SoundHound Passes 100 Million Users

Sites include shazam.com , soundhound.com . Published on October 5th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

Thanks in large part to the explosive growth of smartphone use and mobile computing in general, applications have been popping up everywhere. Right now the 2 prominent music search and discovery apps are Shazam and SoundHound, the latter of which has just announced the milestone of surpassing 100 million users.

The announcement which came by a humble press release was seen as understated by a few people, especially when you consider that in January 2010 after a rebrand, SoundHound had just 2 million users. In just over 2 years, the app has added 98 million users and by all accounts these are active users. Katie McMahon, Vice President of SoundHound pointed out recently that all 100 million downloads of the apps have translated into regular use and engagement.

While Shazam has been able to grow on the strength of TV and media partnerships, SoundHound has put in some solid creative and innovative effort to bring its Sound2Sound technology to users. This technology allows users to search ‘sound against sound’ and not through traditional ‘sound-to-text’ techniques that are typically used by other music and song identification apps. The result is crisp and more fluent path to finding out “what’s that song?”

SoundHound comes bundled with HTC Android phones and this has no doubt helped to build the user base since Android phones are activated in the thousands daily. The challenge will be to catch Shazam which is iOS based and which so far has over 250 million active users.