Name that tune...the rise of Shazam

But it's not just Shazam that's evolving - the whole mobile industry is facing up to changing times.

"What's interesting is to see how that landscape's evolving - particularly in the UK market right now - and how everything's becoming less proprietary and much more open," says Fisher. "And how different operators are adopting different strategies... It's going to be interesting to see where the industry ends up. Because they run the risk of becoming a bitpipe and that's what they don't want to do."

As operators look to innovative third-party apps to help power a brave new era of mobile services, Fisher argues Shazam, with its community of users, is ideally placed to help them and build its own business in the process.

"[Shazam's] really working for the carriers," he claims. "These guys are making millions of pounds - each carrier - with some of our deployments and some of our customers. They're generating over £2m per year just on Shazam as a paid-for service. That's quite high for data services."

Shazam says it now has "significant penetration" across 50 carriers in 60 markets around the world.

Fisher goes on: "Carriers just don't make that much money out of data services. They make a lot of money out of peer-to-peer messaging. And people paying for soccer results and buying things like games, ringtones - they're still generating good revenue.

"But when you can bring in business models and services that start to deliver that [level of revenue] and it's very early on in the life cycle - because this is moving to the new customer experience - then carriers are very interested because they can see how this is going to develop over time and become quite significant."

Handset manufacturers are also being won over: "We're being preloaded by handset manufacturers already," says Fisher: "We think by the end of 2009 we'll be on 250 million devices and that's because of the deals we've already signed.

"At the moment our mission is to go back and re-educate the marketplace about Shazam and what this technology is doing in terms of driving ARPU [average revenue per user] and driving usage across the networks."

With these winds of change filling his company's sails, Fisher predicts music recognition will be "a ubiquitous feature on phones" by 2010.

But he needs the operators to buy his argument - because he needs their support to create the kind of services he would like, such as the ability to offer users simple fixed-price direct music/video downloads to their mobiles without them having to worry about racking up large download bills in the process. Shazam and Vodafone launched such a service earlier this year.

"Ultimately Shazam has a lot more value for you if you can hear a song, ID it and buy it immediately and it will drop onto your phone and drop onto your PC simultaneously," Fisher says.

"And it's only with people like Vodafone and the other operators supporting service providers like Shazam and having transparent pricing that then you can go out and say the price of downloading a song is 20p. And it's a fixed price... [Users can then make a] decision as to whether that's good value for money or not."

He adds: "Vodafone's the first operator in the UK to do that [fixed price for music and video downloads to mobile] and the other operators will follow suit. It'll be interesting to see how quickly they follow suit - this isn't just a phenomenon around music. This is about mobile services."

What's next for Shazam? The technology has been integrated into mobile phones and FM radios so you can ID songs via the radio but expect radios themselves to start sporting a Shazam button, probably in time for Christmas.

Looking a little further ahead, the potential of mashing up Shazam with GPS-powered location-based services is an area that excites Fisher, as he explains below, so don't be too surprised if your future mobile includes some kind of Coldplay-fan locator...

Read more in the Q&A on page 3...