Song identifying app Shazam is rolling out music video channels to all of its 120 million monthly active users in a partnership with Vadio, a Portland-based startup. Through their partnership, whenever a user taps on the Shazam icon to identify a song, a thumbnail of the official music video for that track will display on the song’s Shazam page.
As we recently reported, the Shazam app has been downloaded over 1 billion times since the company was founded in 1999 and has finally become profitable.
Thankfully, the videos don’t just auto-play. A user has to click on the video thumbnail to make that happen. After the first video concludes, another relevant video will cross-fade in and begin playing through Vadio. Vadio shares a portion of its ad revenue with content creators but declined to discuss specific terms.
Something like a mashup of Outbrain and Vimeo, Vadio’s technology “ingests” premium video content, mostly music videos, distributes them and monetizes them with advertisements. Vadio CEO Bryce Clemmer said that Shazam and Vadio aim to “influence the discovery of new video content,” through this integration.
Vadio does not yet offer users an offline mode for bookmarking video channels to keep watching on the go, but Clemmer said the company is always working with partners to develop new features.
In a company statement, Shazam said the integration of Vadio is part of an effort to “give fans a great reason to spend more time with Shazam.”
Video channels within Vadio can be curated by editors, auto-generated using trending data, or built by marketers to reflect what they think are the interests of their targeted audiences. That means Shazam, or other platforms using Vadio, could extend a new type of creative unit, a video channel, to advertisers or artists on their platform.
