Avid music fans spend a lot of time searching for unidentified tracks. Just take a look at any mixtape on Soundcloud – peppered with hundreds of comments pleading for ‘track IDs’. Now all that hunting might be over with news that Shazam and Beatport have teamed up.
Shazam is a mobile phone based music identification app, which works by gathering a brief sample of music being played. An ‘acoustic fingerprint’ is created based on the sample, and is compared against a central database for a match.
Shazam predominantly draws on the ITunes database, which only contains a limited number of electronic underground tracks. However, Shazam’s pairing with online electronic music store Beatport will see it extend its 25 million song database with the entire Beatport catalogue.
The news has been greeted with mixed reactions. There are those who are delighted to be able to put an end to those long searches for unidentified gems. Equally, the deal will give some well-deserved exposure to producers.
Others fear that the deal will give rise to a new phenomenon on the dancefloor: an inescapable sea of mobile phones held in the air. Purist DJs, similarly, are not happy that their more underground choices will be exposed to the world.
Of course, it still leaves those vinyl-only releases undetectable and, as a result, all the more prized. This aspect might make the vinyl format doubly as alluring for those underground DJs who want to retain a certain exclusivity to their sets.
