Business News Digital

Deezer not bothered which Americans sign up now

By | Published on Wednesday 20 July 2016

Deezer

Deezer is available in the US, everyone. Alright, yes, Deezer Elite was there already, but come on. And, yes, the streaming firm had already made its standard option available through a partnership with Cricket Wireless, in part facilitated by its purchase of Muve Music last year. However, the thing to note here is that Deezer has never been available to everyone in the US before. So, basically, I got the words in the first sentence there a bit jumbled up. I’ll try again. Deezer is available [to] everyone in the US. Happy now?

Back in the good old days when every statement that Deezer made seemed like a parody (2011), the company claimed that it had no intention of launching in the States at all, ever. In fact, it said that it had decided to stay out of the US and Japan because together they “only represent 25% of global music consumption”.

Now it seems that a portion of that quarter of all the world’s music listeners is of interest, so yesterday Deezer switched on its service Stateside. The other reasons cited for not hitting the US back in 2011 were “market saturation and low growth forecasts”. Although the marketplace is perhaps now a little less crowded, certain rivals that have been happily streaming Stateside over the last five years have seen significant growth, in some cases putting them somewhat ahead of Deezer in terms of paying users.

Though Deezer does seem to be launching in the US without a loss-leading freemium level, which is possibly easier to do now that no-freemium-thanks Apple Music and Tidal are key competitors, rather than just Spotify.

Whatever, Deezer’s Global CEO Dr Hans-Holger Albrecht shouted yesterday: “We are THRILLED to make Deezer available to all music fans in the US, at a time when the company is growing stronger and developing new technologies that enable us to deliver a much more personalised experience. We’ve already received an overwhelmingly positive response since offering Deezer via our partners Sonos, Bose and Cricket, and now look forward to making our service available to everyone”.

I just noticed that Deezer is also claiming to have “the world’s biggest music library” now, so maybe it’s still got a bit of that outlandish spirit of yesteryear in it. Maybe that dream of launching in more countries than actually exist is still alive.



READ MORE ABOUT: