Shazam’s Tech Assets Gets Bought Out, By BMI

Two music recognition deals in a day: One of my favorite startups in the space, Shazam Entertainment, is being bought out (at least its technology)…it has been sold to BMI, the performing rights and music publishing royalties company. Shazam is a mobile music recognition company based in London, and entered the U.S. market a year ago.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed…BMI will get all the technology and patents, and will use those to form a new company called Landmark Digital Services, which will be tracking music royalty payments using Shazam’s recognition technology. Over the next 12 months, performance information from this new technology will be combined with BMI’s current radio airplay measurement system.
Shazam’s technology, called BlueArrows, uses pattern recognition to identify performances from any source containing audio, and can detect the source in as little as one to two seconds, says the company.
Shazam will continue to pursue business activities aimed at the mobile consumer use of the BlueArrow technology, under a worldwide exclusive license to be provided by Landmark.
The company had a lot of momentum going for it, but was having trouble capitalizing on that momentum, as technology and business models kept morphing at warp speed over the last few years. So all in all, probably the best thing for the company going forward…
Our previous coverage on Shazam and music recognition, here and here

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