If you’ve ever heard a snatch of a catchy song on television or in a bar and wondered what it was enough to pull out your iPhone, you’re probably familiar with music-identifying services like Shazam which record a snippet of music and then try to identify the artist, album and title against the information in its database.
Ever wonder, though, how Shazam gets all of its data? Intriguingly, it doesn’t all just get pumped in from the labels. Instead, Shazam employs a constabulary of music detectives who not only track down on-the-rise tracks and artists, but also actively search out new tracks to index, implement and program into their data frames.
A fantastic piece explaining how one of iOS’s most casually impressive apps is driven by the invisible magic of human ingenuity.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
