Chris Barton came up with the break-through idea for Shazam while living in London

Shazam was created a full eight years before apps even existed

Shazam was started before the iPhone, the iPod, and even iTunes

Professors from MIT and Stanford said that inventing our algorithm was impossible

One famous venture capital firm told us “I don’t see why anyone would ever use this”

Shazam almost went bankrupt several times over six years until finally the iPhone App Store launched

Shazam had to build a vast music database from scratch starting from CDs

Shazam completely reinvented its business model more than four times

Over the years Shazam also built many cool features that failed

Shazam is the first AI product launched in history to have become mass consumer

Shazam defeated huge copycat competitors including Google, Sony, and Philips

To this day Shazam dominates music recognition and has become a verb

Shazam investors include Richard Branson, Ashton Kutcher and Carlos Slim

Shazam’s board included the founder of MTV

“Beat Shazam” is the only game show hosted by an academy award winner

Shazam’s music database has more songs than Spotify

Shazam also powers music recognition within Siri and Snapchat

The word “Shazam” means to “conjure magic”

Shazam is one of very few products that many people remember the first time they used

Every single month about eight million people download Shazam

Shazam is the largest recognized brand ever acquired by Apple