Shazam is a service for iPhone, Android, and other mobile platforms that lets you put your phone up to a song that’s playing and identify the name, album, and artist of the song. It works quite well with a library of 10 million songs to pull from. Spotify is a music streaming and download service that is trying to break its way into the U.S. market. Now they’re hooking up. Users of Shazam will soon be able to instantly stream or buy tracks from Spotify, the two companies announced today.
“Now if you hear a great new track you can identify it, listen to it instantly in its entirety and easily add it to your music collection. That’s pretty powerful stuff,” said Daniel Ek, chief executive of Spotify.
However, we do wonder if this means Shazam will be dropping support for AmazonMP3 or iTunes. When a song is tagged on Shazam, it is added to a list of tags. When brought up, you can find YouTube videos, tour info, song lyrics, buy the song on AmazonMP3 (or iTunes on iPhones), and share your discovery via a number of social sites like Twitter or Facebook. Hopefully Spotify will be added to the list of options and not replace entries on it. It would be a shame to not be able to purchase via AmazonMP3 anymore.
Those who paid for the premium version of Shazam Encore ($4.71) should have the new Spotify feature almost immediately. Users of the free version will get an update in the next few months, adding the feature.
If you have the premium version of Shazam or live in Europe, let us know what you think of Spotify.