GearBits: Name That Tune

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April 16, 2004

Name That Tune

Have you ever heard a song on the radio and thought - "That's great! Now who is that artist?" - and the DJ forgets to let you know? With a new music recognition service from AT&T Wireless, you can easily name that tune.

Customers dial #ID for the identification service, then hold their phone up to the speaker. In 15 seconds, the NowPlaying service sends out a text message with the current song title and artist, as well as information on the last five songs just played (in case you missed one of those).

The service is the first in the US, and is provided by Musicphone in cooperation with Shazam Entertainment, which has provided a similar service in the UK based on proprietary recognition technology and a database of over a million recorded songs.

The UK service includes an additional option to purchase the artist's CD containing the song, once it has been identified.

Posted by Sam | Permalink | TrackBack

Comments

Let me guess, they'll charge you 50 cents for the service and then charge you again to send you the damn text message.

At that point, you're already half way to buying the song on iTunes... but I guess you still don't know what "that" song is.

Posted by Ryan at April 16, 2004 05:07 PM

There is a free trial period, after which the service is roughly 1 cent plus the usual airtime.

Posted by Sam at April 16, 2004 09:00 PM

There was an old service like this, with a keyfob. Press the keyfob when a strange song comes on, and when you dock the fob at your home PC, it would query a server for the song info. I didn't buy it, because the servers only held playlists from the popular stations.

Is this going to be any different? How many is a million songs, anyway? Is it going to pick up on the breaking bands on my college radio station- the songs I actually want to discover? Or, like Clear Channel, will it only trade in mainstream pap? If so, then forget a service, just wait a hour and you'll hear the song again.

Posted by rene carlos at April 19, 2004 01:20 PM