Deezer came out well before Spotify appeared on the horizon – 2007 in fact – to disrupt the streaming music space, but it faces a problem. Spotify has sucked up a lot of air despite having less registered users, 15 million to Deezer’s 20 million. The again Deezer has 1.5 million paying subscribers when Spotify is over 3 million right now. What do they do next?
Deezer is fighting back, doubling down outside of the U.S. aiming to launch in 200 territories this year (most recently the U.K.), although not in the U.S., where Spotify just launched. Still, the Paris-based company today iterates on its product with the launch of an off-line mode which will run inside the browser. It is currently available on Chrome, and will be on other browsers very soon. Yes folks, that means you won’t need a desktop app, unlike Spotify. The announcement was made today at the London Web Summit by CEO Axel Dauchez.
The “off-line mode” allows Deezer Premium+ subscribers to download their music library to their computers and to access it offline
This could be an advantage. It’s an open standard so it will be easier for Deezer to integrate social media features (Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm…) and faster to iterate than a desktop app.
It will be interesting to see if this aids Deezer’s mission to be the music streaming service of choice for Rest Of World.