Business News Deals Digital

Deezer confirms €100 million in new finance

By | Published on Thursday 21 January 2016

Deezer

Bad news all round if you had Deezer in the “next streaming service to go kaput” sweepstake. I bet you thought you were onto a real winner, didn’t you? What with Rdio safely out of the way and that messy “hey everybody, we’re IPOing, oh, actually, we’re not IPOing” debacle that occurred last year.

But no, the streaming firm that sits somewhere between Apple Music and Napster in the ‘most paying users’ chart, depending on how you do the maths, announced yesterday that it had just secured another €100 million in funding. Which makes you wonder why it ever bothered with the embarrassingly abandoned IPO in the first place.

The new financing round is led by existing investor Access Industries, aka the owner of Warner Music, which has a number of digital dabblings outside the Warner business, with Deezer and Songkick the most notable. One of the streaming service’s earliest backers, Orange, has also participating in this new round of investment.

The money will be used to further grow Deezer’s user base in the 180+ countries it now operates in, a task made all the harder by Apple’s move into streaming last year of course. Some of the cash will also be used to hone the Deezer product, presumably in a bid to have a few more USPs over Apple Music and the market leading Spotify to help with that consumer acquisition.

For now Deezer is returning to one of the earliest methods of product differentiation in the streaming music space: “our catalogue is bigger than their catalogue”. The service says it now has over 40 million tracks in its system, which constitutes “the largest music catalogue available globally”. Which is possibly true, if you ignore SoundCloud and my mate Tim’s hard drive. Torrent Tim we call him.

So, that’s all exciting, isn’t it? And it’s all still to play for in this here streaming music market, you must always remember that. Or at least, Deezer CEO Hans-Holger Albrecht would like you to remember that fact. “We’re in the early stages of the music streaming market”, he said yesterday. “And it’s quickly becoming the primary distribution channel for music”.

As for all that new money? “The additional funding will allow Deezer to consolidate our position as a leading global, independent audio streaming service and expand our offering to music lovers around the world”. Good times.



READ MORE ABOUT: |