Mobile phone owners can now use a service that recognises a snatch of a tune and identifies it from a database of 1.6 million songs.

Shazam users call a number, play 15 seconds of whatever song they want to identify and then wait for a text message with the name of the artist and song.

But the service does not come cheap at 50p per successfully-identified song.

Shazam spotted the Dixie Chicks instantly

BBC News Online used the service to identify the Dixie Chicks' Some Days You Gotta Dance, Christina Aguilera and company with Lady Marmelade, and even Jim Reeves' I Love You Because.

The answers came back with seconds of the song being played down the line.

Users can buy the CDs online and see a permanent record of the songs they have "tagged".

The service is likely to appeal to those who become obsessed with snatches of music they hear on television or the radio.

It covers only commercially-available music and will not recognise many specially-written advert themes.

But it will still help bands who allow their music to be used on adverts to sell more records.

The service follows research published last year from the Philips labs in Holland last year on a process called "hashing".

The cryptographic technique used by computers to check they have safely received a message.

It works by comparing chunks of data and then creating codes unique to that message.

Philips announced plans at the time to build its own service with a database of just 100,000 songs.