Shares of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) lurched higher on Monday after the iPhone giant announced its newest acquisition. This time Apple has its sights set on Shazam, a mobile app that identifies songs, movies, TV shows and audio clips.
Shazam’s core business is in music recognition, and the company has achieved over a billion downloads of its app to date.
The endgame behind this is for Apple to ultimately improve its music platform, not to mention a pairing with Siri has the potential to be incredible as well. According to the Verge, Apple Music gets roughly a million clicks per day from Shazam.
On the other hand, if Apple were to shut down the app, other music streaming services, like Spotify, would lose out on referrals.
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A price for the acquisition for was not announced, although the number $400 million has been thrown around by sources familiar with the matter. This will easily be one of Apple’s largest acquisitions in years. Its largest purchase ever was for Dr. Dre’s Beats for $3 billion back in 2014.
Shazam issued a statement saying:
We are excited to announce that Shazam has entered into an agreement to become part of Apple. Shazam is one of the highest rated apps in the world and loved by hundreds of millions of users and we can’t imagine a better home for Shazam to enable us to continue innovating and delivering magic for our users.
Separately Apple added:
We are thrilled that Shazam and its talented team will be joining Apple. Since the launch of the App Store, Shazam has consistently ranked as one of the most popular apps for iOS. Today, it’s used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, across multiple platforms. Apple Music and Shazam are a natural fit, sharing a passion for music discovery and delivering great music experiences to our users. We have exciting plans in store, and we look forward to combining with Shazam upon approval of today’s agreement.
Shares of Apple were last seen up about 2% at $172.61, with a consensus analyst price target of $187.74 and a 52-week range of $112.49 to $176.24.
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