Updated with Saavn's role in the partnership After testing waters with Airtel in January, mobile based music identification service Shazam has now partnered with the online music streaming service Saavn* to allow users identify and discover music across regional languages like Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, and Bhojpuri and genres like Bhangra, Devotional, Ghazals, Carnatic and Indipop among others. As part of the deal, Shazam said that it has already integrated Saavn's music library into its music database and it claims to add thousands of new music tracks every week. The deal period or the financial details of the deal were not disclosed. For the uninitiated, Shazam is a mobile application which allows users to identify the music being played - you open the app, press a button and Shazam identifies the music by comparing a small segment of it with its own music database. While the company claims to have a music database of 27 million tracks, the database was primarily focused on English music with limited Hindi music data and little regional music data. While Shazam was able to identify Hindi and regional music earlier, it was very limited in our experience. With this development, the company will now have improved recognition capabilities of Hindi songs and regional songs. We tried out a couple of the latest Hindi and regional songs and the app was able to correctly identify these songs. However, we noticed that the tags offered the same options it traditionally offers for all song tags. These include the ability to share the…
