Remember the good old days when you had to hold your phone up to the radio and then wait for the text from Shazam to tell you which song that was? Well the service has come quite a ways in the more than a decade since its launch, and after its latest rounds of funding which saw $30 million brought in, the company has now been valued at more than $1 billion.
Shazam debuted back in the dark times of 2002 to help people figure of what song was playing, simply by holding your phone close to the source. As soon as the song was recognized, you would get a text message with the name of the song. Since then, Shazam has come a long way, with the Wall Street Journal reporting the company’s value now stands at $1 billion. Shazam was rather successful in its latest round of funding, raking in $30 million. This works out to about a 3 percent stake in the company, which is where the $1 billion figure comes from. Consider this one statistic: In 2014, 100 million people used Shazam every month. That’s an increase from the 70 million in 2013. All of a sudden, Shazam’s success isn’t that surprising.
