What If Spotify Bought Shazam?

What if Spotify bought SoundHound, or teamed up with Shazam to add a prominent way to identify the music that lives around you on a daily basis?

Imagine standing in line when a song came on the speaker system that intrigued you. You Open a streaming music service app that immediately listened and identified the song in question and brought it up to play the full track without leaving the app or handing you off to another site that may or may not work correctly on your phone. This could be a big deal. But could this functionality promote discovery among people not usually bothered to take the time to dig into new music?

Recently in an interview I did with Stephen Phillips, who founded music discovery service We Are Hunted, he mentions that he thinks music discovery is only a problem for those interested in it, which is still a very small niche. If you don’t know you have a problem, then do you really have a problem? Music discovery is of great concern for those people interested in music or for companies trying to sell a subscription, but does the person watching the Grammys and discovering new music really care enough to use any app, no matter how good it is? Like the analogy that someone says they’re interested in cars, but they don’t know anything about cars and they don’t take the time to learn, well, are they really interested in cars? Same for the person who never discovers new music.

The idea that music is all around all of us every day and it might just take the slightest nudge or piece of functionality to convert someone to a discover-ist is an optimistic one. If the solution to a broken industry was combining the ability to identify a song and the database of actual songs, I’m sure we would have seen it by now. Still, just because something can’t change one person’s habits doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be extremely use for those already in the fold. I would love to see Spotify or Rdio partner with (or buy) a company that can quickly identify songs and have that as an option to be the default screen when launching the app.

Possibly an amazing feature, yet still short, I think, of transforming a population into new music seekers.