Man vs machine vs music
Jamie Foxx’s new gameshow Beat Shazam pits music fans’ knowledge against the almighty smartphone app.
Beat Shazam
Season 1 Saturdays (from 23 November) e.tv (*194) 18:00
Is Beat Shazam (2017-now) the US’s answer to South Africa’s beloved gameshow Noot Vir Noot (1991now)? Actually, kind of! Both shows are all about who can identify a song with the fewest notes played. But Beat Shazam’s teams won’t just be competing against each other. After five rounds, the winning team will pit their skills against the Shazam music identification app to see whether they can identify six different tunes faster than Shazam. “Shazam can search and identify millions of songs between two and five seconds,” reveals Beat Shazam host Jamie Foxx, warning that “I keep telling people not to fall for the fool’s gold, which is when you hear a lyric and think it’s the title of the song”.
MY FAMOUS FRIENDS
Oscar-winning actor, musician and comedian Jamie will add all sorts of shenanigans to the game, including piano playing, dress-up moments and saucy hints about guest appearances from his real-life celeb friends. “There is a piano on the set. I say I’ve got a magic piano and sometimes whoever’s (work) I’m playing will come (onto the set). You never know who might stop by,” hints Jamie.
And there will be music categories based on the celebrities’ playlists. “We have Snoop Dogg show up (episode 5, 21 Dec). Everyone has to guess what kind of songs Snoop would like. There’s no genre – just Snoop. Terrence Howard (Lucious Lyon in Empire, 2015-now) – episode 1 was crazy because the first song on his playlist was The Devil Went Down To Georgia,” reveals Jamie. Competitors could be standing around when Mariah Carey walks in, hugs them and introduces Divas round (episode 6, 28 Dec).
KNOW THAT TUNE
All tunes come from the US Billboard Hot 100 charts – from its launch in 1958 to now. As the chart covers every music genre, it helps to study. Jamie reveals,
“Some people have guessed the song in 1.2 or 1.3 seconds because they’ve been studying. And when they play against Shazam, what impressed me was the different people’s backgrounds and what they know. There was this little white lady from South Carolina, 63, who knew the hip-hop categories, all the R&B categories. So I had to learn not to judge a book by its cover. Their music knowledge was vast,” Jamie says.
THE HOST BOAST
Jamie adds that the competitors aren’t the only ones who have to swot. “There are regulations. You can’t mislead the audience. I was on set with this huge book and someone was like, ‘Are those your lines from a movie?’ No. These are my gameshow lines,” says the host. “I had to get that learnt so I could be, ‘Here’s the category, the prize is $1 000, the category is disco, contestants are you ready?’ It’s like a play-by-play.”