I tried the Shazam app for ChatGPT – and it’s a surprisingly natural fit for the chatbot

OpenAI has invited Apple Music to join its library of third-party apps for ChatGPT, with a feature that could shape how you find and organize music, even if you can't stream full songs through the AI chatbot.

Apple’s Shazam app has spent more than two decades identifying songs playing around you. Now that familiar trick has become a third-party app inside ChatGPT, allowing the AI chatbot to tell you the name of any track that's playing without needing to open a separate app.

Shazam joins the existing Apple Music and Spotify ChatGPT apps, linking the AI to your listening choices. The combination means Shazam can recognize the song you’re hearing and immediately turn it into a conversation about music..

You’ll need to connect Shazam before you can use it in ChatGPT. To do this, open Apps in the left-hand menu, search for Shazam, and click Connect to give it permission to link to the chatbot.

Once connected, you can either type the plus (+) icon in the ChatGPT prompt bar and select Shazam, or start a prompt with @Shazam and ask what song is playing.

Shazam ChatGPT

The most obvious test for Shazam is the situation that made the app famous. A song is playing somewhere nearby, and you want to know what it is. So I clicked on the app in ChatGPT and asked, "What song is this?" Then I hit shuffle on my phone. A few seconds later, the result appeared.

It's similar to what you’d see in the standalone Shazam app: album artwork, the track title, the artist name, and a preview button that plays a short clip of the song. All Star by Smash Mouth was correct — a song that, at this point, the internet could probably identify in its sleep.

In terms of accuracy and speed, the experience felt identical to traditional Shazam. I could even save the song to my Shazam library if I wished.

Instead of closing the app after learning the song’s name, I stayed inside the conversation and asked ChatGPT to recommend similar music. The chatbot quickly produced a handful of tracks with a similar sound and mood. Identifying the song becomes the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of the interaction.

Shazam inside ChatGPT does not reinvent music recognition. The core technology remains exactly the same, and longtime Shazam users will find the experience instantly familiar. What it changes is the context.

Identifying a song is no longer an isolated action that ends once you know the title. Inside ChatGPT, that moment becomes part of a broader conversation about music. The identified track can immediately lead to recommendations, playlists, or additions to a streaming library.

Combined with the existing Apple Music and Spotify integrations, the Shazam app turns ChatGPT into a kind of conversational control center for music discovery.

It's notable that while Spotify's ChatGPT app offers to build playlists and help explore genres, Shazam operates at the opposite end of the discovery process. It begins with a real-world moment of music and a concrete discovery. In that sense, Shazam is reactive, while Spotify and Apple Music are exploratory. ChatGPT is the conversational musical bridge linking them.

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