Deezer introduces a raft of new features and announces Samsung partnership

Deezer introduces a raft of new features and announces Samsung partnership

Deezer has announced three major platform developments today that are geared towards increasing the accessibility of the platform and streamlining the consumer experience, as well as a major deal with Samsung.

First of all the company is introducing two new features. The first - Flow - free from any time restrictions and available to all Deezer users (free and premium) - creates a personalised radio station based on both users' streams on Deezer and on their own music library, with up to six skips per hour permitted.

The second - Playlist Radio - is going to be available only to free users and will be ad-supported. It will include tracks from users’ favourite playlists combined with tracks recommended from Deezer’s editorial team (and take note here, no mention of an algorithm but of “alive” editors). Premium users will not be short-changed as a similar feature will be present for them called "Playlist Shuffle", nevertheless the user experience could end up being a bit confusing to free users that upgrade to premium if the "Playlist Radio" function ended up disappearing upon upgrading.

The second big announcement is that Deezer is removing all time limits on desktop and tablets for on-demand access of its free version. This is a big step towards getting free users to consider Deezer their only and indispensible music provider.

Finally - as far as product news are concerned - Deezer is unifying users’ music collections with the new beta of Deezer’s Mac client. This allows users to merge their existing music with Deezer’s in a seamless way. 

These new developments - even if they most likely come out of a long gestation period - will inevitably be seen as a direct response to what Spotify has released in the past few months but Deezer has certainly added its own flavour.

Deezer today also announced a major partnership with Samsung that will see European customers of the Korean manufacturer receive six months of Deezer’s Premium+ service for free when they buy a Samsung smartphone or tablet. The Premium+ service includes high-quality streaming up to 320Kbps The first phone to be involved in the promotion will be the Galaxy S5 from April 11th. This is a big deal as most of the expansion of streaming services has come from carrier partnerships of late, with manufacturers steering away from the space probably still scarred by Nokia’s experience with “Comes With Music”.

It remains to be seen how Deezer’s partnership with Samsung fits in with Samsung’s own music product Milk that was released just last month during SXSW in the US. It may well be that Samsung can’t foresee being able to bring Milk over to Europe since that product is based on Slacker Radio which doesn’t have international licenses as of yet, and so in that respect the partnership with Deezer can be seen as their European alternative.


(Andrea Leonelli)