The Magic Behind Shazam With Chris Barton
Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments
The guest today likes to create magic and bring that magic to music. Chris Barton, the Founder of Shazam, shares the magic behind Shazam and how he overcame the naysayers who say his idea to identify music out of thin air is impossible. Our brain is wired in a certain way due to societal pressures and the world we work in, so Chris implores everyone to start from zero by resettling the way our brain works. He discusses the five methods of starting from zero and dives deep into the concept of creative persistence. Tune in to this episode to know what he means by that!
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The Magic Behind Shazam With Chris Barton
In this episode, our guest is Chris Barton, the Founder of Shazam, the wonderful app that lets you know what song is playing. He talks about how we had to overcome the noise of people saying that will never happen, as well as the noise that’s happening in the room when you’re trying to get the app to figure out what song’s playing, as well as how to scale it and how to get every single song that is available onto that app. He said we need to have creative persistence. Find out what he means. Enjoy the episode.
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When Chris came up with the idea to identify music out of thin air, everyone said it was impossible. He embarked on a journey to make it possible through not just one but many innovations. He’s continued to innovate and learn from these amazing innovators during 8 years at Google, 4 years at Dropbox, and as the Founder of his new company Guard. You might also know him from being the Founder and first CEO of Shazam which was acquired by Apple in 2018 for $400 million. Chris, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
I’m always fascinated when someone has such a huge accomplishment like that on their resume, CV or whatever you call it, to ask what’s your story of origin. How did you get so passionate? I’m guessing you might have started with technology first versus music but take us back to childhood, school or wherever you want.
As a child, I wasn’t diagnosed, but I did in retrospect have dyslexia and ADHD, which explains a lot of things. It made things a struggle. I was lucky enough to get into college at UC, Berkeley. I remember when I was choosing my classes and my major, I would go into one of the buildings and look at the syllabus of every class.
I would choose all the classes and the majors that had the least books on the list. It would take me so long to read books. I embarked on a career after college in Management Consulting and enjoy the analytical side of that. I had this desire to create something that was this lingering desire. As a child, I always loved projects and creating my haunted house for the neighborhood.
A haunted house that anyone could come to and go crawl through cardboard boxes with strobe lights flashing, bake sales and all the typical things that little young entrepreneurs like to create. It’s a lingering thought. I’d love to create something on what’s my outlet going to be and how am I going to do it. I didn’t hone in on the idea of starting a company until I was already doing my MBA at UC, Berkeley.
While I was doing this MBA, I had thought I would use it as a pivot point to go from a telecommunications expert to becoming an internet expert and partnerships expert. One day, I was sitting in a computer lab. This was in the first couple weeks of my two-year MBA. Next to me was another guy working. He was a year ahead of me and doing his second year of the MBA.
I said, “What are you working on?” He said, “I’m starting a company.” I said out of curiosity, “What did you do before your MBA?” He said, “I was an Air Force pilot.” That was the moment I thought, “He was an Air Force pilot. There’s no relevance in flying jets to starting a company. He’s just a go-getter. If it means being a go-getter can start a company, then I should start a company.”
Shazam: When you introduce two problems simultaneously, pattern recognition often becomes impossible or extremely difficult.
Right in those first couple of weeks of my MBA program, I decided to embark on starting a company. I felt like it would allow me to achieve this dream of creating something and combine it with my expertise and my business career. That was the beginning. The next step was coming up with the idea, forming the team and all that stuff. I can get into that as it makes sense for you and this chat.
A lot of people reading are going to be interested to know how you overcame all those naysayers. Let’s talk about Shazam. You like to create magic and you come up with this idea. First of all, the name is fantastic. It implies magic. It tapped into my younger inner child, Shazam. I can hold something up. I understand Bluetooth technology but somehow magically this comes through. What did you do to ignore the naysayers saying your idea was impossible?
The first initial set of naysayers came from the fact that once I came up with this idea of identifying songs over a mobile phone, it turned out that technology did not exist anywhere. It wasn’t as simple as hiring some smart engineer to build it. It was more comparable to inventing a breakthrough drug to cure cancer in the sense that you have to invent something and not just build something.
That makes it very different from starting a company like Google, Snapchat or Facebook, where you’re building something. There’s no unknown. You just have to build. In our case, we’re trying to invent something. We had all these PhDs in Electrical Engineering Signal Processing from MIT and Stanford telling us that not only was there no technology to do it but also they knew of no way to do it. They didn’t know how it could be done. It had to be invented.
