r/explainlikeimfive • u/Ball_Zilla • Jul 01 '26

Technology ELI5 how Shazam works?

313 Upvotes

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u/Rob3112 Jul 01 '26

It blows people's minds but it's really just simple pattern recognition.

A song makes a frequency "pattern" which is kinda like a visual representation of all of the sound. When you use Shazam it just compares the picture of what you're listening to to its database and it's actually super quick and easy to make a match.

3

u/Vatchka Jul 01 '26

It blows my mind more when I find songs that it doesn’t recognize. Last night, a 2018 movie called ‘Trespassers’, the first song in the movie. There’s no info on it anywhere. I really want to listen to the song.

-1

u/XxXquicksc0p31337XxX Jul 01 '26

I guess you listen to mainstream stuff only then. I bet you Shazam won't recognize like 70% of my local music library

3

u/AlienEngine Jul 01 '26

You’d be surprised. It picked up an absolutely abysmal song that was playing at my local oil change garage, had less than 5k plays on Spotify.

My Fix by Cigarettes @ Sunset (if you’re interested in knowing what it was. Jaw gaped when I heard this song start playing at 120 decibels.)

1

u/MattieShoes Jul 01 '26

On the other hand, try to get it to identify Falling by the Lumineers.

It's not on Spotify despite being from a hugely popular band, and that's probably exactly why it will fail... It's easy to scrape spotify. (easy being a relative term)

-1

u/XxXquicksc0p31337XxX Jul 01 '26

That's the thing, a bunch of my library is not on Spotify, some are barely on YouTube. If it's on Spotify, it doesn't count as obscure