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Last year, we announced that Apple was buying the startup and music recognition app Shazam for about $ 400 million. Nearly a year later, the agreement was finally reached. Today, Apple has announced that it has finalized the acquisition and that it will soon make the announcement of the service free for everyone, by removing the free level funded by advertising the application.
"Apple and Shazam have a long history together. Shazam was one of the first applications available at the launch of the App Store and has become a favorite app for music lovers around the world, "said Oliver Schusser, Apple's vice president of Apple Music. "With a shared love for music and innovation, we are excited to bring our teams together to provide users with even more great ways to discover, experience and enjoy music."
It's not clear how long-term Apple will incorporate Shazam's flagship product into its service – a pretty smart technology that can identify a song by hearing a fragment. The two main directions seem to be to continue to remain a stand-alone, longer-term application, or to integrate it into a broader Apple Music offering. (The two do not exclude each other.)
At $ 400 Million – a figure confirmed by several sources in our first report on the agreement – Shazam is one of Apple's largest acquisitions, both musical and global, and highlights its expanding role as a force not only in the hardware, but in the services performed on that hardware.
In music, he is competing with suppliers like Spotify, who, with Snap, were also looking to buy Shazam and Pandor (which will now be part of SiriusXM). in the music have included the acquisition of Beats, which became the basis of Apple Music, which Apple acquired for $ 3 billion in 2014.
In May, Apple announced that it has surpassed 50 million users of Apple Music.
The agreement comes three weeks after the EU finally gave the go-ahead to the deal after Apple publicly announced its intention to buy the start-up. (We write "startup" only on his behalf: it was funded at $ 143 million but had existed since 1999.)
The application has hundreds of millions of users and has exceeded 1 billion downloads in September 2016, but it has never managed to generate profits.
In September 2017, Shazam reportedly achieved a turnover of £ 40.3 million ($ 54 million) in its 2016 fiscal year, an improvement between 2014 and 2015. It recorded a pre-tax loss. £ 4 million ($ 5.3 million). ) in 2016, which was still a loss but significantly lower than the loss of 16.6 million pounds in fiscal 2015.
Although this is one of the most popular apps in the music category, Apple did not break the rules of competition by buying it.
"Concerns in this regard have been ruled out because Shazam's data is not unique and Apple's competitors would still have the ability to access and use similar databases," said the EU. at the beginning of the month.
More soon.
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