Reports have emerged today which claim that popular music identifying app Shazam has repeatedly failed to identify music by US EDM act Skrillex as actual music.
Claims have emerged from a whopping tens of people who, hearing some of Skrillex’s music playing in a shop or on a lucrative advertisement, say they attempted to use the software to identify the name of the music but that each and every time they tried to do this they were met with the error message “We couldn’t find a match. Shazam cannot identify singing or humming”.
“At first, when I tried to identify a Skrillex track – you know the one that sounds like a kind of nu-metal/dubstep bastard hybrid – and Shazam just said it couldn’t identify it, I thought it was just a glitch on my phone or a memory problem,” claimed complainant Andrew Jerome. “But even after I closed the porn I had open and put the phone right at the speaker, it still failed to correctly identify the sound as music.”
Mr. Jerome claims that, perturbed by Shazam’s behaviour, he went home and tried several other Skrillex tracks, all of which we are assured are purportedly music, but Shazam failed to identify any of them.
“Eventually,” he continued, “it even stopped giving the usual error message and instead started popping up a text which simply read the words – ‘not music’, as if not only could it not identify what it was hearing as music, but that it had an opinion on it. And that opinion was sure that the sounds being played were not music.”
“I’m not saying Shazam has taste but if it did, it’s got quite a discerning ear,” he added,
Andrew claims that several of his friends tried using Shazam on their phones but that all received similar feedback with one claiming that the app eventually started suggesting possible sounds for what it was hearing suggesting it might be “the repetitive squeaks of a robot crying after being sexually assaulted by a larger, more ruthless robot” or “a former emo fan attempting to combine the musical tropes of that genre to dance music via dubstep, and failing to make anything that sounds halfway decent”.
A spokesperson for Shazam briefly addressed the reports claiming that they had not been aware that there was an issue with the app recognising Skrillex’s output as music and that they will work immediately to rectify the situation.
“This is news to us,” said the Shazam spokesperson, “as far as we know the stuff that Skrillex produces is definitely music – he’s won Grammys and surely someone who has been awarded with a Grammy wouldn’t make music so bad that a machine programmed to identify music wouldn’t be able to recognise it.”
