No, not Captain Marvel's Shazam. The app.

So here the situation. As I sit here doing stuff on the computer I have a concert of The Cure playing. Robert Smith writes these songs that have titles that pretty much have no reference to the chorus where you can usually get a clue of the title. So as this concert plays I keep hitting up Shazam for the titles. It has yet to find ONE song from the concert audio. Even the popular stuff like Friday I'm In Love and Just Like Heaven! The song that just played was a great example. I know this song. It's titled One Hundred Years. I gave Shazam 3 tries and it did not find it. I paused the video, went to "the tube" and found the song. Shazam found it in 3 seconds.

So, what is it about the recognition algorhythm that Shazam seems to ONLY recognize studio recordings? Is there perhaps some embedded MP3 encoding involved? I have read 6 articles so far and they all agree that Shazam works by taking an audio sample and matching it up with a database.

Does anybody have any propeller-head level knowledge about how this actually works? It seems like if it samples, it shouldn't matter what the source is of the sample that says "Show me show me show me how you do that trick, the one that makes me scream, she said" as long as it hears those words. And it should spit out "Just Like Heaven."

THIS is the kind of thing I lay awake at night thinking about!

Yeah yeah... I know...