Last year Apple showed how it could incorporate the music identification capabilities of Shazam even deeper inside iOS 14, and now it’s taking another step inside Apple Music. It will add more DJ mixes and new features provided by Shazam.
Apple Music enhances the DJ set section and introduces new features
Apple Music initially introduced DJ mixes and mash-ups in 2016 through a partnership with Dubset Media Holdings to identify and pay for licensed music within mixes. Now Apple claims that relying on the Shazam technology acquired in 2018 and collaborating with various labels, Apple Music has the tools to identify and compensate for individual creators, event promoters, labels, etc. It also allows subscribers to see individual track names, skip tracks within the DJ set, listen to them with Lossless audio on “most mixes” and save them to the library for offline viewing.
So yes, the same identification technology that tells you the name of a song playing in a shopping mall can apparently tell which festival it is from, which DJ is the mix of e remove some parts of the mix. This is apparently a fairly detailed feature. It is based on Apple Music’s database of approximately 75 million songs, to enable recurring earnings for the clubs that host the DJ sets and the DJs that produce them.
The success of the mixes
There’s a genre page within the Apple Music app, and the company says engagement has tripled over the past twelve months, with over 300 million streams of DJ sets so far.
Apple has put in a ton of mixes over the past year, including some by Charlotte de Witte, Tiësto, Carl Cox, and others. Studio K7! Founder Horst Weidenmueller said “thanks to the partnership with Apple we finally have a place to celebrate DJ-Kicks with an additional 14 editions that haven’t been on the market for over 15 years.”
Apple says it is commissioning more mixes and is working closely with DJs to get additional content on the service. Existing mixes on Apple Music will be kept, although not all of them will have the new features.