CRS In Action: 'How To Use Shazam To Enhance Programming And Promotions With Rich Riley'

CRS 2015

FRIDAY (2/27) morning's CRS 2015 "HOW TO USE SHAZAM TO ENHANCE PROGRAMMING AND PROMOTIONS" panel featured SHAZAM CEO RICH RILEY, who spoke to the room about the uses and cross-promotional features of SHAZAM and its multi-layered music discovery platform.

SHAZAM is currently the #1 sales referral app for iTUNES, having been fully integrated in to the iPHONE iOS operating system. With more than 100 million monthly active global users producing 20 million SHAZAMs per day and generating 600 million cumulative downloads, SHAZAM has become a hit predictor and sales force for labels and artists.

"SHAZAMs are also highly coordinated with sales," stated RILEY. "We drive about 10% of all digital music sales directly through SHAZAM. We sell over 400,000 tracks per day. That's several hundred million dollars of music per year. So, SHAZAMs are very predictive of sales." The next logical step is utilizing the efforts and data created by the SHAZAM user database to adequately reflect listener preferences and trends in a station's programming and playlists.

Utilizing SHAZAM's analytics and user database, RILEY explained how trends can be predicted and actively engaged listeners can be tracks and broken out by demographic down to exact street location or neighborhood. SHAZAM has partnered with SUN BROADCAST GROUP in an attempt to better deliver these analytics and statistics to station owners and programmers nationwide. Using a backdoor entry to the platform, SHAZAM hopes to affect the programming habits on a global level by better informing decision makers of listener habits and desires with to-the-minute information.

"Every SHAZAM is a very strong signal of interest," explained RILEY. "A song caused someone to take out their phone, open the app, and push the button and say, 'What is that? I really want to understand that and know more about it.' And we're now able to use this data signal to target ads, to target content, and to share data with [radio] in terms of what is going on and what music is connecting with consumers."

RILEY discussed the correlation between spin count and number of SHAZAMs, stating that trends can pinpoint tracks that listeners are more willing to listen to because of a high passion rate as well as trends for when songs will begin to show burn based upon the decline in SHAZAMs.

"We think there are interesting insights to this," he said. "We think data like this can be very insightful in terms of programming, what to spin, etcetera, and we can also see where they are happening. We can plot that on maps, so you can look at the geography. We can see in almost real time the trajectory of a song and how something breaks and becomes a hit."

SHAZAM also offers in-app experiences available for stations. Moving beyond music identification, the app is now able to allow users to SHAZAM television or events to gain access to extra content, information, and experiences related to their listening and viewing experience. Radio would be best served by this feature by making their non-music content SHAZAMable, creating a listener experience via the app to drive traffic to the station website, featured station contest, advertiser-related content, and exclusive station artist- or music-related features. These features can be tailored to the station according to the cross-section of their terrestrial listeners who are utilizing SHAZAM to find their content.

In all, it is easily concluded that SHAZAM can and should be a powerful piece of technology easily used to drive both revenue and ratings for a station based upon both in-app content experiences and analytics directing to passion point songs for listeners. Being ahead of the trend has not always been the road radio has traveled, but with the increase of social media, the power of the Millennial listening audience, and the trends in music, it is easier than ever for radio to take the cutting edge approach and integrate technologies and new forms of research and data analytics in to their station programming strategies.

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