The Rise of “Capture Culture” in Music

That’s what some are calling this new trend in music apps.  Here’s what Billboard has to say on the subject:

For decades, the question, “What song is playing?” plagued music fans. If a DJ failed to announce an artist’s name or the song’s title, fans were left to their own devices to figure it out (usually singing, humming and/or reciting misremembered lyrics to bemused friends or annoyed record-store clerks). Often, people accepted the music playing through the speakers in TV shows, movies, and bars as background ambience, because they lacked a means to identify a song and discover the artist behind it.

Today, of course, fans can get that info and lots more immediately: They can pull out their smartphones and use music-ID apps like Shazam and SoundHound to instantly name a song and gain a wealth of information about the music-artist bio, video, buy links, lyrics, tour dates, and much more.  “And, in turn, [a fan’s] senses are heightened,” says Keyvan Mohajer, the CEO of SoundHound, “because music they hear around them is in fact ‘capturable’ and therefore interactive.”

What’s significant about this “interactivity” is that music-ID apps empower fans to turn any passive listening session into an active one, where they lean forward and learn more about an artist.

But that’s not all fans can do. Shazam and SoundHound have partnered with the subscription music service Spotify, enabling users to play identified songs and add them to their library.

Shazam rolled this feature out to premium users in January, months before Spotify launched stateside, and soon offered it to free users too. SoundHound, on the other hand, enabled their “Play Now In Spotify” option in August, but only European users have the option now. While this feature might seem minor, it marks a critical turn in the way fans collect and discover music.

Traditionally, we think of music collecting as the act of acquiring music through a purchase, but that’s quickly changing. With Spotify integrating with music-ID apps, it gives fans a new option: capturing. When a Shazam or SoundHound user tags a song playing on the radio, they can now bring it into Spotify and listen to it there. If they so choose, they can also add it to their music library, making it easy for fans to capture and collect songs.

As the long-heralded shift from owning music to accessing it takes place, we’re also slowly moving from collecting music to capturing it. Music service MOG, for instance, recently launched an app feature called “Moggles.” Users can hold their phone up to any picture of album art and “we identify and add it to your collection or let you start playing it,” says MOG CEO David Hyman. “You can go to a record shop or be at a friend’s house and see a CD cover or vinyl, and snap a picture.” It even works when you “hold it up to little images of album art on your computer screen,” he added.

Welcome to capture culture: Where music is not solely bought from a store and collected in our home, but captured from our environment through mobile apps and instantly stored in the cloud. 

Read the rest of the article here.