San Francisco, Dec 12 (IANS): In keeping with its plan to expand the company's music business, Apple confirmed that it is acquiring popular music recognition app Shazam beating Snapchat and Spotify.

It has come to an agreement with the London-based service late on Monday, Tech Crunch reported.

"We are thrilled that Shazam and its talented team will be joining Apple. Since the launch of the App Store, Shazam has consistently ranked as one of the most popular apps for iOS," Apple was quoted as saying.

"Apple Music and Shazam are a natural fit, sharing a passion for music discovery and delivering great music experiences to our users.

"We have exciting plans in store, and we look forward to combining with Shazam upon approval of today's agreement," the iPhone maker added.

Last week it was reported that Apple struck a deal with Shazam for a likely sum of nearly $400 million.

The report also said that Apple has been working on the deal for about five months and came after Shazam had been in talks with others, including Snapchat and Spotify.

Built by Shazam Entertainment Ltd, a British app development company, Shazam is used by hundreds of millions of people each month to instantly identify music that's playing and see what others are discovering.

Basically, Shazam recognises music. Users use its app to capture a clip of music that is playing. The clip is then matched with the large database to return the best result.

Shazam, that reports over one billion downloads, also lets users identify any, TV show, film or advert in a jiffy, by listening to an audio clip or a visual fragment.

Meanwhile, Shazam said: "We are excited to announce that Shazam has entered into an agreement to become part of Apple.

"Shazam is one of the highest rated apps in the world and loved by hundreds of millions of users and we can't imagine a better home for Shazam to enable us to continue innovating and delivering magic for our users."

Some backstory about how the deal got done between the two:

Launched in 1999 as an SMS code service, Shazam reportedly made $54 million in revenues in the fiscal year 2016.

Apple has made some other acquisition as well, like buying Beats for $3 billion in 2014 which became the basis for Apple Music.