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

Over 100 venture capital firms declined to invest in Shazam

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

Shazam’s first marketing campaign included hiring people to walk into bars to show people Shazam

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

Apple launched the iPhone App Store in 2008 with only 500 apps. Shazam was one of them

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

Shazam launched in 2002 as a four digit phone number that you called to identify a song

Shazam built its own “supercomputer” that was inspired by Google. Google was founded just two years before Shazam

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

Many people tried to convince Chris to change the name “Shazam” saying it was too difficult. Luckily we didn’t

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

Many professional DJs use Shazam to find music for their sets

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

Apple ran a national television commercial just about Shazam

Apple acquired Shazam 18 years after we started the company

Shazam is the largest recognized brand ever acquired by Apple