Happy Saturday Hollywood tech nerds!

Upcoming in this post:

🎶 How Shazam works

🕸 The untold story of the Spiderman suit heist

🍿 Kernels: 3 links worth making popcorn for

How does Shazam work???

23,000+ songs are Shazamed every minute.

But how the hell does it work? This month, a breakdown finally went live on how Shazam works. It’s absolutely fascinating.

I’ll give you the high-level stuff, no computer science PhD necessary:

When Shazam first started, there was no existing database of music they could use. “We literally hired about 30 18-year-olds to work 8 hours/day in 3 8-hour shifts (24 hours per day) putting CDs into computers that ran custom software that we built from the ground up,” explained Julius Smith, an early consultant at Shazam. “We had 100,000 CDs which is about 1.7 million songs.” These 18-year-olds had to type the name of every song, album title, and artist as they built the database.

From there, Shazam creates a unique audio fingerprint — a spectrogram — of what you’re hearing and then searches its database for a matching fingerprint. But to look through the database and compare very fast, they simplify a song’s data to the peaks of the frequency because those peaks are the main things the brain processes. So Shazam takes a spectrogram and puts it into a scatter plot of peaks — which are all unique for ever song.

Then they look for matches in the plots. If there are enough matches aligned over a period of time, Shazam can name the tune.

After 2 years of development, Shazam launched in 2002!! Wow, I always thought it launched after the iPhone, but it was before. Initially Shazam was actually a service that people in the UK could access by dialing 2580 and letting the microphone record whatever audio the phone was picking up. Then the user would get a text with whatever the song was. 🤯

It didn’t really hit a hockey stick level of growth until the app store launched in 2008. Even then, Shazam wasn’t profitable until 2016! But they would eventually be bought out by Apple in 2018.

And that’s how Shazam works! I am mindblown right now.

The Story of the Spider-Man Suit Heist

I went down an absolutely wild rabbithole this week.

Did you know that during the filming of Spiderman 1 with Toby Maquire, 4 out of the 30 Spiderman suits were stolen?

No big deal, right, it’s just some red spandex. Nope, each suit was custom-made with muscles, webbing, and Oakley lenses. They were valued at $50,000 per suit and Columbia Pictures was pissed off.

They put out a $25,000 reward for the suits.

Meanwhile, Spiderman hit the box office and did $100M the opening weekend. The thief thought he was scott-clear, who cares about a couple Spiderman suits when they made $100M in a weekend?

Well, Columbia Pictures had a stroke of luck the next year.

The wife of Columbia Pictures security guard Jeffrey Glenn Gustafson was divorcing him—and during the proceedings, she saw an opportunity to get a nice $25,000 reward check so she told her lawyers and the police about how her ex-husband stole the Spidey suits.

The police raided Gustafson’s home as well as his partner’s out in NYC. They found 3 out of the 4 Spidey suits PLUS a Batman suit from Batman Forever back in 1995 with Val Kilmer. (The 4th suit had already been sold to a collector in Japan, which they’d proceed to get back).

Gustafson was sentenced to 9 months in jail and had to pay back $93,000 in restitution. And thus the Hollywood Whodunnit was solved and concluded.

Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)

Here’s a round-up of cool links about Hollywood and technology:

Was Christopher Nolan’s Tenet bad orrr a misunderstood masterpiece? You decide (link)

Learn why we use green screens and blue screens. Plus why each is used in different cases. (link)

Which movie scenes used stunt doubles? Check out this cool video introducing you to the stunt doubles behind famous actors. (link)