I'm just imagining the founders as every stoned business school student at the time like "Bro, wouldn't it be cool if there was an app where you just press a button and it tells you what song is playing" and they actually managed to find the guy capable of building it.
To this day, Shazam still has that aesthetic of "press big button, do magic".
Actually, the first version in 2002 worked by listening to a phone call. There were no apps really at the time, at least not in the iPhone sense (because it didn’t exist).
Maybe in a parallel dimension
where internet took a few more decades to be created we call a number to listen to our Twitter feed narrated by some robotic voice, and we get a bulletin/form every week where we write down who we want to follow or unfollow, and of course a field where to write our own tweets!
When I first used Twitter it wasn’t that far off. You could text your tweet to 40404 and it would post it. If I recall correctly it would also send you a text for any @‘s too
To this day, Shazam still has that aesthetic of "press big button, do magic".