Apple Using Shazam to Predict 50 Breakthrough Music Artists This Year

Apple today launched a new Shazam Fast Forward 2025 website that will spotlight 50 music artists who are poised to have a breakthrough year.

Shazam Fast Forward 2025
The list of artists will be revealed on a genre-by-genre basis over the next five days, starting with dance/electronic artists today. Rising artists in the Latin, Country/Rock, Pop, Hip-Hop, and R&B genres will follow later this week.

"With more than 300 million global monthly users and over 100 billion global song recognitions since its launch, Shazam's unique ability to accurately predict the next breaking artist is unparalleled," said Apple, in an email.

Artists are selected based on Shazam's "uniquely predictive data and algorithms," coupled with the "expertise of Apple Music's global editorial team."

Apple said two-thirds of the artists who were in Shazam's predictions list last year went on to be in Apple Music's Daily Top 100 list in 150 countries.

A variety of Shazam playlists are available on Apple Music.

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Top Rated Comments

FaustsHausUK Avatar
16 weeks ago
I'm looking at the Discovery Top 50 playlist and it looks like someone's cat ran over their keyboard chasing a toy. I love music, I work in music, and I have heard of one artist on this entire list. ?
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
nathansz Avatar
16 weeks ago

So now we're going to financially incentivize artists to create music to please the algorithms instead of our ears?
I suppose I misunderstood what this was.

I figured it based this on what people have Shazam search for, which tells it what music is pleasing people's ears
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
dannyyankou Avatar
16 weeks ago
Not sure why they’re dragging this out instead of just releasing the entire list at once.

Anyway, that is an interesting concept, using Shazams to predict which artists are getting big. It makes sense.
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Hopefully Smarter Avatar
16 weeks ago
the charts have the same "artists" year after year.
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)
breather Avatar
16 weeks ago
Fun idea. But the site is *****.
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)
FaustsHausUK Avatar
16 weeks ago

I'm not familiar with many of them either. very international list

plus we're just out of touch ;)


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Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)