Shazam tops 5 billion tags

Helping people everywhere answer the nagging question, “What’s that song?,” Shazam today celebrates its 5 billionth tag, meaning that the company’s audio fingerprinting technology has been used more than 5 billion times to help mobile users identify songs and television content.

“It took Shazam 10 years to see its first billion tags, then 10 months to achieve the second billion. And in just a year, we have gone from two billion tags to five billion,” Shazam CEO Andrew Fisher said in a statement.

Pink’s song “Blow Me One Last Kiss” marked the 5 billionth tag, the company said.

Shazam started as a small-time text message service for song identification in the U.K. in 2002. It has since become the definitive music-tagging application, with 225 million mobile users who use the app 10 million times per day. The company’s rise to recognizability — Shazam is often used as a verb — can be attributed, in part, to releasing early on mobile with an application for iPhone in July 2008.

More recently, the London-based company has migrated to bigger screens, enabling its technology to recognize television content and advertisements to provide viewers with enhanced second screen experiences.

The first Shazam-enabled TV commercial aired during Super Bowl XLIV in 2010, and since then the company has worked with brands and media companies, including American Idol and the London Olympics, to make television content taggable.

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