A new Shazam update brings music discovery detection to songs playing from other apps.
“You can now identify songs in apps like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube,” the Shazam App Store description reads after an update on Thursday, July 6. While the feature isn’t quite as seamless as one would hope, here’s how to activate the new feature.
How to Use Shazam on Social Media Apps
- Open an app like TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube and find a video with music playing in the background.
- Open the Shazam app.
- Press the Shazam button.
- Switch back to the social media app—Shazam will listen in.
- Once it has a result, the music discovery app will ping you.
Don’t want to activate the feature every time? You can set up auto Shazam so you’ll get alerts any time you hear music.
- Open the Shazam app.
- Press and hold the Shazam button.
- A message that says “Auto Shazam is on” pops up.
- Now when you scroll social media, you can identify songs.
Shazam will store the songs it automatically identifies in your library so you can check them out later. It’s not dissimilar to Google’s Now Playing service for its Pixel phones—though that doesn’t yet work with social media. If you’re tired of having songs constantly identified while you scroll through your feed, you can follow the same process again to disable it. Be careful running Shazam too much in the background though, it can really eat your battery to identify all the music you’re hearing.
Since Apple bought Shazam, it has been a major success for the Cupertino giant. It reached more than one billion songs using the Music Recognition feature from the Control Center in iOS. It has also processed more than one billion song matches per month, an impressive figure as the service is available across both iOS and Android—but with deeper integration on iOS.
