At the end of 2017 the purchase of Shazam by Apple was announced, a purchase that became official at the end of 2018, when the European regulatory authorities they gave the go-ahead to the purchase, since it did not violate competition laws. From the moment of purchase, Shazam has increased the number of users as well as the profits.
The financial results presented by the company last week at the UK Companie House show how the user base increased to 478 million users in 2018, compared to the 400 it had in 2017. Revenues have been negatively affected, going from 44,8 million in 2017 to 34,5 million in 2018, probably due to the elimination of advertising.
The first step Apple took when the purchase agreement with Shazam was closed was remove all the advertising displayed by the application in the free version. It should be remembered that the application showed advertisements in the application, advertisements that we could eliminate if we made use of the Shazam Core version, an application that had a price of 5 euros.
Despite the drop in revenue, the British company has managed to increase profits, profits that reached 158,4 million in 2018 compared to the losses it registered in 2017 and which rose to 19,4 million dollars. Another of the data that these numbers reflect shows us how the number of employees went from 225 in 2017 to 216 in 2018.
The income obtained by the company comes mainly from the sale of intellectual property and the value attributed to the workforce of Shazam Media Services after the acquisition by Apple. Long before Apple's Shazam purchase agreement, the Cupertino company allowed us to recognize songs through Siri, without the Shazam application being installed on our device.
