Music identification platform Shazam has seen its valuation come into question, after it revealed by The Telegraph that the company only made £40.3m last year.

The company currently holds a billion-dollar valuation but isn’t turning over the revenues expected from a business with that kind of valuation. Despite this, it did increase sales by around 14 per cent from £35.2m the year prior.

Shazam, which searches for and identifies songs by listening to a segment of the music, tells people what song they are hearing – whether it be through a radio, a TV commercial, or the song being played in public.

It makes its revenues through a combination of referral fees from music download services, like iTunes, adverts and a paid ad-free version. The problem with the referral fee portion of this, of course, is the popularity of music streaming services meaning that people don’t tend to purchase individual pieces of music or albums anymore.

It is because of this why Shazam has had to change its approach and now makes the majority of its money from TV and print ads. These ads enable people to ‘Shazam’ either the sound from a TV ad or the image from print to be transported to the brand’s promotional page.