Shazam is an application that can identify music based on a short sample played using the microphone on the device.

The original UK developer of the app, Shazam Entertainment Limited, was founded in 1999 by Chris Barton, Philip Inghelbrecht, Avery Wang, and Dhiraj Mukherjee.

Shazam works by analyzing the captured sound and seeking a match based on an acoustic fingerprint in a database of millions of songs.

[8] Shazam can identify music being played from any source, provided that the background noise level is not high enough to prevent an acoustic fingerprint from being taken, and that the song is present in the software's database.

[10] Shazam Entertainment Limited was founded in 1999 by Chris Barton and Philip Inghelbrecht, who were MBA students at the University of California, Berkeley, and Dhiraj Mukherjee, who worked at a London-based internet consulting firm called Viant.

[11][12] In need of a digital signal processing specialist, the founding team then hired Avery Wang, who had received his PhD from Stanford University.

[13] Initially, in 2002, the service was launched only in the UK and was known as "2580", as the number was the short code that customers dialled from their mobile phone to get music recognized.

At a later date, the service also began to add hyperlinks in the text message to allow the user to download the song online.

[14] Shazam launched in the US on the AT&T Wireless network in 2004 in a joint offering with Musicphone, a now defunct San Francisco-based company.

The free app enabled users to launch iTunes and buy the song directly,[16] although the service struggled to identify classical music.

[29] On 3 April 2013 Shazam announced an exclusive partnership with Saavn, an Indian online music streaming service.

[38] Riley replaced Andrew Fisher, who was hired from Infospace into the CEO role in 2005 to strengthen industry partnerships and grow the userbase.

[40] In August 2014, Shazam announced the launch of Resonate, a sales product that allows TV networks to access its technology and user base.

[52] In May 2009, Tune Hunter accused Shazam of violating U.S. patent 6,941,275, which covers music identification and purchase in a portable device.