It just closed a new $150 million fund from tech luminaries, as well as institutional investors. It now has 450 members in the Bay Area and across the globe. Still skeptical of this idea, and thinking about how competitors could easily replicate this technology, they pivoted to answering the question “What if someone could identify the song using the actual sound of the music captured over the mobile phone?' Then, they would not need to know what the radio station was playing at all, because they would actually identify using the sound of the music itself.When South Park Commons (SPC), a community of tens of engineers in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood, came together, it mostly flew under the radar, save for a New York Times profile in 2017, a year after it was formed.įounded by Facebook’s first female engineer, Ruchi Sanghvi, she explained at the time that her ambition with SPC was to create tech’s answer to the Bloomsbury Set or Benjamin Franklin’s Junto club, where people could discuss their respective and shared experiences and hopefully form new ideas along the way.įast forward and SPC - which went on to raise a $55 million venture fund in 2018 to back projects born by community members - says the experiment is working. They would then provide a consumer mobile phone service that would tell users what song was playing on the radio. The software would let RJs keep records of the songs they played. They initially thought of building a software that would be installed at the radio stations. Though they were successful in finding a technically feasible feasible way of identifying music, it came with two severe limitations - they could only identify songs playing on radio stations, and the user experience was poor. The idea that a person should be able to identify music heard at different places was something which few companies were already working upon. Soon, the duo met Philip Inghelbrecht (another co-founder of Shazam). During his internship period, he used to discuss random ideas with Dhiraj Mukherjee (one of the co-founders of Shazam) and verbally agreed on doing business together once they had a concrete idea to work on. In 1999, Barton was in transition to the second year of MBA, and completing his summer internship at Microsoft in London. Barton believed that consumer technology offered two value propositions - build things that are easy to use and open the world of possibilities for the end user.

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