The reason that they said it was so difficult is it was pattern recognition. With pattern recognition, when you introduce two problems at the same time becomes often impossible or extremely difficult. Those two problems are Noise and Scale. Noise in Shazam is you’re identifying music by using the sound, coming from the microphone on the phone.
In the background along with the music are noises of people talking, cars honking and all different things. There’s also Scale. The database you’re identifying against is not the top 50, top 100 songs or all the 100,000 songs played on the radio. It’s 100 million songs that Apple has in its database. The way I like to describe what makes noise and scale so difficult is to imagine the following.
Imagine you’re in a small party of about 30 people. You look across the room and I say, “Show me where your sister is.” You point to her. I put you in Wembley Stadium and I say, “Across the stadium, your sister’s sitting in the crowd. Tell me where she is.” You can’t do it. That’s your brain challenged by noise and scale at the same time, a huge scale of people and a lot of noise. It makes pattern recognition very difficult.
The naysayers were people saying, “You’re not going to be able to invent this.” There were other types of naysayers along the way who say, “This is not going to take off. No one’s going to want to use it. It’s a feature, not a product.” What I found is that whenever I came across a naysayer, it motivated me more rather than less. The more that I thought something was impossible, the more I thought I wanted to get and achieve it because people say it’s impossible.
[bctt tweet=”Noise and scale are the big challenges.” username=”John_Livesay”]
All founders face a form of that, don’t they? You’ve put that distinction that there’s noise in the marketplace. If you’re doing something that a bunch of other people is doing, they’re like, “You’re too late to the market.” All investors want businesses to scale. Those words have different meanings separate from the creation of Shazam. You have this interesting passion for inventing things.
You have twelve patents and not just Shazam. You did something for Google and Dropbox. When I think of Google, I don’t think of them as a company that’s reaching out to the people who don’t work there saying, “Please, invent something for us.” I think of them as the opposite. You have to come up with something that Google hasn’t thought of inventing themselves for them to want to buy. There must be a good story there.
I worked at Google for eight years. During that time, I came out with two patents. While at Dropbox, I did another five patents. In my role at both Google and Dropbox, I was the first mobile partnerships employee.
Not just an employee at Google but the first one focused on the mobile cutting edge.
I joined Google with 2,000 people while it was a private company. There was no one working on mobile at all. I had founded Shazam so I had a mobile background. I was out flying on planes around the world to meet with the big mobile phone companies like AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Nokia, Blackberry and so on. When Android came about, I was among the first couple of people doing all the Android carrier partnerships and creating a framework.
Android was this very complicated ecosystem. It was not just about making money. It was about creating a successful even playing field for everyone that wanted to play a role in smartphones, including mobile device manufacturers like Samsung and Motorola and mobile carriers like AT&T and Verizon. Also, all the people that make apps and other bits of hardware.
We’re talking about how you like to invent things and create patents. When you create something for a company you’re working for, they get the patent, not the employee, correct?
I should be clear, with those companies, Google and Dropbox, it is their patents. I invented it and I’m listed as the lead author on them. It wasn’t in my job title. I would not say the typical partnerships person at Google or Dropbox has filed patents. No one said, “Chris, you need to file some more patents.” We’re relying on your inventions here.
Shazam: It was not just about making money. It was about creating a successful, even playing field for everyone.
You travel the world as a keynote speaker. Tell us how that journey started. A lot of companies want to have someone with this incredible background and teach them about innovation for one thing.
It’s my main focus along with a startup company that I’m starting as a keynote speaker. I’m focused on innovation but also telling firsthand stories from having created, conceptualized and ideated ideas. I created Shazam from the ground up and overcome all the obstacles and barriers that we encountered along the way. I draw on all these firsthand stories from Google and Dropbox and being part of those pioneering teams.
I love to tell those stories and inspire people. I’ve identified five key ways of thinking differently. They’re not the default ways that we think. They’re ways that by default we don’t think. That’s one of the things that hold us back from these game-changing innovations like what led to creating Shazam and how we do it. Anyone can do this. Anyone can create these great innovations. It’s not that we were geniuses. It’s more about the approach and the way of thinking.
