
It took a while after his presentation at SXSW, but one of industry analyst Mark Mulligan’s slides comparing Spotify and Deezer is making some ripples this week. Digital Music News has published the slide and questioned why Deezer appears to have so many “zombie accounts” – inactive users. According to Mulligan’s calculations, 20m of its 26m total users in January were inactive, with 3m active free users and 3m paying users. Spotify, by contrast, had 4m inactive users, 14m active free and 6m paying users according to Mulligan. This is something Music Ally dug into in early February based on figures from France, where industry body SNEP claimed 500k people were paying for streaming music there (Bulletin, 5-Feb-13), despite the fact that the majority of Deezer’s 3m subscribers were thought to be in France. Then, as now, the key question was around how many people who had Deezer bundled with an Orange mobile tariff weren’t using the service.