Yes, but there is an on/off switch which presumably stops this activity. The energy impact in mavericks while "listening" is hovering around 2 on my machine. For comparison, Safari is at 8.

The difference is Safari is doing something immensily useful, whereas Shazam is a gimmick.

That and, constant audio surveillance (even with "an option to turn it off")? No thanks...

My first thought as well. This could be used as constant surveillance tool if Shazam chose/was forced to shared the uploaded data with GCHQ/NSA </paranoid-theory>

Of course. How else are Shazam going to make money? They need to listen to you, process the audio using a natural language processing procedure, and then target advertising at you.

Can confirm that they're pursuing this business model: particularly to see what TV ads you're being exposed to. Coverage from existing sources is panel based with low sample sizes that do not extend well into more targeted research.

I can't say for sure but from reading the description is sounds like it and I'm not downloading it for the reason. They need to make it clear.

The same statement can be said about the mobile apps. Also, Shazam is now baked into Siri.

AFAIK, the mobile apps only listen to the microphone when the app is open, not in the background

They can listen in the background and Shazam will do this if you enable Automatic mode, though the iOS status bar turns red while the microphone is being accessed by a backgrounded app.

This is incorrect. They added background listening months ago.

I'm glad they haven't added this creepy feature to Android yet