As a storytelling keynote speaker, a lot of people say, “You’re a gifted storyteller. It’s natural for you. Maybe you studied it.” It’s like being an athlete or a Broadway performer. If I don’t have those skills, I can never be a good storyteller. Everyone can learn how to be a good storyteller. You’re saying everyone can learn how to be an innovator and you have the process of Start From Zero. Can you expand a little about what that means?
I call it Start From Zero. I’ve given this name and brand for this set of methodologies. The best way to think of it is you’re resetting the way your brain thinks. Your brain is wired to think in a certain way. Due to the pressures of society and the world that we work in, you think in a certain way. That way can disable your opportunity in terms of creating a game-changing innovation. In Start From Zero, there are these five methods. One of them I call Build From Basic Truths. It’s coming up with new ideas in a different way.
Not thinking from the familiar or analogy to what we already know, which is how our brain is wired to think because that’s much more efficient but instead, taking a taxing approach, questioning all your assumptions and breaking down to what you know are the basic truths. This is otherwise academically known as First Principles Thinking. It’s used by people like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Leonardo da Vinci and a lot of many great innovators.
Another one is what I call Creative Persistence. I believe that great innovation is not just about one idea. It’s a sequence of ideas and problems that you solve very creatively that allows you to get from your original vision to the endpoint of having a truly game-changing innovation that has a breakout success. When I look at the Shazam story, it was much more than, “Let’s identify a song out of thin air and invent this technology.” There were many problems we had to solve related to the creation of the music database, the search engine and the partnerships with mobile phone company integrations that we had to overcome.
We had to do things that had never been done before to get to the end goal of a delightful single push of a button to get an answer. There are several others around eliminating friction making experiences to be seamless and trying to eliminate everything that you have to think or do and trying to make something Shazamable that people talk about.
[bctt tweet=”Creative persistence is the key.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It’s all about creating magic. Shazam set a new bar. When Shazam is out there, people thought, “You can touch a button and get this delightful experience that solves a problem.” Many companies will think, “How could we create our Shazam of something? How can we make it easy to book your airplane flight or have your house remodeled?” You could pick any business. How can we make it super simple and delightful like Shazam?
People use that a lot with Uber when they’re pitching for startups like, “We’re the Uber of this.” Uber said, “We’re going to deliver food. How do we make this Shazamable?” You talk about in your keynotes making things that people love and referencing Steve Jobs, making people love the iPad when it first came out and still do. I have an emotional connection to what you’re creating for me.
You said something else I want our readers to take away, which is if you create magic, you’re surprising and delighting people. I can’t believe it’s almost like magic like, “Now I know the name of that song that I could think of. It was driving me crazy. Now I can share it with my friends or download it.” It changes their life.
The other thing is this concept of Creative Persistence. We all have to sell ourselves. I talk to a lot of sales teams about storytelling as a tool but this concept of how do you be persistent without being pushy? How do you be persistent in following your dreams when you get obstacles and noes from clients and objections? There’s a creative way to be persistent. It’s just no to the grindstone is what I heard you say.
It’s truly all about creativity. I’ll give you one example with Shazam. We needed to build a music database from scratch. We were a little startup. We didn’t have music. There were no databases of digital music. We didn’t own every CD out there and we certainly didn’t want to have to go buy every CD out there, cash startup. It wasn’t just about persistence. We went and found the big retailers of CDs in our first market, which was the United Kingdom. Those were Virgin Megastore and HMV. We found a distributor that had even more CDs than the retailers. This huge distributor had a warehouse of every single CD available for sale in the United Kingdom and they would sell the CDs to the retailers.
We approached the distributor. This is 2000. The world is moving to digital. Napster was in its early days. We said, “The world’s moving to digital. Don’t you think it’d be great to have a digital copy of your entire CD catalog? Don’t you want to be ready?” They’re like, “We do want to be ready. We could put about 30 18-year-olds right there on site and have them turn all your CDs into a digital database from scratch for no charge.”
That’s hard to say no to. How smart. I love the way that you ask the question, “Don’t you want to be ready for the future? Here’s a way to do it that will benefit both of us and won’t cost you anything,” talking about creative parameters. That comes from taking your science skills and applying them to people skills is what I’m hearing.
You’re inventing things along the way. You’re solving little problems. People think of entrepreneurs as persistent person that has much determination and breaks down brick walls. What I saw at Google is it’s not just about breaking brick walls down and being highly persevering. It’s about being inventive. Google said, “We want to have every book.” I remember when I joined Google, I said, “What’s your mission?” They said, “Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.”
