The Bee Gees’ disco-era hits are perfect for those starting a new company, according to the keynote speaker at this year’s Baton Rouge Entrepreneurship Week, whose theme is “Stayin’ Alive.”
Dhiraj Mukherjee is one of the co-founders of the popular music discovery app Shazam, for which Apple reportedly paid $400 million in 2018. When Shazam was first released on his Apple App Store in 2008, it quickly became popular among users who wanted to quickly identify songs being played on the radio, in restaurants, and bars.
Shazam has been around since 2002, in the early days of mobile phone innovation. Previously, customers accessed services by contacting a mobile phone number. After you play music for 30 seconds, the number answers and sends you a text message identifying the song that’s playing.
“We were doing everything to survive and not run out of cash,” Mukherjee said in a speech at Mid-City Tower on Thursday morning. “As an entrepreneur, if you run out of cash, you’re done.”
Mukherjee and the other founders employed a variety of strategies to launch Shazam. They have developed a digital signal processing system that can recognize a song’s distinct audio fingerprint. They signed an agreement with one of the UK’s largest music distribution companies to accumulate a collection of songs that would allow them to be identified. Additionally, it took months to painstakingly rip songs from millions of CDs. They didn’t have money to buy equipment, so they built their own computers, which they put on racks and loaded with music.
“It was all about survival,” he said. “Because when the money runs out, the party’s over.”
Mukherjee argued that Shazam pawned its technology as CD sales declined and consumers flocked to download services like Napster. A company that manages song rights has sold identity verification services to track which songs are being played on the radio and collect copyright royalties.
Mukherjee said the company has made great strides by starting sales in the Apple Store and integrating Shazam’s technology into iPhones. Shazam took him 10 years to get 1 billion users, it took him 1 year to get 1 billion users, it took him 2 months to get 1 billion users I did.
“We were very, very lucky,” he said. “It was like the stars aligned.”
But Shazam’s success was influenced by other things, he noted. The founders trusted not only themselves, but also each other. Their only concern was business and nothing else. But he insisted they were easygoing and fun. According to Mukherjee, every day was an adventure.
