Mobile music identifier Shazam is making its first ever acquisition, buying technology from Tunezee that shows song lyrics in sync with a currently-playing song.
Shazam is introducing a new feature based on the technology, LyricPlay, in to its paid-tier Encore app. This will allow users to not just identify a song playing on the radio, for example, but also get the lyrics as the song plays.
Shazam is one of the most popular mobile businesses around, now with 125 million users, 30 million of them on iOS, tagging three million tracks per day – 10 percent of which are referred through to iTunes Store, from which Shazam takes a revenue slide.
But Shazam still wasn’t profitable the last time it reported earnings
It has recently been turning its audio-identification technology to supporting TV viewer engagement with shows and ads. But it is also padding out its core song-identifying app, which now has competition in the form of SoundHound – for example, by including an option to play identified songs in Spotify’s mobile app.
CEO Andrew Fisher, in announcement: “We are committed to make the necessary investments to build or acquire innovative technology.” It is now keeping back some of the best features, like LyricPlay, for users of Encore, which requires an annual payment, but won’t tell us how many Encore subscribers there are.