Shazam is a great app for categorising and telling you all about the music of the present. But what about the music of the future? Using data from Shazam tags of which there a 7 million a day, Shazamers (the app’s official blog) has predicted that Gotye’s ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’ will be the number one smash summer hit, The Next Web reports.
It’s a fascinating and great use of data mining. Shazam’s director of Music and Content Will Mills also says that the technology can be used to anticipate trends:
“We can already see in advance which songs will be big, because their tagging pattern is quite peculiar. We can notice unusual behavior around a specific track – thousands of people thinking: “Wow, what the hell is this?” and using Shazam to find out the answer. This usually starts weeks or even months ahead of the trend.”
Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know is currently receiving around 1.5 million tags per week, so it is rightly the number one prediction, even if other songs by Usher and Maroon 5 aren’t far behind.
Shazam’s technology has actually got a very good track record: it correctly predicted the success of Lana Del Rey and Jessie J. As Mills says ‘In fact, up to 85% of the songs that get to number one in Shazam’s charts go on to break into national top 10 charts, as well.’
We’ll see how the ranking looks at the end of the summer, but I reckon it will be pretty accurate, even if the number one hit at the moment Call Me Maybe doesn’t feature.
