Warner Music Group Announces New Shazam Powered Label, Marketing Alliance
Warner Music Group and Shazam have formed a strategic alliance to discover new acts and sign them to a Shazam branded label. The Shazam label imprint will identify unsigned artists by combining traditional A&R with with the music ID app's massive fan activity data. The partnership will also market existing WMG artists.
Shazam has proven to be one of the few music apps that drive significant music purchases. During the 2014 Grammys, Shazam messaged 10 million app users to tune in for exclusive content. Those users Shazamed the awards show more than 1 million times, with 54,000 purchasing music by featured artists. Shazam has 420 million total users in 200 countries.
A component of the new marketing alliance allows artists to directly engage with fans who Shazam them. WMG labels will receive enhanced data on fan behavior and can launch specially tailored promotional campaigns. In turn, WMG will provide Shazam with exclusive content and other benefits.
Initial joint projects included Shazam’s first video premier with Chromeo’s ‘Come Alive’ and first single premier with Wiz Khalifa’s ‘We Dem Boyz’. More than half of Shazam’s 700,000 tags throughout this year’s Super Bowl happened during the Halftime Show when fans were offered an exclusive Bruno Mars video. Further projects are planned for Jason Derulo and Hunter Hayes.
“By partnering with Shazam, we have forged a potent proposition: the first crowd-sourced, big data record label,” said Rob Wiesenthal, COO/Corporate, Warner Music Group. "While data and crowd sourced analyses will never be a substitute for the expertise and instincts of our A&R professionals, we do believe the information we obtain for this new label will provide very useful signals that will bolster our ability to find the stars of tomorrow."
