Streaming music firm Deezer is rolling its high-definition Deezer Elite service out to more than 150 countries, following its US debut in September 2014.
The company says it brought forward the plans for its global launch after finding strong demand in the US, where 200,000 people have signed up for the service that streams music in the lossless Flac audio format.
For now, Deezer Elite will only be available through connected hi-fis made by Sonos, which was also its launch partner in the US.
Sonos owners who are already Deezer subscribers can switch to Elite for no extra cost, while people who are new to the streaming service will be able to sign up for its higher-quality tier from 19 March.
“We still haven’t set a price for new users, but I would anticipate that it will be similar to the US,” Tyler Goldman, chief executive of Deezer north America, told the Guardian.
There, Deezer Elite costs $9.99 a month for people who sign up for a year in advance and $14.99 a month if they opt for monthly billing. That hints at £9.99 and £14.99 respectively in the UK.
Goldman said Deezer Elite’s US launch has been successful beyond his company’s expectations, noting that while subscribers to its standard service tend to listen for around an hour a day, Deezer Elite users listen for double that time on average.
“This is obviously a somewhat self-selecting group – these are huge audio enthusiasts so they’re naturally going to be heavy listeners – but the satisfaction quotient is extremely high too,” he said. “65% of them say they won’t go back to MP3-quality music. They’re definitely valuing the sound-quality difference.”
Deezer is focusing its energy on selling Deezer Elite to Sonos’s customers for now, but Goldman said more hardware partnerships will follow in due course, as the service is refined.
Its appeal rests on the higher-quality bitrate at which the music it streams is encoded: 1,411 kilobits per second (kbps) rather than the 320kbps rate offered by Deezer’s standard service.
For now, the Flac streams will not be available on Deezer Elite subscribers’ mobile devices. “Firstly because most phones today cannot support Flac, and secondly because there would be significant data charges,” said Goldman.
“Third, most people listening on a mobile are listening on a headset, and although they’d hear a difference, it wouldn’t be pronounced. Also, in the US, we’re seeing for Deezer Elite users that the majority of consumption is happening at home.”
Goldman said record labels have been supportive of Deezer’s move into high-quality streaming, enabling it to make more than 25m tracks available in Flac format, out of the 35m in its catalogue.
Deezer is far from alone in exploring lossless-quality streaming music. Norwegian firm Aspiro has one service called WiMP HiFi in Scandinavia, and another – Tidal – available elsewhere in the world.
It has 41,000 paying users across both services, although Aspiro’s profile is also currently high because it is in the process of being bought by a company owned by musician Jay Z.
French firm Qobuz also has a hi-fidelity streaming service available in eight European countries, and while Spotify does not currently offer a lossless option, its chief executive Daniel Ek hinted in December that it was mulling the idea.
Musician Neil Young recently launched PonoMusic – a music-playing device and online store focusing on lossless files. However, Pono offers them solely as “a la carte” downloads, rather than as a subscription streaming service.
Goldman admitted that in time, lossless may be a standard feature for streaming services. “There are parallels to HDTV: initially people paid more for HD channels, but over time it just became part of your package,” he said.
“You can see a longer-term arc in music where Flac may be the common way that files are delivered. In the interim, you’ll definitely see other services offer Flac as an option, but super-serving this audience will not just about the encode rate. It will be about the other features.”
Such as? Goldman noted that Deezer Elite customers “way over-index” with their interest in the classical and jazz genres; tend to have plenty of lossless-quality songs either bought or ripped from their CD collections; and often have more than one residence.
“There are a lot of things that we can super-serve here. Clearly this is an audience that has different needs,” he said.
It’s also an audience that will be crucial to Deezer’s future prospects, as it faces up to competition from well-resourced rivals Apple, Google (including YouTube) and Spotify.
Deezer currently has 16 million active users, including 6 million paying subscribers, although a significant proportion of the latter have the costs picked up by their mobile operators as part of “bundle” deals, so are not guaranteed to continue subscribing when those deals run out.
Targeting audiophiles through Deezer Elite is one strand in the company’s strategy to find currently under-served groups of people who are not already paying to stream music.
“Globally, we’re only at around 40 million people paying for a music subscription,” he said, of the wider streaming market. “That’s still quite small. There’s a lot of room for growth, but it’s important that we continue to refine what we’re doing.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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Deezer Elite high-resolution streaming service goes global with Sonos
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