Facebook’s partnership with Spotify alerted the world to the growing popularity of music streaming services. A new global wave is coming to this dynamic space.
French music streaming service, Deezer, has challenged Spotify by announcing that its service will now be open to the world, with a 200-country launch.
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Deezer is a web‐based online music streaming service that gives users instant access to music without the hassle of downloading an app. Users are able to listen to music on their desktops and any smart device.
The company launched four years ago in France, Belgium, and the UK, but now sees the value of extending the brand to a global audience. Like Spotify, it makes its money by streaming music free with advertising, with a paid option for “Premium users”.
Its new global push will see the service roll out in a number of new territories every week from 8 December 2011 starting with Europe and America, before finally making its way to Asia and Africa.
The service claims to be simple, intuitive and responds to fans’ needs to discover, listen to, organise and share the music they enjoy.
Right now Deezer has 1.4-million paying subscribers and has partnered with key industry players such as Facebook, Orange, Belgacom and Everything Everywhere as part of the international roll‐out.
“Since 2007, I have focused my research towards matching a global service with the local expectations of music fans and artists. Our unique product and the partnership with Facebook make my aim a reality. This is a great step forward for Deezer,” says Deezer founder, Daniel Marhely.
Deezer’s partnership with Facebook will allow it to tap into the social network’s 800+ million users who currently “don’t have access to legal music downloads.”
According to the service, its users will represent 75% of the worldwide music market by 2016 and will create a cultural revolution, “offering local music content in every territory”.
Following the core themes of LeWeb — social-local-mobile –, the success of the service’s global launch depends largely on local distribution and a localised adaptation of the service making it unique to each country.
Deezer’s complete music catalogue includes 13-million titles from 2 000 different labels. Users can share tracks and listen live to friends’ music.
“Deezer has built its service with Facebook as a unique tool for artist promotion,” says Deezer CEO Axel Dauchez, who took the stage with CNN’s Becky Anderson at LeWeb to empahaise the need for legal downloads. This service hopes to encourage more legal downloads by allowing artists to share their music, new releases and playlists with a global audience instantly.
“For the past ten years, downloading and piracy have concealed the two real revolutions of digital music: value is in ubiquitous access rather than in the current model of content ownership, and the focus of development in the worldwide music industry is no longer as concentrated on the USA. These revolutions lead to a healthy, growing music market. Deezer is the first company to address this new global evolution, Dauchez adds.
