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Deezer’s newly appointed CEO Hans-Holger Albrecht isn’t worried about Apple’s imminent arrival into the streaming market, and killing freemium isn’t on his agenda, at least not yet.
There’s no point doing away with “something that’s working” Albrecht explained during an interview at Midem in Cannes today, while admitting there’s “no doubt” that streaming is cannibalising downloads.
In December 2014, Deezer announced the replacement for its former CEO Axel Dauchez. From the start of February 2015, the streaming service’s new boss would be Dr. Hans-Holger Albrecht, previously boss of telecoms and media group Millicom.
Albrecht didn’t give any press interviews at the time of his appointment, preferring to spend his first three months getting to grips with the company, and mulling its strategy to compete with Spotify, Apple, YouTube and other streaming rivals.
Ahead of his keynote speech at the Midem conference in June, though, Albrecht held a series of interviews in London this week, including with Music Ally. Starting with what he sees as the strengths and weaknesses of the company.
“Playlists are key. Decision fatigue is a big problem for consumers: when you’re faced with a catalogue of 35m tracks, what are you going to listen to?” said Spintune CEO Brittney Bean, as she introduced this afternoon’s playlist-focused session at The Great Escape conference. “They’re overwhelmed with the choice.”
She noted that playlists are becoming an important tool for streaming users to navigate through those catalogues – whether their own playlists of favourite songs, or the themed collections created by the streaming services, labels and other curators.
She noted that one thing that gets left out: what happens if and when the services die or are acquired. “There is a question of who owns the data? Who owns the playlist?” said Bean, citing the terms and conditions of Spotify and Rdio as examples.
There’s a lot of debate online today spurred by a report showing streaming music service Tidal’s app has plummeted down Apple’s US App Store charts over the past fortnight – and the comparison of that ranking with Spotify and Pandora.
The main line on this has been “Tidal is dead already” or at least doomed. But we think there’s something much more interesting to take away: Pandora (in the US) and Spotify (there and in other countries) are doing well. Very well. In fact, in several major western markets, Spotify is making more money than some of the most lucrative mobile games, which have traditionally hogged the App Store revenues.
Tonight is Music Ally’s Future Music Marketing event in London, where we’ve gathered a panel of opinionated experts to give their views on whether a selection of technologies are hits or hype – or a bit of both – for helping musicians reach fans.
The third topic up for discussion was streaming services: what the likes of Spotify, Deezer, Beats and Tidal have to offer artists and labels. There was an introductory presentation by Music Ally’s own training manager Nikoo Sadr, followed by the panel debate.
Our panellists for the night: Sammy Andrews, head of digital, Cooking Vinyl; Dino Burbidge, director of innovation and technology, WCRS; Niamh O’Reilly, digital director, Sony Music; Katie Ray, digital marketing consultant, Modest Management; and Jessica Roe, CEO, Level Theory. The moderator was Music Ally’s Eamonn Forde.
In 2010, Information Is Beautiful published an infographic showing the estimated royalties earned by musicians from sales and streams of their work, from the various digital services.
Now it’s updated the image for 2015, with some new services (hello, Beats Music and Tidal) and some new metrics too. We’ve reproduced it with Information Is Beautiful’s permission on the right: click on the image to see it at full size – you might need to click again in your browser to view it at 100%.
So what does this 2015 “remix” (as they’re dubbing it) tell us? The company has a neat summary on its blog:
“Your objective is to grow your user base, to tell a story such that you can IPO or you can sell, and you can exit, and you can put money back in the pockets of your investors. You are not the ones who are investing in developing talent. You are not the ones who are signing artists. And our artists and investment – our creative community – is contracting daily, as a result of the free services that are out there and giving music away, with the objective of you achieving some sort of exit at the end.”
Conference panel sessions are often anodyne affairs nowadays, with speakers eager to agree with one another and spout platitudes. So hats off to whoever bucked that trend by putting Ministry of Sound CEO Lohan Presencer on a Mobile World Congress panel with representatives of two streaming music services: Rdio’s global head of business development Chris Burton and Deezer’s VP of Europe Gerrit Schumann.
Led Zeppelin signed an exclusive streaming deal for their back catalogue with Spotify in December 2013, leaving not a whole lotta love (sorry) for rival streaming services. That relationship has since taken in the latest set of Led Zep remasters, and a tribute to ‘Led Zeppelin IV’ as part of Spotify’s Landmark series.
But yesterday, the band’s catalogue spread its wings and flew to other services: Deezer, Tidal and Rdio are among those to have announced that they have it. Deezer Elite and Tidal, obviously, have it at HD quality, with Led Zeppelin likely to figure prominently in both services’ efforts to court an audiophile audience. But it’s a good time to consider just how popular this kind of band are for a general streaming audience.
French magazine Haut Parleur is the latest publication to take a good look at Deezer’s hard bundles, raising some concerns over the company’s current bundle-heavy business model, but also some […]
Our cover feature looks at the new ways in which lyrics are being used online – from the steady rise of Genius (formerly Rap Genius) and its new goal of annotating the entire web to Deezer’s partnership with LyricFind to offer scrolling and synchronised lyrics to users as a means of standing out in a packed marketplace. It’s been a long journey but some feel innovation is still being shackled here as lyrics remain hugely complex to license
Streaming music service Deezer has acquired Muve Music, the digital music service owned by US mobile operator Cricket Wireless.
Current Muve Music subscribers will be moved over to a free trial of “Deezer from Cricket” for up to four months, at which point they’ll have to decide whether to start paying $6 a month for the streaming music service. Their existing libraries and playlists will transfer across.
That’s a change from Muve Music, which was hard-bundled into Cricket Wireless’ smartphone tariffs: people paid at least $45 a month for mobile plans that included voice calls, texts, data and a subscription to download songs from Muve’s catalogue.
Streaming services like Spotify and Deezer are mustard-keen to sign partnership deals with hi-fi makers, but the latter companies may have their own streaming ambitions too. Latest in that group […]
