Apple's acquisition of Shazam is not just about it's music discovery feature

Apple confirmed on Monday that they are acquiring Shazam - the ubiquitous music identification service which has been around for about 18 years. The terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed yet. However, sources close to the company point to a $400 million deal.

Shazam is the most popular music identification app on both the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store. You have to let the app listen to a tune or part of a song by clicking the Shazam button. Not only does it show the name of the song, but it also suggests you a place (like YouTube or Apple Music) to listen to that.

With the $400 million acquisition, Apple aims to get a leg ahead over its competitors especially when YouTube is about to unveil their new paid music streaming service. Given Shazam has been developing augmented reality features that allow brands to serve personalized ads to users, Apple is looking towards the future. Shazam has been working on serving AR based ads based on what you are listening to.

The acquisition amount is equal to what the company spent to buy Next Computer Inc. and bring Steve Jobs back in 1996. Nonetheless, the $1 billion deal the company made to acquire Beats Electronics still tops the list.

Shazam currently has over 170 million active users around the world, of which 20 million are US residents. In 2010, the platform introduced a new service, which when triggered the advertiser can directly open a promotion on users’ device. During the 2014 Super Bowl time, the feature had been found to be used more than 700,000 times.

If you have an iPhone and you love fiddling with Siri, you might have already known that it has Shazam integration. At this moment, as you ask the voice assistant to recognize a song, it shows the track and gives you a button to purchase that particular track. The standalone app has a feature of adding the searched-song to users’ Spotify playlist.

Although there have been concerns that Apple may curb the development of Shazam on Android, given their bitter rivalry with Google. There has been no word on how Shazam will continue to operate under Apple.