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Warner Music Group to launch new label with Shazam

By | Published on Thursday 20 February 2014

Shazam

Warner Music Group has announced a partnership with Shazam to launch a new label bearing the music discovery tool’s name. The new imprint will use data collected through Shazam’s apps to inform both new signings and marketing campaigns.

WMG’s COO Rob Wiesenthal explains: “By partnering with Shazam, a brand which is synonymous with music discovery for fans all around the world, we have forged a potent proposition: the first crowdsourced, big data record label. 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”.

The two companies already have a marketing alliance, and have so far collaborated on premieres of ‘Come Alive’ by Chromeo and ‘We Dem Boyz’ by Wiz Khalifa. Further projects involved Jason Derulo and Hunter Hayes are also planned.

On the new development, Shazam’s CEO Rich Riley said: “We are excited to enter into a next-generation partnership with Warner Music Group. Every minute of the day, people around the world Shazam over 10,000 songs, giving us incredible insight into what songs are trending and allowing us to discover future hits. Combining Shazam’s proprietary data with WMG’s A&R expertise will yield fantastic results. We are also eager to use our deep data and advanced promotional solutions combined with exclusive content from WMG to help artists engage with their fans and sell more music”.

Shazam recently announced that during this year’s Super Bowl, users whipped their phones out to find out what they were listening to 700,000 times. More than half occurred during Bruno Mars and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ half time show, presumably coinciding with people shouting, “What is this awful rubbish?”



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