November 16, 2017 at 11:58Shazam vice president for EMEA, LATAM and Canada Josh Partridge: “IT people lack understanding of business processes”
The representative of the company that developed the popular music recognition service visited Innopolis University and spoke about the role of young IT specialists in Shazam development, about the music and plans of the company.
Since my studies at the university, I am upset by the narrowness of specialization and the limitedness of a certain field of knowledge in universities. I believe that the university should expand consciousness, test your views for strength and inspire the creation of new ideas. Therefore, my advice is to do things that open up new horizons for you, even if you do not immediately understand the practical value of what you are doing. This is especially important for undergraduate students.
As for subject areas, I believe that modeling of business processes is one of the most important aspects that no one thought about five years ago, and now it comes to the fore. To start a startup, it’s important to understand which business model your idea is based on. IT universities primarily study subjects related to programming, and this is an important part of the future product. But you need to know how to monetize the product.
Even during my studies at the university, it was difficult for me to understand exactly what my work would be. At Innopolis University, I was attracted to the fact that training here is directly related to practice, students learn what they face during their work.
We are looking for people who are passionate about high technology, and those who want to try something new, experiment, change and move forward. Changes are constantly taking place in the IT industry, and I believe that they are very important and you need to be prepared for change. Our company has changed a lot in ten years. And this is a normal process - to evolve, move forward and change. Therefore, the ability to search for something new is so important.
Over the past three years, in terms of the number of users of the Shazam service, Russia from the 20th place was in the top three. Therefore, we are developing the product taking into account the interests of a new group of users, and in this context we need to expand contacts. The company employs employees from 40 countries, we often hold hackathons in the USA and the UK, we need specialists in design and development.
Broad geography is very important, especially for launching the product: if you open Shazam and see that Russian music is also available in the application, you will want to use the application again. We get a lot of feedback from users, and all this helps us to develop.
We are working to ensure that Shazam is the first application available on any new platform. This is very important for our development. Initially, Shazam was an SMS service, an application available on simple mobile devices, but now it integrates with Siri, Snapchat, Samsung TV, became the first application on Apple iWatch.
The application recognizes 90% of the tracks, and only in 10% of cases the recognition fails. In 5% of cases, the reason is the lack of a signal, in the rest - due to live performance. In some countries, the recognition rate is lower - 70%. For example, we do not have a very large catalog of Arabic music.
10% of the inaccuracy is due to a bad signal, an attempt to recognize a live performance or a not very well-known track of the 70s. We have specialists who daily track cases of inaccurate recognition of tracks in each country. As soon as such an incident occurs, we find out its cause - perhaps it was a live concert on TV that is not recognized.
We are adding new features to provide a better user experience: geolocation recognition - during the concert, recognition will result in a playlist of this artist, delayed recognition - the user recognizes something while offline, and the application shows the result when the gadget is connected to network. We have other ideas on how to further improve the service, and we hope to implement them in the future.
We have expanded our mission from a music recognition service to a service for interacting with the surrounding space. A year and a half ago, we launched the image recognition function. We want users to be able to search in Shazam not only for music, TV shows, radio programs, but also for images. Recently, we launched Shazam codes (when recognizing the code, the application provides additional information about the object, visualization of goods, mini-games, videos, animation in augmented reality mode). In Russia, with the help of Shazam for brands technology, the largest campaign in Europe with the Pepsi brand was implemented, 400 thousand people were pranked and 250 thousand photos were made in augmented reality with the animation proposed by the brand. Now we are working with Danone products.
Our database is half a billion tracks. But the secret is that we do not store tracks. The algorithm works like this: we create an imprint of the decibels of the track and save it. When Shazam reads a track, the application does not record it, but maps it to the fingerprint in the database. This is an important point, because as the database grows, it is necessary to increase the data transfer rate. As soon as a new track comes out, its imprint immediately appears in our database.
Shazam is convenient in that it can be used as needed. Yesterday I was at a club where Russian music was played, and I went to Shazam about ten times a night. I have two children and I don’t often go out somewhere, so next time I’ll probably go to Shazam in about a month. The application can be used when necessary: at least 20 times a day, but you can not go there for several days. This is its difference from other daily applications, such as instagram.
I think that information technology has already had a huge impact on music. I remember my first iPod with four buttons, which contained only 2,000 songs, and I had to take CDs with me on the road. Now you can listen to 40 million tracks on Spotify. I think this is unbelievable. So the impact of IT is already obvious. The very possibility of access to a huge amount of music is phenomenal!
