Shazam now matches 1 billion songs every month, has matched 50 billion since 2002

Shazam on iPhone (Image credit: iMore)

What you need to know

Shazam now matches one billion songs every month.
The service has matched 50 billion songs since its inception.

Apple-owned music matching service Shazam has announced that it has crossed the 50 billion song mark and it now matches one billion songs each month.

Those 50 billion songs have been matched since Shazam started way back in 2002, originally as an SMS service. Times have changed a ton since then and, now owned by Apple, Shazam continues to match songs at a rate that's almost impossible to fathom.

"Shazam is synonymous with magic," said Oliver Schusser, Apple's vice president of Apple Music and Beats, "both for the fans getting a song recognition almost instantly, and for the artists being discovered. With 1 billion recognitions a month, Shazam is one of the most popular music apps in the world. Today's milestones show not only people's love for Shazam, but also the ever-growing appetite for music discovery around the world."

The most Shazamed song of all time remains Tone and I's Dance Monkey, we're told.

Apple recently announced the next step for Shazam, with ShazamKit giving developers the chance to build its song matching system into their own apps for the first time. It'll go further than that though, with developers able to use ShazamKit to match almost any audio they want it to. Developers will be able to create their own catalog of audio and make it recognizable, Apple says.

Recognizing the songs is only half the battle, of course. Once you know what it is, it's time to listen to it. That's where headphones come in and these are the best AirPods Max deals you're likely to find. You might as well listen to Dance Monkey in style, right?

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.