Shazam Now Shows the Moments Where Songs Go Viral
Shazam Popular Segments in Safari [Jesse Hollington / iDrop News]
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Apple has rolled out a new Shazam feature that offers a fascinating look at how we discover music: Popular Segments.
As the name suggests, this feature highlights not just the songs that are topping the charts, but the moments in those songs that people are listening to the most — or at least those segments where people are most likely to ask Shazam to identify what’s playing.
Popular Segments spotlights the key moments within a track that drove the most Shazam activity within the past week. Available for top tracks ranking on Shazam’s charts and based on Shazam tag volume, this interactive feature displays relative segment popularity throughout a song, allowing users to hover over the graph and reveal precise time markers and corresponding segments.
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That’s a subtle but important distinction, as it doesn’t necessarily mean that these are the riffs that everyone is repeatedly listening to. Rather, it’s that point at which many people are thinking that the song is interesting or catchy enough that they really need to find out what it’s called — and possibly save it so they can hear it again.
“Shazam has always been about connecting fans to music that moves them,” Apple Music co-head Ole Obermann said in a press release. “With Popular Segments, we’re taking that a step further—revealing exactly which moment in a song grabbed the listener’s attention, while giving artists and the industry that unprecedented insight.”
The Long Game of Shazam
Even though Apple has owned Shazam since 2018, the company has done a pretty good job of keeping it at arm’s length. It had solid iPhone and Apple Music integration for years before Apple came along, and while that’s undoubtedly been tightened up a bit, Apple has maintained it as a standalone app — for both the iOS and Android platforms.
In fact, most users wouldn’t even notice it’s an Apple app unless they looked closely. For the most part, it’s the same Shazam app that we’ve known and loved since it launched as one of the first iPhone apps in 2008, adding only the kind of improvements we’d have expected even if it had remained independent.
While Apple quickly gave Shazam a fresh coat of paint, it didn’t begin adding new features in earnest until 2020 when it added a more traditional text-based search feature to help folks find their favorite songs. Later that same year, a Music Recognition button came to the iPhone Control Center — the first evidence that the service was now an Apple property, since this was something third-party developers wouldn’t be able to do for another four years.
However, that button was also more a feature of the service, as it didn’t technically require the Shazam app to be installed; instead, Apple had baked Shazam’s technology into iOS itself. Along similar lines, it also debuted a web app that could call up the service to identify songs from any browser.
Since then, Apple has continued to improve the app on a regular basis, adding concert and tour info, proper Mac support, Live Activities for background recognition, and tighter playlist integration for discovered songs.
While many of those were a bit iPhone-centric, Popular Segments is something that folks on any platform can enjoy.
For now, the feature appears to be exclusively available on the web app. It can be accessed on both desktop and mobile by selecting “Charts” and choosing a track. There’s no word yet on when (or if) it will come to the iPhone, iPad, or Android apps.
