What Song is Playing? You Can Find Out with Shazam App

Do you want to know what song is playing? Don’t be left wondering, you can find out for sure thanks to an awesome app called Shazam. The app first came to the iPhone some time ago and has made it easier than ever to discover what song is playing regardless of where you are. It works flawlessly in loud bars, clubs, restaurants, stores, cars, just about anywhere music is playing, it handles background noise remarkably well and is nearly always able to identify music. Once a song is identified, Shazam will provide links to buy it via iTunes or watch the related music video from YouTube.

Update: The iPhone and iPad can now do this natively without any third party apps! All you need to do is find what music is playing by using Siri in iOS! Siri is available on the Mac too for the same capability… no third party apps are required any longer to find out what songs are playing! Nonetheless, Shazam can still identify songs too, and if you’re on an older device without Siri support then you can continue to use Shazam to identify what music is playing.

Shazam – the “what song is playing” app

I figured the days of wondering hopelessly what that catchy song playing is were largely over due to this app. Honestly I thought everyone knew what Shazam was by now, it’s been featured in iPhone commercials and has been in the App Store top downloads for a long time.

Despite it’s ubiquitous promotion and popularity, I still have people asking me frequently how to find out what music is playing. I just recently used it to figure out what song is playing in the new iPad commercial after a few people asked me about it, everyone is always amazed that I can quickly come up with an answer. I then told them to just download the app and they were pretty amazed that apps like this exist.

Shazam has both free and paid versions available to download for iPhone, iPad, Android, Nokia, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile phones. The free version works the same as the paid version but has limitations on how many songs you can ‘shazam’ in a month, while the paid version offers you unlimited music discovery. You can download the free version for iPhone and iPad via the iTunes App Store.

It’s definitely a must-have app for any smartphone, you should check out the free version first and if you end up using it often go ahead and upgrade, you’ll be amazed how often you’ll be pulling out your phone to discover new music. Highly recommended.