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Morning Report:聽Apple acquires Shazam in a likely attempt to boost Apple Music.聽

Apple recently 聽its acquisition of the music and ad identifying app, , at a cost of $400 million. The music discovery company was previously valued at after raising $30 million during its last funding round, led by , in February.

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Shazam reportedly achieved profitability last year, which its to an increased focus on advertising and marketing rather than music sales.

In December 2016, Shazam an integration with Snapchat, allowing its users to access, download, and share music featured in snaps and stories. Snapchat expressed interest in acquiring the app itself following the apparent success of the integration.

According to , however, Snap鈥檚 troubled public offering in March contributed to the fallout of that conversation.

Apple, valued at about , has acquired 聽in 2017 alone. With this acquisition, the company could be looking to bolstering Apple Music, its own music streaming service, which competes with Spotify. Shazam brings in around 1 million referrals a month for both Spotify and Apple Music. that Apple will focus on further integrating Shazam with Siri by fine tuning its use of AI and visual and audio recognition, making Siri more competitive with its Amazon and Google counterparts.

From The聽:

• Apple confirmed that it has acquired the popular music recognition service聽, in a deal reportedly valued around $400 million. Founded in 2000, London-based Shazam has attracted hundreds of millions of users and raised over $140 million in venture funding.

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• U.S. securities regulators sent a cease-and-desist order to issuers of an initial coin offering (ICO), detailing why it fell afoul the rules, SA国际传媒 News reports. The offering in question, Munchee鈥檚 launch of the 鈥淢UN鈥� token, reportedly refunded the $15 million it raised.

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