Apple says Shazam will soon be ad-free

Apple's $ 400 million purchase of Shazam has officially ended. Which means that Apple now owns Shazam. And for users of Shazam, this could soon bring a much appreciated advantage: ads on the app will disappear soon.

Apple's announcement on Monday of the deal's conclusion revealed that "the app will soon be offering its ad-free experience to all users." Shazam allows users to identify a song played in a bar, restaurant or archaic technology. Listen to a fragment of the music and link it to the millions of songs in its database.

Shazam was one of the first sensations of application to the smartphone era. An awesome reviewer in 2009 called it "the closest to a cell phone can become magical". The application remains a popular utility. It has been downloaded over a billion times, has 150 million active users a month and is still used to identify 20 million songs a day. The Shazam app is currently the seventh most popular music app in the Apple store.

"Apple and Shazam have a long history together," said Oliver Schusser, vice president of Apple's Apple Music in a statement. "Shazam was one of the first applications available when we launched the App Store and became a favorite application of music fans around the world."

For all the popularity of Shazam, the company has not found a way to make money for its users as do social media and some other popular applications. Apple announced its acquisition of Shazam last December for an announced price of $ 400 million. According to Pitchbook, the valuation of the company after a private financing cycle in 2015 was less than $ 1 billion.

Apple may be hoping that frequent users of Shazam will become Apple Music subscribers. Apple Music had 36 million subscribers at the beginning of the year. One of Shazam's early investors, DL Capital, said Apple's ownership of Shazam could bring in an additional 7.5 million subscribers to its music distribution area.

Currently, once Shazam identifies a song, she presents users with a big button to buy or play the song on Apple Music. There are also options to play the song on Spotify and Deezer: Google Play, once an option on Shazam, is now absent, although these options are thinner at the bottom of the Shazam application.

The Apple-Shazam agreement was reached on a day when another music app was acquired. The SiriusXM satellite radio company said Monday it would buy Pandora's streaming music pioneer for $ 3.5 billion.