Chris Barton

Chris Barton is an American entrepreneur, consultant, and technology leader, best known as the co-founder of Shazam, the pioneering digital music recognition app. His career is a testament to perseverance, vision, and the ability to transform a radical idea into a technology used by millions.

He received his education at the University of California, Berkeley, and developed a mindset centered on perseverance in the face of adversity. The concept behind Shazam was based on a futuristic vision: to allow anyone to instantly identify a song with just a tap on their phone. In its early years, the project faced enormous technical obstacles and a constant shortage of funding, which tested the founding team’s resolve.

Despite initial challenges, Shazam grew to become one of the world’s most popular mobile apps, revolutionizing the way people interact with music and setting a precedent for audio recognition technology. The app reached over one billion downloads and was acquired by Apple in 2018. This milestone validated Barton’s original vision of the need for technology that could offer a nearly “magical” user experience when identifying songs.

In addition to his role at Shazam, Barton has worked at other tech giants such as Google and Dropbox, where he continued to innovate in mobile product development and growth strategies. As a speaker, he shares lessons learned about how to tackle the impossible, the importance of choosing the “right obsession” for innovation, and how resilience is the true driving force behind successful startups. His legacy is having created a disruptive technology that transformed global music consumption.