Being Shazam one of the most used apps on my iPhone, I was excited to see the company announcing the ability to stream full songs from Spotify earlier this week. Shazam has added Rdio and Beats Music streaming over the past year, but Spotify was the big omission.
Spotify integration works as expected: once you authenticate with your account from the settings, every tagged song will get a play button with the Spotify icon that will let you stream a full track. Shazam will bring up a player widget at the bottom of the screen, which you can tap to open a Now Playing view with buttons to buy the track on iTunes, like it, or add it to a Spotify playlist. Shazam doesn’t automatically add each new tagged song to a special playlist in Spotify – you’ll have to give the song a thumbs up and it’ll be added to the My Shazam playlist in your Spotify account.
I quite like the improvements that went into Shazam’s refreshed Home screen design, too. Shazam is, besides a good song recognition app, a popular social network for music, at least in Italy. All my friends use Shazam, and the service is extremely popular and mainstream at this point. Therefore, I appreciate the inclusion of Trending Shazams and regional charts in the Home screen (below a big Touch to Shazam button) as they give me a fairly accurate representation of new and popular songs.
Shazam has a mix of regional and worldwide recommendations in this screen: I can read an article about Pharrell in English, but I see an Italian “single of the week” as well. Charts are nice, and I like how you can tap a large Play All button to start playing a list of songs quickly.
Shazam is adding more stuff to their app, which is not good news if you remember how simple it used to be. However, most of the content they’ve added isn’t too bad if you’re into Top Charts for music, and, more importantly, it’s always easy to tag a song thanks to a button in the middle of the tab bar.
Shazam is available for free and with a paid version – the latter removes ads and should hopefully help Shazam stick around in the future.
