If nobody can Shazam it, why is it in the campaign?
You’re half watching something on the sofa. An ad comes on, and four seconds in a bassline grabs you. Phone out, Shazam open, nothing. The ad ends. You’ll never think about it again.
That’s a campaign that paid for music, got the reaction every brand dreams of, and handed the payoff to nobody.
This isn’t a niche habit
Shazam passed one billion identifications a month in 2021, and has since been reported at over 300 million monthly active users. Those numbers aren’t from a gimmick that faded out.
In a Magid study for Shazam, 55% of people who tagged an ad did so to bookmark it and come back later, and 68% of taggers went on to engage further with the brand, against 23% of non-taggers. The sample was small, around 440 people per group. The behaviour is the point. Curious people act on it. Shazam Tagging Triples Consumer Engagement with TV Ads +2
What it looks like when it works
Start with the biggest ad on the UK calendar. John Lewis built its 2025 Christmas campaign around one song, Alison Limerick’s “Where Love Lives”, with a new version by Labrinth. The Labrinth recording was released on streaming services on 4 November 2025, the day the ad launched, and a vinyl pressing went on sale at John Lewis. The song’s co-writer told PRS for Music it was enjoying a significant renaissance thanks to the placement. Nobody had to hunt for it.
The same pattern shows up all over 2025. Chartmetric reported that Good Neighbours’ “Home”, running in Tesco’s campaign since February, picked up a further 93 million streams that year. Jess Glynne’s “Hold My Hand”, a Jet2 ad song from 2015, became both a meme and TikTok’s Song of the Summer, and her Spotify monthly listeners rose by 1.7 million in a week, 523.3% above her average weekly growth.
Ninja Tune says the group Fcukers have had three Apple Keynote syncs and that each one produced strong spikes in Shazams in the days that followed. It also isn’t limited to adverts. After Emei’s “Scatterbrain” appeared in Amazon’s Off Campus series, Shazam activity rose from around zero to more than 10,000 daily Shazams within weeks, and daily streams were up 77%.
Every one of those worked because the audience could find the song.
And the cost of when it doesn’t…
Not every campaign wants a findable song, and that’s a legitimate call. Bespoke tracks written around a brief can be a perfect creative fit. The cost is that if the song never reaches streaming services, the audience who fall for it have nowhere to follow it. A great hook and a real artist can generate a lot of goodwill in 30 seconds, and it’s worth deciding on purpose whether to capture it.
Brands already know music works
84% of the ads Kantar tests globally use music. Kantar also found well-known music gives an 11-point average lift in ad distinctiveness, and that music is around 4% of a typical production budget.
So brands spend a small slice of the budget on the element that makes people reach for their phones, then sometimes give those people nowhere to go.
Why tracks go dark
Shazam matches audio against fingerprints of recordings in its database. In practice, that means tracks that have been distributed to streaming services. If the track is unreleased, library music, a soundalike, or edited so hard the fingerprint breaks, you get a blank screen.
Sometimes that’s a deliberate creative call, and fine. A lot of the time it’s a cost decision, or nobody checked. I’d argue that’s the real scandal.
What the artist loses
A major campaign puts a track in front of millions of people who’d never have found it. For an independent artist it can be the best marketing they’ll get, and the licence fee is only part of it. If the audience can’t trace the track, the artist gets paid once and gets none of the follow-on: no new listeners, no streams, no ticket sales. Every artist in the examples above got more than a cheque out of it.
What the brand loses
A track people can find lives on in playlists, search and conversation, and carries the brand with it. An unfindable one disappears when the media spend does. Kantar also cautions that music should be checked for wide prior use to avoid brand misattribution [13], and discoverability is the other half of that problem. kantar
The fix is boring
None of this is expensive.
Test the actual final edit in Shazam before launch, not just the original release.
If it’s a released track, check the recording is live on streaming services and the metadata is right.
If it’s bespoke or unreleased, credit the artist in the caption and link to the music.
Put discoverability in the brief, next to clearance.
Where Light On comes in
Example: our sync licensing of Groovejet by Spiller to Dolce & Gabbana’s Violet campaign.
Light On is a music strategy, sync licensing and brand partnerships consultancy, and we think the best music in advertising works when both sides come out ahead. The brand gets the emotion and credibility of the track, and the artist gets paid properly and heard by people who’d never have found them. So when we help a brand choose music, we look at what it can do for the brand, the artist and the audience, and we ask the question most briefs skip: when someone hears this and wants to know what it is, where do they go?
Working on a campaign where music is a key element of the strategy? Let’s chat at enquiries@lightonmedia.com