WMG Partners With Shazam To Sign New Artists

Warner Music Group and Shazam have developed an innovative strategic alliance that will discover new acts and sign them to a Shazam-branded label under WMG, and that will collaborate in enhanced marketing across WMG’s roster of artists.

The global partnership will create a connection between music fans, emerging artists, and WMG’s A&R teams. The Shazam label imprint will identify unsigned artists for support and development by combining WMG’s global A&R expertise with Shazam’s proprietary fan activity data. At the same time, the app’s unique promotional channels will empower artists to directly engage with fans who Shazamed them, enabling fans to continue to champion the artist they helped discover.

“By partnering with Shazam, a brand which is synonymous with music discovery for fans all around the world, we have forged a potent proposition: the first crowd-sourced, big data record label,” said Rob Wiesenthal, COO/Corporate, Warner Music Group. “While data and crowd sourced analyses will never be a substitute for the expertise and instincts of our A&R professionals, we do believe the information we obtain for this new label will provide very useful signals that will bolster our ability to find the stars of tomorrow.”

In addition, WMG’s family of labels will offer new ways for their rosters of established and up-and-coming acts to connect with Shazam’s enormous community of 420 million users in 200 countries. WMG labels will receive enhanced deep data on fan behavior for WMG acts and be able to launch specially tailored promotional campaigns. In turn, WMG will provide Shazam with exclusive content and other benefits to augment the user experience, providing even more reasons for fans to make the app their destination for news about their favorite acts.

Initial projects activated under the alliance have already included Shazam’s first video premiere with Chromeo’s ‘Come Alive’ and Shazam’s first single premiere via its News Feed with Wiz Khalifa’s ‘We Dem Boyz’.

“We are excited to enter into a next-generation partnership with Warner Music Group. Every minute of the day, people around the world Shazam over 10,000 songs, giving us incredible insight into what songs are trending and allowing us to discover future hits. Combining Shazam’s proprietary data with WMG’s A&R expertise will yield fantastic results,” said Rich Riley, CEO, Shazam. “We are also eager to use our deep data and advanced promotional solutions combined with exclusive content from WMG to help artists engage with their fans and sell more music.”