14 DAY TRIAL // At its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Apple plans to unveil its next-generation mobile OS with Shazam technology built inside the software, in a new attempt to strengthen its music business in the face of rising competition from Pandora, Spotify, and even YouTube.
People with knowledge of Apple’s plans are telling Bloomberg that “The company is planning to unveil a song-discovery feature in an update of its iOS mobile software that will let users identify a song and its artist using an iPhone or iPad.”
To achieve this feat, the Cupertino giant is partnering up with Shazam Entertainment Ltd., which sells a revolutionary app bearing the same name as the one that recognizes playing music around the user and then serves up a result with the artist’s name, the name of the song, and even a link to buy that song in iTunes.
This is said to be Apple’s latest attempt at bolstering its music business amid growing competition from rivals Google, Pandora, and Spotify. Along with building Shazam inside iOS 8, the Cupertino giant also plans to extirpate iTunes Radio out of the iOS Music app and give it its own standalone UI.
All this will be unveiled at WWDC14 in June if everything goes according to plan, sources said.
The same people revealed that Shazam would be incorporated in iOS 8 in the same way Twitter is integrated with the current version of the mobile operating system, “meaning consumers don’t need to separately download it.”
Users will reportedly be able to invoke the Shazam feature using Siri. One person said that an iPhone user would be able to say “what song is playing” and get an instant result with all the details about the song.
Song discovery is something Apple has always praised, while Shazam has been one of the very first “iPhone OS” apps highlighted by the company in its keynote presentations. It’s interesting to see how their paths are meeting again for the unveiling of iOS 8, but it’s also strange that Tim Cook & Co. never made a business proposition until now.
The computer giant could well make a bid to acquire Shazam completely, gaining full rights to the service and hiring its talented engineers at the same time.
The Worldwide Developers Conference runs from June 2 to June 6 this year. At the event, Tim Cook and his crew are also expected to unveil the next-generation Mac OS.