Quotes of the Day

If you've been in a British pub in the past year, you may have noticed people holding their mobile phones in the air. No, they're not showing off the latest handsets; they are relieving that most annoying of musical itches: the oh-so-familiar-but-hard-to-identify tune.

Thanks to a mobile-phone service called Shazam, you can identify almost any song you hear — be it in an elevator, at a bar or in a mall. Just dial 2580 (in the U.K.) on your phone, point it toward the source of the music, and within 30 seconds you'll get a text message telling you the name of the song and the artist. If you like, Shazam can also send you a 30-second clip of the song, ring tones and the option to buy the CD online.

To test the service under carefully controlled conditions in an actual pub, TIME exposed a phone to two versions of Burt Bacharach and Hal David's I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself. The result: Shazam had no problem telling Dusty Springfield's 1964 version from the White Stripes' 2003 release. The service uses a pattern-recognition software algorithm that essentially takes a fingerprint of the incoming sound — it looks for and identifies 16 specific characteristics of the music, such as pitch, tone and beat — and matches it instantly to the corresponding song in the database. Shazam has already captured 1.8 million songs, and is growing rapidly.

Launched in the U.K. last summer, the service is now going global. Shazam started up in Germany and Finland earlier this year, and plans to launch in Italy, Austria, China, Japan and the U.S. over the next two months. It's also expanding and diversifying its database to serve an international clientele. So if you happen to hear the latest Cantonese boy band on the radio in a café in Rome, Shazam should be able to name that tune. The service costs 80� per song in the U.K., a small price to pay to resolve a perennial barroom argument.

• HUGH PORTER
• Thanks to a mobile-phone service called Shazam, you can now identify almost any song you hear