Since Shazam announced that they raised $32 million to expand their integrations with TV, they’ve been busy working with Syfy, BRAVO, Oxygen and Spike TV allowing Shazamers to tag and unlock extra content. Shazam teamed up with Universal Motown, Lil Wayne’s music label and Vevo (“ranked by comScore as the #1 Music platform on the web”) to premier the artists highly anticipated new music video for his unusual love ballad “How to Love” (currently at 3,700,619 views), which he performed at the VMAs.
When asked how this online partnership fits into their TV expansion, Shazam’s London based Director of Music and Content Will Mills answered that, “there aren’t many networks that rotate music videos, if you look at traffic and eyeballs, YouTube and Vevo own the capital.” He further explained the benefits of this partnership. “We had shared objectives, in terms of building out brands, it was more of a value exchange.”
While money might not have been exchanged in this partnership, Shazam is definitely becoming an important driver of iTunes downloads. Shazam PR Manager Rica Squires explained that there are, “over 4 million tags each and every day that result in 300,000 (8%) song downloads,” across iTunes and other vendors”. If Shazam continues to prove using them will lead to download purchases, Will Mills and his team at Shazam might be on their way to becoming one of the most important executives in the music business.
Shazam also played a role during the VMAs Sunday night. Bing ran Shazamable ads that unlocked content related to the VMAs. Unfortunately, the performances during the live show didn’t seem to be watermarked, a missed opportunity for MTV to sell music.
As the fall TV season approaches, Shazam has already embedding their technology into promos for new shows. When watching promos for ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy, you’ll be able to tag and unlock exclusive content about the new season. As the season progresses, tagging new promos will unlock new content, from a music video to exclusive scenes.