NASHVILLE, Tenn.–Perhaps you’re creative. Perhaps you’re persistent. But if you really want to innovative and succeed, you’re going to need to be both–creatively persistent—and you’re going to need to recognize the difference between zero and one, according to the man behind one of the most popular global apps ever created.
“Have you ever had a crazy idea for something that is impossible?” asked a man who had just such an idea—and who was told just that.
Shazam Founder Chris Barton shared with attendees at Origence’s Lending Tech 2025 event the story behind the app, which identifies songs and other information about the song and artist. It began its corporate life with a half-decade of struggles so difficult it nearly didn’t survive, offering a technology that for today’s tech users feels clunky and inconvenient, but which at the time was not viewed as “friction.”
It Can’t be Done
Going back to the 1990s before the company was founded, Barton said his meetings with acoustical experts, Ph.Ds., and electrical engineers at places like MIT and Stanford all led to a common refrain: his idea for creating a service that allowed someone to identify a song they like but don’t know the title or artist wouldn’t work.
He said he heard the same close-the-door-on-your-way-out message from venture capitalists who did not see a market for the idea.
“The truth is Shazam almost failed from the very beginning and it’s all my fault,” Barton said. “My original idea for Shazam was not good enough. My original idea was to tie into the technology of the time.”
That technology was a complicate and cumbersome process, and included tapping into an existing system used by radio stations that identified the songs they were playing. Users of Shazam would use their flip phones to dial the service and would have to identify the radio station they were listening to. Shazam would then check with the radio station network to ID the song being played, and in turn generate a song title sent back to the flip phone owner.
Convoluted & Worse
Not only was it convoluted, it didn’t offer any other information. And it didn’t work for songs being played in public or at clubs, or if the person didn’t know what radio station they were listening to.
Had Shazam not pivoted, said Barton, it would have suffered the same fate as the six other companies pursuing a similar vision at the same time, and become lost to the sands of corporate start-up history.
Barton, who shared that he is dyslexic and whose parents were told by a teacher that he was “defiant,” said throughout his remarks that he had come to realize that “defiance” is not always a negative. In fact, he said, it was an attitude that helped Shazam to become a verb, like Google.
Four Fundamentals
Barton told the meeting that building a successful enterprise involves four fundamental building blocks:
- Build from Basic Truths
- Creative Persistence
- Eliminate Friction
- Connect to Emotions
Barton, who spent time at both Google and DropBox in their formulative years, said success required identifying different ways of thinking.
“Cooks follow recipes, but chefs invent new ones,” he said, even as chefs use the same ingredients as ordinary cooks.
The A-Ha Moment’
“When you’re coming up with a breakthrough new idea, the only basic truth is there are no assumptions, and from there you build the possibilities for your new idea,” he observed.
Shazam was born from a recognition that everyone was beginning to carry mobile phones, and if he could find something new for people to do with those phones, a successful niche could be exploited. In 1999, he said he had an “a-ha moment.”
“What could someone do that would leapfrog me and make me irrelevant?” he asked himself. “That is a great way to think about innovating. What if I could do this anywhere? And that was the a-ha moment. Building from basic truths is a form of defiance. Defy your brain. Question the assumptions that have wired our brains.”
Apply Creative Persistence
When a person has a great idea, according to Barton, “it’s going to feel like the system has been set up to stop you. It’s like a prison. You have to have creative persistence.”
He took the audience through some of the challenges in the field of pattern recognition—necessary when identifying music—and a host of related complications, such as background noise that made his idea seem a near impossibility, along with other equally vexing issues, such as noise cancellation, audio filtering, speed variation, pitch correction reverberation and sound distortion.
Incredibly, the company was able to patent a technology that overcame all of that, but it did so at the same time as the dot.com bust. Barton shared how he met with a group of investors where one person dismissed him by saying, “I don’t see why anyone would ever use this.”
“I remember thinking, ‘I’ve got to prove this guy wrong’.”
Barton and his cofounders eventually secured $7.5 million in venture capital.
With funding in hand, the next task was digitizing music, all of which was on compact disks at the time. That required hiring 30 18-year-olds, who spent 24 hours a day over nine months at a CD warehouse digitizing CDs and entering information on the song title, artist and lyrics.
“That’s creative persistence,” said Barton.
The Real Business
At the time, brand new songs were even more difficult to get copies of as the songs were sent to radio stations only. Shazam formed a partnership with a DJ at a radio station in London who received new music CDs every Monday. The company borrowed the CDs, put them in the database, and sent them back.
“I thought we were in the music recognition business, but what I was really creating was a search engine, which we had to build,” Barton explained, showing all of the computers it wired together to create its own supercomputer.
“This was all one year ahead of the iPod, and seven years ahead of the iPhone,” he explained.
Shazam launched in the summer of 2002 as a four-digit telephone number–2580, because they are all in a straight line on a phone pad. The user would hold their phone up to the music being played for 15 seconds, and then Shazam would send back the song title.
Don’t Respect Barriers as Authorities
“There is something all of us do when we face a barrier: we respect it,” said Barton. “We say it can’t be done. Instead, you need to defy it. You need to use creative persistence to get past them.”
Eliminate Friction
Urging credit unions to look at their own operations, he said it’s critical to see the difference between a pebble and a boulder.
“What is the friction in your business that you see as a pebble, but actually it’s a boulder?” he asked. “Search and destroy friction. Reduce effort for others, not for ourselves. Every time you force a choice to be made, that’s friction.”
Barton recalled hearing someone observe of the requirement that a task require a click on a screen vs. not clicking as, “’The difference between zero and one is infinite.’ I will never forget that statement. At Shazam, we thought we had done everything. But friction almost killed Shazam. Eliminating friction saved us.”
And yet, when Shazam launched, it did so with a thud. It had almost no users, according to Barton.
More Than a Bad Year
“Have you ever had a really bad year? We had six really bad years. We barely avoided bankruptcy. We had layoffs,” he explained. “It was six years from launch until the App Store came out in the summer of 2008. And it’s all due to friction. With Shazam, you had to know something–2580. And then you couldn’t download the song. You had to drive to the store and show the text message to the store clerk. And we had to make money, so we had to charge people to use it. But if you charge people every time, that’s friction. It was not until the App Store allowed us to remove all that friction that we rocketed to hundreds of millions of users.
“Think about your business. Where are your pebbles? How can you eliminate friction by removing mountains?”
Connect to Emotions
People who build their own homes—or companies—are emotionally connected, Barton said.
“We ended up succeeding because we cared so much,” he said.
It also got a fate-altering boost when Apple announced the rankings of its most popular apps. Shazam had the highest rating, which only led to more success.
“Think about the impact you have on other people’s lives,” Barton urged. “Over 300 million people around the world currently use Shazam each month. I think about the struggling musician on the other side of this song.”
Barton said the release of the Apple rankings also gave him reason to call the investor who had said to him all those years earlier to remind him he had said he could see no reason for the app.
The Crazy Ones
Barton concluded with a. tagline from a 1990s TV commercial from Apple—which acquired Shazam in 2017 for $400 million: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”