Facebook Adding Audio Recognition Feature

Ellis Hamburger, writing for The Verge about Facebook’s “audio recognition”, an upcoming feature to tag music and TV shows when posting to the service with the Facebook app:

Facebook’s implementation, in fact, only works in the US for now, can recognize only 160 TV channels, struggles to recognize music in commercials (which are a big part of Shazam’s business), and only recognizes a few million songs so far. In most cases Shazam works seamlessly, an important part of the company’s secret sauce, but Facebook isn’t exactly competing with Shazam here. Facebook’s audio recognition is designed not to help you figure out what’s playing, but to make it as easy as possible to update your friends about what you’re listening to or watching.

An interesting experiment to drive traffic to Facebook pages for artists and TV shows, but far from a Shazam or SoundHound competitor. Much of the appeal of those apps is that you don’t need to post your discoveries anywhere, whereas Facebook is simply building a feature for the Post interface.