Shazam for Android adds ability to listen to identified tracks in YouTube Music

Damien Wilde | Sep 28 2020 - 4:13 am PT

Song identification stalwart Shazam has long been an essential for music discovery and sometimes just remembering that annoying earworm that you can’t quite pinpoint. For Shazam users though, it’s probably great to hear that you can now listen to identified tracks in YouTube Music.

For those that might not be aware, Shazam was acquired by Apple back in 2018. Because of this acquisition, this does mean that when you identify a track using Shazam, you’re quite blatantly pushed to listening to said track using Apple Music. Luckily, you’re not limited to just opening any Shazam identified audio in Apple’s music streaming platform.

Tapping the overflow three-dot menu will allow you to access some more of the most popular music streaming platforms. Previously on Shazam that included Spotify and Google Play Music but with the latter service set to shut down very soon, YouTube Music integration is much needed and very welcome we’re sure. Heck, it at least saves some time having to manually dig through the app looking for the song you’ve just tagged.

While YouTube Music doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as popular as Google Play Music, this is at least a minor step in the right direction from a third party not really affiliated with Google. Given that YouTube Music has just surpassed 500 million installs via the Google Play Store, there are bound to be some people out there that like using Shazam for music discovery and playback.

We wouldn’t expect Apple to push Google’s YouTube Music service when using Shazam though. This feels more like a goodwill gesture than anything else, with Google Play Music on the way out, linking to a dead service would be a little mean.