Apple Music Adds More DJ Mix With New Features Powered By Shazam

Apple last year showed how it can integrate Shazam’s music ID features even deeper into iOS 14, and now it’s taking Apple Music one step further. Apple Music initially introduced DJ mixes and mash-ups in 2016 as part of a partnership with Dubset Media Holdings to identify and pay for licensed music in mixes.

Now Apple says that by building on the Shazam technology acquired in 2018 and partnering with various labels, Apple Music has the tools to identify and compensate individual creators, event promoters, labels, and more. It also allows subscribers to see the names of individual tracks, skip songs in the mix, listen in lossless audio on “most mixes” and save them to their library for offline viewing.

Image: Apple

So yeah, the same fingerprint ID tech that tells you the name of a song played in the mall can seemingly determine what festival it’s from, what DJ is mixing it up, and picking different sounds when they mix. . This is apparently detailed enough, drawing on the correspondence between Apple Music’s database of roughly 75 million songs, to allow recurring revenue streams to the clubs that host the sets and the DJs that make them.

There is a genre page dedicated to DJ mixes in the Apple Music app, and the company says engagement has tripled in the past twelve months, with over 300 million DJ mixes streams to date.

Image: Apple

Apple has already been in tears adding mixes over the past year, including some from Charlotte de Witte, Tiësto, Carl Cox and others. Studio K7! Founder Horst Weidenmueller said in a statement that “Thanks to the partnership with Apple, we finally have a place to celebrate DJ-Kicks with 14 additional editions that haven’t been on the market for over 15 years.”

Apple Music says it’s ordering more mixes (following the series released earlier this year to mark Black Music Month and pride) and working closely with DJs to get additional content on the service. This is a new way to get DJ mixes on Apple Music alongside old ones like the Dubset platform. If you’re already enjoying the existing mixes on Apple Music, we’re told they’re not going anywhere, even though they don’t have all of the new features included. Still, it’s not yet accessible to bedroom DJs or lesser-known names who post their mixtapes on SoundCloud, so there’s room between that and the wild days of Muxtape.