Mobile music recognition company Shazam is looking to broaden its activities into the broadcast monitoring area, with applications from radio airplay monitoring to music piracy.
The strategic rethink follows its launch a year ago as a consumer tool designed to identify unknown tracks. Shazam CEO Jerry Roest says it has already run pilot tests for a US-based performance rights organisation and an airplay monitoring company after being approached by them to adapt its music recognition technology.
The company has now attracted approaches from a UK media owner to monitor radio output, as well as a UK-based performance rights society, he says.
Roest says privacy contracts mean he cannot reveal the names of the groups, but he believes Shazam can now attract four new sources of revenue from tracking for royalties payments to artists, airplay monitoring, piracy and ad tracking.
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Roest says, "Our system can dramatically reduce staff costs and, because most tracking studies are samples, we can offer more complete and more accurate information."
He adds that Shazam has already been asked to co-operate with anti-piracy efforts.
Roest says that Shazam's move into these new areas has been prompted in part by the approaches by companies seeking to use the group's ground-breaking technology for new applications, but he also admits that Shazam's original business plan - which forecast that 5% of UK mobile users will use the service around four times a month - has proved over-optimistic.
Shazam has attracted 600,000 unique users and around half of those don't use the service "that much". Shazam expects to achieve revenues of £4m in 2004, breaking even by the middle of the year •
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