Comment by mmaunder

This was the smart approach when Shazam launched in 2008. I would have done exactly the same thing - gone straight to developing a method to turn every song into a hash as computationally efficiently as possible. If you launched this today the default R&D approach would be to train a model which may turn out to be far less efficient and more expensive to host. It feels like the kind of thing a model might be good at, but given that there are a finite number of songs, taking a hash-based approach is probably way more performant.