Shazam, the unique service where music lovers can identify all of their favourite tunes just by using their mobile phone have announced that they have 50 million users in over 150 countries and has attracted investment from Silicon Valley VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers (KPCB). Considering usage was 15 million in February of this year, this has been a rapid increase, and the companies target is to reach 100 million users by the end of 2010. It is said that the service has been downloaded on the iPhone App store more than 10 million times. This unique service is very simple to use; all you have to do to identify a song is hold the phone up to the speaker for a matter of seconds, and the artist and song name will be revealed. When a song is played, it runs through a database of over 8 million tracks, which date back to the 50’s, in order to find the exact fingerprint match. Users can also use Shazam not only to discover songs, but to find extra information out about the songs/artist, search for a specific interest, buy music, or you can use the service to simply save songs which you may want to purchase in the future or create a collection which you can then share with others.

The investment is a very big boost to the company, and it is very rare for Silicon Valley funds to look for growth opportunities in Britain. Shazam have previously raised approximately £11.5 million from Acacia Capital and DN Capital, and has to date raised approximately US$20 million. The Times have stated in a report that Shazam is very profitable, by generating revenue from several methods, and also taking a cut on advertising revenue, earning a fee when customers buy a song using the application and by people paying to subscribe to a premium service.

With Shazam being supported on most of the popular platforms including Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile, there are plenty of mobile phones out there that you can start enjoying Shazam with. Will the company reach their target of 100 million users by the end of 2010? I certainly wouldn’t bet against it.

Shazam reaches 50 million users