Before the smartphone revolution, we used to listen to a song either on TV or radio and find out that some of the songs being played are unfamiliar. We needed a way to identify songs that you liked over the radio or TV and that is why developers came up with Shazam and TrackID.
TrackID was Sony’s version of Shazam which they installed in their Sony Ericsson phones and later on Sony phones as an app. Well now it is no more as shown in a notice while you fire up the app.
From the app, they issued a notice that TrackID will close down on September 15th. The reason? “All businesses move forward, and sometimes this means that apps are discontinued,” which sounds like corporate talk for cutting costs.
Since TrackID keeps a history of what you have inquired in the app, regular users won’t be able to transfer their history to another app, which can be bad news for people who rely on that history to remember certain songs.
The interesting news however is that Sony decided to recommend Shazam, TrackID’s biggest competitor, to its users for them to identify music. Shazam is still the leader in this niche and is used interchangeably as a verb too while identifying music so that is another win for the company.
This move could also signal that other Sony apps could be discontinued (Xperia Lounge? News Suite?) but we have to wait and see if that will happen. However for TrackID fans, you now have slightly over two months to enjoy the app before its eventual demise.
