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Replacing Piracy<br />
With Partnership<br />
Jonathan Benassaya, CEO of Deezer<br />
13<br />
In Profile: Pioneers Of <strong>Digital</strong> <strong>Music</strong><br />
Deezer is a France-based ad-supported music<br />
streaming service. It has made the migration from<br />
being unlicensed and illegal to being a valued<br />
partner to the music industry. “In the US, start-ups<br />
usually begin in a garage; in Paris my partner started<br />
out in the music business in my kitchen – launching<br />
a website called blogmusik.net” says Jonathan<br />
Benassaya. “He soon received letters from bodies<br />
representing rights holders saying the service was<br />
illegal and must be shut<br />
down. He did that and then I sat down with him and the<br />
rights holders to see if we could work out a way forward.”<br />
The result was Deezer, a licensed and legal website that<br />
users can access anywhere using a browser. The service<br />
offers on demand music streaming, web radio and a smart<br />
radio tool similar to Last.fm or Pandora. Once users have<br />
listened to their own playlist a number of times they tend to<br />
switch to web radio to find out about new hits or the smart<br />
radio tool to discover new tracks. Deezer also offers a free<br />
mobile application for its web radio service. For the ondemand<br />
portable feature users pay €9.99 per month.<br />
The company has gone from three people in August 2007<br />
to 45 people to date. “Our focus is on profitability instead<br />
of international expansion. That’s why we’ve done a huge<br />
job in France trying to optimise everything - from the<br />
music rights to the cost structure. We’ve grown from<br />
100,000 unique visitors to 16 million across Europe,<br />
including almost 12 million in France.” n
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