The most downloaded iPhone app in the US, according to research by comScore, is Facebook. In the UK, tellingly, it’s iPint from Carling, but in Europe it’s Shazam. The music discovery service that identifies a piece of recorded music via a mobile’s mic reached a total of 50million users across all platforms in October (15 million on the iPhone).
Four months ago the London based start-up introduced a paid-for version of its iPhone app – Shazam Encore – and limited the free version to five tags per month. This doesn’t seem to have stood in it’s way.
In the May 2010 issue of .net magazine The Shazam CEO Andre Fisher explains “The reason we introduced Encore is because we had a lot of user feedback saying that people felt Shazam was worth paying for. We also wanted to converge with other platforms because, outside of the iPhone, we do charge. The hardest part was educating people The hardest part was educating people that we’d changed our business model. We didn’t remove the experience for existing users: people could continue to use Shazam on an unlimited basis. Encore is really for new users that then came into the service from November onwards.”
Encore, which is available for a one-off payment of £2.99, comes with a new design, unlimited tagging, faster performance and a range of extra features such as music search and geolocation ticketing. When you tag a song, Shazam now determines where you are and tells you if that artist is playing concerts in your area (or in a radius of 25 miles) and gives you the chance to buy tickets directly through the app. There’s also music recommendations.
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