Why There’s Still No Spotify In Your Shazam
By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.
Rdio's there, Spotify is not. Why is this the case, 2.5 years after their announced integration?
About two and a half years ago, Spotify announced and Engadget and others reported that the always-popular Shazam app — used primarily for identifying songs but also as the perfect replacement for the QR code where television is concerned — would incorporate Spotify. That way, you’d be able to listen to whatever songs you identify in Spotify, and add them to your collection there.
This would be a really nice feature to have, because music is so frustratingly hard to collect these days. On top of that, Shazam music partnerships manager just told Evolver.fm that Shazam accounts for 10 percent of all digital music sales worldwide, an astounding figure.
One would imagine that people would also like the ability to add what they tag with Shazam to their Spotify accounts, which is why Engadget called Shazam+Spotify “yet another sign that Spotify has gone mainstream.”
Just one problem: Spotify announced that Shazam integration in January of 2011, yet as of today, September 4, 2013, Spotify is not in the free (i.e. popular) version of Shazam, though the company apparently did incorporate Spotify into some paid versions. Shazam promised to add Spotify to the free versions for iOS and Android “soon,” but that never happened ceased to be the case at some point (see update below).
Evolver.fm asked both Shazam and Spotify to clarify the situation five days ago. We have yet to receive a response from either company, so the question of why Shazam and Spotify are not working together in Shazam’s free apps — as they announced that they would three Januaries ago — remains a mystery.
The upshot: If you want to use the free version of Shazam to collect music into your music subscription, use Rdio instead.
Update: Kyle Bylin, formerly of Bilboard, tells us that Spotify was in the free Shazam as of September 2011. Apparently, at some point, it dropped out, or we are missing something here.
Another Update: A Shazam spokeswoman now confirms, “[W]we are integrated with both Spotify and Rdio in our Encore App and Rdio in our free app.”
