Photo: shazam.com
Photo: shazam.com

Human ingenuity is truly amazing. At some point in time (in 1999 actually) someone (ok that would be Chris Barton, Philip Inghelbrecht, Avery Wang, and Dhiraj Mukherjee) decided to create an app that would help music lovers identify the artist, title, and album that happens to be playing at that moment in time. And Shazam was born.

I’m always bowled over when I think of the technology involved in actually turning something like that into reality.

The four founders did that, and then they kept going.

The latest innovation to come from Shazam is a kind of digital crystal ball. The company is claiming to be able to predict which songs will be hits and which won’t. They’re able to do this through a pretty complicated set of analytics. They essentially gather up huge amounts of data and then analyze that data for patterns.

If you never believed that there was a formula for creating a hit, you should believe it now. Shazam’s software has found it.

For DJs, though, this little bit of technological innovation is particularly relevant. You can use Shazam to identify the most popular sections of any given song. Imagine what you could do with that? You could create mixes consisting of just the most popular bars from every song, even the least popular over all.

What do you think about that advancement? Is it really useful or advisable for DJs to rely on, or even use, that kind of technology. Does it help you become a better DJ or does it strip away another layer of skill?