Apple completes Shazam acquisition, will make app ad-free for everyone

Apple has successfully completed its acquisition of Shazam, the popular song identification app. The company confirmed it was buying Shazam and its development team for a reported $400 million last December. The acquisition was temporarily held up because of an investigation by the European Union, which scrutinized the deal over potential antitrust concerns. But regulators gave it the thumbs up earlier this month.

In what’s sure to be welcome news for Shazam users, Apple has announced that it will be removing all ads from the app “soon.” And yes, that includes the Android version, which isn’t going anywhere.

Shazam has been downloaded over 1 billion times around the world and is used over 20 million times every day, according to Apple’s press release. The app has been around since the beginnings of the App Store and was one of the coolest early demos of what a mobile app could do. You’d hold up your phone, let it listen to a song playing nearby for a few seconds, and the track and artist information would just pop up on screen like magic. All these years later, it’s now a feature that’s available on many platforms and one we take for granted.