Shazam Gets a Big iOS Update and a Web App for the Holidays

It’s now been three years since Apple first acquired Shazam, the British music recognition service, and while Apple has continued to gradually improve the service, over the past few months it appears that it’s been ramping up its efforts to bolster and integrate the app and service even more tightly into the Apple user experience.

For example, while Shazam has been integrated into Siri for quite some time — in fact, it was possible to ask Siri to identify songs long before Apple even acquired Shazam — this year Apple took things a step further in iOS 14.2 by adding a single-tap Shazam button right in Control Center.

Now it looks like it’s focusing its efforts back on the Shazam app, completely overhauling the user interface as well as, for the first time, introducing a Shazam web app that can be used to identify music from any browser.

Shazam Redux

Although Apple refreshed Shazam’s design back in 2018, shortly after it acquired the company, this consisting mostly of refinements and tweaks to make the interface more streamlined as well as making room for a new feature that would allow users to see lyrics in real time, syncing with whatever song Shazam is actually listening to.

By contrast, today’s redesign highlights a significant modernization of the user interface, bringing it far more in line with iOS 14 and other modern iOS apps — most notably Apple’s Music app, of course.

The new design also puts a much stronger focus on the app’s main task — identifying the songs you’re listening to, with a big tap-to-Shazam button front and center joined by the ability to quickly and easily access your Shazam history with only a single swipe up from the bottom of the Home screen.

You’ll also now get notified if any missed or offline Shazams are found, and a new Charts feature is now available when searching for tracks, letting users easily see what’s trending.

Further, despite fears that Apple was going to use Shazam as an anticompetitive weapon against rivals like Spotify, the app continues to embrace both Apple Music and Spotify users, allowing your “My Shazam Tracks” playlist to be synced with either service (or both), with the new app ensuring that even more of a user’s Shazam history gets synced up to their favourite streaming service.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that Apple isn’t still trying to persuade users to join up with Apple Music, but it’s doing so through more direct promotions, rather than trying to force things through the app itself; as it did last year, from now until January 17th, Shazam users who haven’t yet tried out Apple Music can get up to five months of the service for free.

Shazam on the Web

For the most part, Apple seems to still be keeping Shazam at arms’ length — the developer on the App Store is still listed as “Shazam Entertainment Limited” and the developer’s website link goes to Shazam.com, however for the first time this site is no longer merely about the app, but rather it actually is the app.

Launching in beta for now, users will be able to visit Shazam.com from their browser and identify whatever is currently playing. While compatibility is a bit limited right now — only Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are supported on macOS and Chrome OS — it seems fairly likely that this will eventually be expanded to embrace Windows as well.

Naturally, you’ll need to have a microphone on your computer, and you’ll need to give the browser app permission to access it, but otherwise the web-based app works every bit as well as the mobile apps do, and you can even sign-in to Apple Music to connect the web app to your own music library, allowing you to listen to the full versions of tracks directly from Shazam and open them in the web version of Apple Music; although the web app doesn’t (yet) support automatically adding identified tracks to your “My Shazam Tracks” playlist, you can manually add them to this or any other playlist from the Apple Music web interface.