Walking Dead, Made in Chelsea ‘key to music discovery’

Television is becoming the key driver in digital music discovery, according to new stats from song recognition firm Shazam.

The company, which has been moving further into television apps in the past few years, said that TV advertising and TV programming were the top drivers in music discovery.

Shazam allows users to identify tracks by ‘listening’ to and ‘tagging’ them using mobiles or tablets and then to download them on to their devices.

In the UK, AMC cable series The Walking Dead drove 43,000 tags for singer songwriter Ben Howard’s ‘Oats in the Water’ and Ben Nichols’s ‘The Pale Light in the West’.

E4 scripted reality series Made in Chelsea drove 26,000 ‘Shazams’ to tracks from Asgeir and Woman’s Hour. A number of TV adverts also lead to large spikes, Shazam revealed in end-2013 review.