The New Shazam Player

You may have heard about Shazam before. The startup in the music industry launched with its unique feature that let you identify songs. Since its launch, Shazam has expanded its offerings with premium options and new features for music lovers. Now they are bringing a new feature to their repertoire. Now instead of just identifying your music, Shazam wants to play it.

After downloading the free Shazam Player iOS app you can open it and it will ask to scan through your music. It does this to make use of one of its features, LyricPlay. This feature will play lyrics to certain songs in your library if it has it in its database. Then whenever you play the song it will bring up the lyrics written in stylized block letters and highlight the current line.

Other features that come with songs are the ability to read a bio of the artist, see Youtube videos related to the song, look at tour dates for the artist, and of course have sharing options for Twitter and Facebook. These features work together well, but Shazam is still limited in its database. It wasn’t able to provide all these features for every song in my library, and many also didn’t have any lyrics available. Hopefully this inconvenience is resolved with future updates that will add more and more information about different songs, albums, and artists.

Shazam will also transfer any playlists you have created for your music, but it also adds two of its own. You can add any song in your library to the Good or Bad list. Now these may or may not be a reflection of whether or not you like the songs, but any song put into the Bad list will not come up during a shuffle.

In the end, the Shazam Player wants to replace the default music app on your iPod, and it makes a very strong case by providing more features. However it isn’t quite there yet as these features still need to be developed and become robust and the interface needs to be a little more intuitive.