New Shazam/Rdio feature escalates Shazam vs. SoundHound battle

Rdio announced a new feature in its partnership with music-identification app Shazam, raising the game in an escalating rivalry with competing service SoundHound. The Shazam/Rdio partnership was created so users could listen to identified songs in their entirety, after Shazam ID’d them. The new feature enables users to take any song from Shazam’s Pulse service, which is a trending chart of popular song IDs, and throw it into an Rdio playlist.

Shazam and SoundHound sqaure off with competing partnerships and usability features. Countering the Shazam/Rdio coupling is SoundHound’s affiliation with Spotify. In the SoundHound app, you can identify a song, and (if you have the function set), have it automatically added to a SoundHound playlist within the Spotify service.

Both these services conveniently hinge between hearing a song offline, and building customized listening online. Shazam’s Pulse section for exploring music was launched last June. Using Pulse with the Rdio linkage brings a new dimension to Shazam, which now can supplement, or even replace, the music-discovery features of Rdio. In this context, Shazam Pulse acts as a chart of crowdsourced musical trends, with an easy way to collect the music found there.

NOTE: Cheryl Lucanegro, VP of Sales for SoundHound, and Anthony Bay, CEO of Rdio, will both speak at RAIN Summit West in Las Vegas on Sunday, April 6th. Go here for a complete agenda, speaker list, and registration.