About education
Since my studies at the university, I am upset by the narrowness of specialization and the limitedness of a certain field of knowledge in universities. I believe that the university should expand consciousness, test your views for strength and inspire the creation of new ideas. Therefore, my advice is to do things that open up new horizons for you, even if you do not immediately understand the practical value of what you are doing. This is especially important for undergraduate students.
As for subject areas, I believe that modeling of business processes is one of the most important aspects that no one thought about five years ago, and now it comes to the fore. To start a startup, it’s important to understand which business model your idea is based on. IT universities primarily study subjects related to programming, and this is an important part of the future product. But you need to know how to monetize the product.
Even during my studies at the university, it was difficult for me to understand exactly what my work would be. At Innopolis University, I was attracted to the fact that training here is directly related to practice, students learn what they face during their work.
On the role of young IT professionals in the development of Shazam
We are looking for people who are passionate about high technology, and those who want to try something new, experiment, change and move forward. Changes are constantly taking place in the IT industry, and I believe that they are very important and you need to be prepared for change. Our company has changed a lot in ten years. And this is a normal process - to evolve, move forward and change. Therefore, the ability to search for something new is so important.
Over the past three years, in terms of the number of users of the Shazam service, Russia from the 20th place was in the top three. Therefore, we are developing the product taking into account the interests of a new group of users, and in this context we need to expand contacts. The company employs employees from 40 countries, we often hold hackathons in the USA and the UK, we need specialists in design and development.
Broad geography is very important, especially for launching the product: if you open Shazam and see that Russian music is also available in the application, you will want to use the application again. We get a lot of feedback from users, and all this helps us to develop.
About service development plans
We are working to ensure that Shazam is the first application available on any new platform. This is very important for our development. Initially, Shazam was an SMS service, an application available on simple mobile devices, but now it integrates with Siri, Snapchat, Samsung TV, became the first application on Apple iWatch.
The application recognizes 90% of the tracks, and only in 10% of cases the recognition fails. In 5% of cases, the reason is the lack of a signal, in the rest - due to live performance. In some countries, the recognition rate is lower - 70%. For example, we do not have a very large catalog of Arabic music.
10% of the inaccuracy is due to a bad signal, an attempt to recognize a live performance or a not very well-known track of the 70s. We have specialists who daily track cases of inaccurate recognition of tracks in each country. As soon as such an incident occurs, we find out its cause - perhaps it was a live concert on TV that is not recognized.
We are adding new features to provide a better user experience: geolocation recognition - during the concert, recognition will result in a playlist of this artist, delayed recognition - the user recognizes something while offline, and the application shows the result when the gadget is connected to network. We have other ideas on how to further improve the service, and we hope to implement them in the future.
About Shazam features and secrets
We have expanded our mission from a music recognition service to a service for interacting with the surrounding space. A year and a half ago, we launched the image recognition function. We want users to be able to search in Shazam not only for music, TV shows, radio programs, but also for images. Recently, we launched Shazam codes (when recognizing the code, the application provides additional information about the object, visualization of goods, mini-games, videos, animation in augmented reality mode). In Russia, with the help of Shazam for brands technology, the largest campaign in Europe with the Pepsi brand was implemented, 400 thousand people were pranked and 250 thousand photos were made in augmented reality with the animation proposed by the brand. Now we are working with Danone products.
Our database is half a billion tracks. But the secret is that we do not store tracks. The algorithm works like this: we create an imprint of the decibels of the track and save it. When Shazam reads a track, the application does not record it, but maps it to the fingerprint in the database. This is an important point, because as the database grows, it is necessary to increase the data transfer rate. As soon as a new track comes out, its imprint immediately appears in our database.
About personal experience with the application
Shazam is convenient in that it can be used as needed. Yesterday I was at a club where Russian music was played, and I went to Shazam about ten times a night. I have two children and I don’t often go out somewhere, so next time I’ll probably go to Shazam in about a month. The application can be used when necessary: at least 20 times a day, but you can not go there for several days. This is its difference from other daily applications, such as instagram.
About the interaction of IT and music
I think that information technology has already had a huge impact on music. I remember my first iPod with four buttons, which contained only 2,000 songs, and I had to take CDs with me on the road. Now you can listen to 40 million tracks on Spotify. I think this is unbelievable. So the impact of IT is already obvious. The very possibility of access to a huge amount of music is phenomenal!
