Investing.com - In a move designed to strengthen its Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) Music offering, Apple agreed to buy the Shazam application for 400 Million dollars.Shazam, created in 1999, is a music and image recognition mobile application. Its users are able to record a small sample of an unknown song using a smartphone microphone, and Shazam identifies the song for the user.Shazam grew in popularity over the years, and its mobile apps have been downloaded over a billion times, with over 30 billion song identification requests performed. The acquisition comes after years of close collaboration between Apple and Shazam. Apple's launch of iOS 8 in September 2014 came with a seamless integration of Shazam into Apple's assistant Siri.While the 400 Million deal is one of the largest acquisitions ever by Apple, Shazam was valued at a billion dollars during its last funding round in 2015. Now, Apple hopes to offer its user an even deeper integration with its music services, in an attempt to differentiate its music service from rivals such as Spotify.