Shazam: How lucky we all are to be able to work on things that are exciting, feel impactful, and give you a sense of purpose.
I said, “When I interviewed there, I thought you already do that. I search Google and then I can get to the world’s information.” They said, “No, that’s just the web.” They embarked on a project to get every book into Google as well. Do you know how they went about it? They realized books are in paper form so they invented from scratch a device that turned pages physically one-by-one in books so they could scan every single page of every single book and get it all into Google.
Speaking of your need to keep creating an innovator and I’m extremely interested in this, you have started something as a former lifeguard Guard Vision, which is using AI to prevent drowning in swimming pools. I don’t think most people realize what a problem that is. Is there a personal story connected to this swimming pool drowning situation that caused you to want to help?
There is a story but luckily no personal story of anyone drowning. The company’s called Guard. The website is Guard.Vision just to play on computer vision. It’s stemming from a lifeguard. The inspiration ultimately was that I wanted to do my next startup an impact-driven startup, not measured by trying to be a multibillion-dollar company but measured by having an impact on saving lives.
If I were to deploy this product success release and let’s say it got into 5% of US private swimming pools, I would save 2 lives a month. Not only that but I would know when and where. I would be in Tucson, Arizona on Saturday at 2:30 PM and save the life of a nine-year-old boy named Jason. This is all cloud-connected. That was the vision.
The personal aspect of it came from a couple of things. One is that I grew up around a lot of water. I grew up surfing in San Diego and was on a swim team in ninth grade. I have a lot of respect for the water and what it means to spend a lot of time in the water. Secondly, I have a young son. When I came up with the idea for this, he was a little younger. He was spending a large portion of his time at his mom’s house where there was a small pool put in the ground. I realize to someone who doesn’t know how to swim a pool is like a bottomless fiery pit. I thought of the risk of it. Those were both sources of inspiration.
The third component of inspiration is the need that we have for this. There’s the opportunity with computer vision. I love doing things that are cutting-edge technology. Computer vision or AI is a new technology that can change the world. What happens is the best people in this space, companies like Google and the best engineers, go after the biggest markets. They go after self-driving cars. That’s where you’re going to make multibillion-dollar businesses.
They don’t chase something small. This is not a billion-dollar or a million-dollar company. It’s small but it’s meaningful. It’s the number one cause of death for children under the age of five in the United States of accidental death. CDC reports that. That means children under the age of five in the United States more often die from drowning than from car crashes, poisonings or gunshots. It’s a real recurring issue and problem. We need to do the best we can to stop it.
It reminds me of that poem, “If I can help one robin’s egg back in the nest, I will not have lived in vain.” It doesn’t matter how much money the company makes in this situation, if I save one child’s life under five, it will be worth all of the time and money spent to create something like this. If people want to know if you are the right speaker for their audience, do you have a sweet spot for audiences that you love to talk to in any particular industries or types of people?
[bctt tweet=”There’s no unknown. You have to build.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I don’t focus on industries because their takeaways are agnostic to industry. There are ways of thinking. While I tend to tell a lot of stories from Shazam specifically, that’s what people are most interested in. I do draw a little from Google and Dropbox. Although these are technology companies, they’re mainstream consumer technology companies that almost everyone is used so people can relate. Do a Google search, throw your file in a Dropbox folder or push that button in Shazam.
I do keynotes to 4,000 or 5,000 people that are part of educational groups and so on. Sometimes 30 CEOs of executives are all invited to an event inspiring around innovation. It ranges across the board. What I love is that almost everyone is using Shazam. I’ll sometimes say, “Who here uses Shazam?” You can see how much interest there is in the audience but it’s almost never anything less than 60% of the hands going up.
If people want to find you, your website is ChrisJBarton.com. Any last thought or quote you’d like to leave us with?
The last thought is a reminder of how lucky we all are to be able to work on exciting things, feel impactful and give us a sense of purpose. That’s what gets me going and what I love to talk about. I’d love hearing other people’s stories of what they’re working on, what moves them and what gives them a sense of purpose. Gratitude is our main thought.
Way to end the episode. Thanks for joining us and sharing your wisdom, excitement and passion for life.
Thanks for having me, John.
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Tags: Creative Persistence, Digital Music, Noise and Scale, Pattern Recognition, Shazam, Start to Zero