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On August 3, 2009, VentureBeat reported that Midomi, a $4.99 iPhone app from Silicon Valley company Melodis, had reached No. 1 among paid Music apps on the iPhone. Midomi could identify a recording playing nearby, but its more distinctive feature let people search by singing or humming a remembered melody. The report also said Melodis was preparing to announce $4 million in new funding.
What happened on August 3, 2009?
VentureBeat said Midomi had become the iPhone’s No. 1 paid Music application. That was a ranking reported at a particular historical moment—not a claim about Midomi’s position today, all iPhone apps, or every App Store category. The app’s reported price was $4.99. VentureBeat’s report also said Melodis would announce a $4 million funding round the next day, led by Walden Venture Capital’s Larry Marcus.
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The same report said Melodis had previously raised $12 million from TransLink Capital, JAIC America, and Global Catalyst Partners. It described several million Midomi downloads, without an exact total, and said the company had become profitable earlier that year. Those were company-reported business indicators; they do not establish revenue, retention, margins, or the reasons customers bought the app.
How did Midomi search for music?
Recognizing a recording
Users could hold the phone near a speaker or other audio source so the app could identify music already playing. This is the familiar song-recognition problem: compare audio captured by a microphone with a catalog of recordings.
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Searching by singing or humming
Midomi also let users sing or hum a tune into the phone. That addressed a different predicament: remembering a melody but not having the recording, lyrics, artist, or title to search. Melodis described the feature as “sing to search” in its account of the technology used by Japan’s au LISMO Music Search service. The KDDI/Melodis announcement describes that integration.
Matching a person’s rendition is a harder task than recognizing a clean recording. A singer can change pitch, timing, pronunciation, and vocal quality; two songs can also share similar melodic shapes. The sources establish that Midomi offered singing and humming search, but do not provide a verified accuracy rate or full technical specification. In practical terms, a match could depend on how clearly the melody was sung and whether the song was represented in the searchable catalog.
How did Midomi compare with Shazam?
The comparison is historical: VentureBeat described the products as they stood in 2009, not their present-day feature sets. It characterized Shazam as a popular free app focused on hearing a song playing from a radio, speaker, or another source. Midomi also recognized external audio, while adding the option to provide the tune by humming or singing.
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VentureBeat reported that Midomi returned results in about five seconds and described it as roughly three times faster than Shazam in the comparison it presented. The article said Shazam recorded for approximately 12–15 seconds and then took a few more seconds to return results. These are reported observations, not a controlled laboratory benchmark, and should not be treated as general performance measurements.
Why would someone pay for Midomi?
A plausible appeal was the ability to search from memory rather than wait for a song to play nearby. For someone with a persistent “earworm,” humming could be a useful input when text search was impossible. The app was therefore selling a distinct music-discovery workflow, not just another way to capture audio.
Its No. 1 paid Music ranking suggests that enough people bought the app to reach that position in the chart VentureBeat cited. It does not prove that humming was the reason for those purchases: the available reporting contains no user survey or sales breakdown. The $4.99 price was the reported 2009 price, not a current offer.
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Melodis was building a broader sound-search business
Midomi was one expression of Melodis’ effort to make sound searchable across devices and services. VentureBeat described the company as developing its own recognition technology. Earlier service milestones included the launch of midomi.com on January 26, 2007, and midomi.co.jp on August 10, 2007, according to a Sony Music/LabelGate historical description.
KDDI and LISMO in Japan
Melodis supplied technology for the “sing to search” feature in KDDI’s au LISMO Music Search. ITmedia reported that the Japanese service could return up to 10 matching songs. ITmedia’s contemporary account describes the result list, while the company announcement covers the integration. The partnership showed how melody search could be incorporated into a carrier music service rather than offered only as a standalone phone app.
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Melodis also announced a partnership to embed Midomi music-identification capabilities in certain Samsung Windows Mobile phones. The announcement described integration on high-performance handsets. The Samsung partnership announcement provides those details. VentureBeat additionally reported that Samsung paid a royalty to preload the app on some phones.
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These distribution arrangements connected recognition with music stores and carrier services, creating a route from “what is this song?” to a purchase. Availability and purchase options could vary by device, platform, and country; the reported partnerships should not be read as universal distribution.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why the music database mattered
Recognition software can only match against music it can search. In January 2009, Melodis announced a partnership with Japanese karaoke company Xing, operator of the JOYSOUND brand, to add about 100,000 karaoke-song MIDI records to Midomi’s database. The agreement planned roughly 1,000 additional records per month. The JOYSOUND announcement documents those figures.
This catalog work was part of the product, not an incidental detail: a capable recognition method still needs suitable song data and coverage. A large database does not by itself establish recognition accuracy, and the announced records do not tell us the service’s total catalog size.
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What the ranking and funding do—and do not—show
- It was a chart snapshot: No. 1 referred to the paid Music category ranking reported by VentureBeat on August 3, 2009.
- It was not an overall market verdict: The ranking does not establish that Midomi was the most-used music app, more popular than free apps, the most accurate service, or the leading music-recognition company.
- Funding was not proof of lasting success: The $4 million round, prior financing, reported downloads, and company-reported profitability were meaningful business signals, but do not reveal long-term commercial performance.
- One investor remained unnamed: VentureBeat said an unnamed major non-U.S. device manufacturer participated in the new round. The report does not establish its identity, so it should not be guessed.
A separate contemporary Opus Research report also covered the $4 million financing and identified Midomi as Melodis’ mobile music-identification app.
Why Midomi’s idea still makes a useful case study
Midomi’s significance lies in the input it made available: a person could provide a melody when the original recording and searchable words were absent. The iPhone ranking made that idea visible as a paid consumer app, while the KDDI, Samsung, and JOYSOUND arrangements illustrated the technology, catalog, and distribution work behind it.
The story is a useful early-App-Store example, not evidence of a direct line to any particular current service. The cited 2009 coverage does not establish Midomi’s current availability, a successor product, or corporate continuity with modern music-recognition apps.
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