for it.
 
bluenoise said:
I had this on previous AT&T phones, too. It was free for a limited time (30 days?) and then they wanted $10/month for the privilege of using it after that.

I use both Shazam and Midomi. I also wondered how they got their money and hoped it was through some kind of "commission" on iTunes sales directed by those apps. If it becomes a pay-to-play service, though, I'll be done using these apps. There are usually other ways to ID music that I don't need to pay for it.
Click to expand...

I think Midomi is a community project that relies on matches of recordings made by other community members. I don't think they make money off of it.

www.midomi.com
 
There's no way I would pay a subscription fee for either of these programs. No way. Sure they're fantastic little apps, but they're about 90% novelty and 10% useful.

I mean, come on. I'm a big fan and I haven't even opened the app in weeks. I could see paying something for them, within reason, but that's about it. One time.
 
Amazed on how it does it

Very cool, amazed on how it does it. Even for some foreign songs, it picks up!
 
Ntombi said:
I love both of them, but they do different things.

Shazam recognizes recorded music, and Midomi recognizes music that you hum or sing into it. Neither will work doing the other, which is a shame.
Click to expand...

Midomi has a tab to recognize recorded music.
 
Wirelessly posted (Apple Communication Device: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5B108 Safari/525.20)

severe said:
There's no way I would pay a subscription fee for either of these programs. No way. Sure they're fantastic little apps, but they're about 90% novelty and 10% useful.

I mean, come on. I'm a big fan and I haven't even opened the app in weeks. I could see paying something for them, within reason, but that's about it. One time.
Click to expand...

I love the app, but hell no would I pay a subscription fee nor would I pay a per use fee for this. I'd always call someone I know and hum it to them first.
 
I must say, I have a MUCH greater success using Shazam over Midomi. That must be some craaazzy algorithm they use to match the samples to their database that fast...

Ed
 
severe said:
There's no way I would pay a subscription fee for either of these programs. No way. Sure they're fantastic little apps, but they're about 90% novelty and 10% useful.

I mean, come on. I'm a big fan and I haven't even opened the app in weeks. I could see paying something for them, within reason, but that's about it. One time.
Click to expand...
I'm the opposite and use it a few times a week on average. I do listen to a lot of random music though.

Wouldn't pay for it though.
 
iTeen said:
Verizon has had this forever.

Vcast Song ID.

Really do wish I wasn't on Verizon though...:(
Click to expand...

I've really been amazed at the response over Shazam for exactly this reason. Every POS phone on verizon has been able to do this (for free as well) for a long time. I was actually surprised to see that the iphone didn't do this natively. Verizon does it so they can sell more songs on their (aweful and expensive) music service. It seems like a natural pair for iTunes on the iPhone.
 
sorry to bring up an old thread but

this app is effing amazing!

we were in a club tonight, and my friend was wondering what the song was. it pulled out his iphone and it was able to catch the song!!

it's crazy cuz the song isn't playing in it's original sound, but was being mixed around by the DJ!! friggin crazzzziii
 
irun5k said:
Basically, it transmits the audio in real time to a large call center type place overseas (70 cents an hour kind of place), where there are a bunch of workers who are very familiar with music and can recognize 90% of all songs instantly. There is a fail over, so if one person doesn't know the song, it rolls over to one of his colleagues, who very well may know it.

When these guys aren't handling song identifications, they subcontract to answer Dell Support phone calls. Need a hand with that wireless router?

okay, okay. its a joke.
Click to expand...

hahahha, what a gemstone.
 
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