News July 3, 2018

Shazam has a new rival, WhoSampled

Lars Brandle

Shazam has a new rival, and it has a touch of genius about it.

The WhoSampled app is now updated with a music recognition feature that allows its users to drill down to “explore the DNA” of music and its second lives.

According to a statement, the revamped software allows music fans to tag tracks and pull down its full history, from information on its samples, to covers, remixes and more. At a glance, it combines the best features of Shazam, one of the world’s most popular apps, and Genius, the U.S.-based annotation platform.

Unlike Shazam, which had a commercial launch in 2002 and works closely with copyright owners and music industry partners, WhoSampled’s database is crowdsourced.

Just six years after going live, WhoSampled today boasts 521,000 songs and 203,000 artists in its system, with a team of almost 20,000 curators (or “contributors”) getting busy with the content. A moderator pool some 40-strong completes the verification process.

Founder and CEO CEO Nadav Poraz says WhoSampled is ready to take the next step into public awareness.

“We’ve been working on finding more and more ways to put this in front of more people — to reach more and more music fans and to get them to appreciate the art of sampling and the beauty of it and to discover music in this way,” he tells Billboard.

“We are aiming to achieve that by more and more partnerships. We’ve been doing projects with all three major labels and we’ve been doing a few brand partnerships. We’re hoping to work more and more closely with both the music industry and the leading streaming services.”

The app is available on iPhones, ad-free for $3.99, while the Android app is free and ad supported. Both are offering unlimited music recognition for a $9.99 annual subscription.