WhoSampled has long been one of our favourite apps and websites for going down the rabbit-hole of music-sampling: tracing sounds back from current-day tracks to the original sources. Now its app has a new feature that puts it into Shazam territory – but with a paid model.

“For an annual in-app subscription of just $9.99 per year (or your currency equivalent), users can add unlimited music recognition to the app and start digging deeper into the music they hear around them every day,” explained the company in a blog post.

“The app can be used to quickly identify any song, not just ones present in the WhoSampled database. When a song is present in the WhoSampled database, the app will immediately reveal all its sample, cover and remix connections.”

A niche? Perhaps, but WhoSampled is one of the relatively-few music startups that has managed to build a community – see also Discogs – that feels strongly enough about the service that offering a subscription isn’t a crazy idea.

How many people will take up the idea is another question: the coming weeks and months will show whether music recognition allied with a deep samples database is something that people will pay for.