One famous venture capital firm told us “I don’t see why anyone would ever use this” Professors from MIT and Stanford said that inventing our algorithm was impossible Shazam defeated huge copycat competitors including Google, Sony, and Philips Shazam had to build a vast music database from scratch starting from CDs Shazam almost went bankrupt several times over six years until finally the iPhone App Store launched Every single month about eight million people download Shazam Over the years Shazam also built many cool features that failed Shazam is one of very few products that many people remember the first time they used Shazam was started before the iPhone, the iPod, and even iTunes Shazam’s music database has more songs than Spotify Shazam is the largest recognized brand ever acquired by Apple The “Beat Shazam” TV game show is the highest budget game show ever made for television To this day Shazam dominates music recognition and has become a verb Shazam also powers music recognition within Siri and Snapchat Shazam completely reinvented its business model more than four times Chris Barton came up with the break-through idea for Shazam while living in London Shazam partnered with many famous brands to create “Shazamable” TV advertisements