Dive Brief:
- Snapchat and Shazam have partnered, integrating the app’s music recognition technology with the social media app’s user experience, according to a Shazam press release.
- Snapchat users can now press and hold the camera screen when music is playing nearby and be able to identify what is playing, engage with Shazam content from within Snapchat and share music and artist discoveries as snaps.
- Shazam has more than one billion app downloads, hundreds of millions of active users globally and more than 2,000 verified artists.
Dive Insight:
The partnership could help each app extend its reach. Shazam has partnered with major marketers like Pepsi and Wendy's as they look to make digital music a bigger part of their strategy, making it an appealing collaborator for Snapchat, which needs to beef up its music offerings if it's to continue along the path to being a major digital platform.
The Shazam app recently slimmed down after a period of adding new features, which ended up bogging down the user experience. The Snapchat partnership suggests Shazam has found a new way to drive growth by partnering with key platforms. This makes sense as consumers increasingly spend most of their time with just a few of the biggest apps.
Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc., is expected to launch an initial public offering of its stock in March and the social media app has been very active in adding new features for its users as well as increased functionality for marketers.
Snapchat is also ramping up its original content offerings on the app as well through a recently announced extended partnership with Turner, mini shows from NBCUniversal and building out an internal “original shows” team to produce scripted and unscripted programming. For marketers Snapchat has dramatically improved its ad targeting and measurement capabilities over the last year.
