14 DAY TRIAL // When it comes to music streaming, everyone is talking about Spotify, but there's one player that you should be watching right now, Deezer. The French company has been at it for a few years and is doing pretty well in its home country.
But it now plans to expand aggressively and will become available in 100 countries within the next few weeks, the end of the year at the most, Reuters reports.
The company's strategy is interesting, it's not interested in the big markets, US in particular, instead it wants to be everywhere else.
It wants to be available in places where little music is sold legally and from where music labels generally don't make too much money.
There's a simple logic behind this, labels are a lot quicker to negotiate licensing deals for places in Africa rather than the US and for much better prices.
Deezer will launch in several countries at a time, hoping to be the first in untapped markets. And, despite the number of companies running music streaming services in the US or in a few European countries, people can't even buy an MP3 legally in most countries, not to mention pay a fixed fee for unlimited music.
But Deezer has another ace up its sleeve, it wants to partner with mobile carriers to bundle the service with smartphone contracts, for example. That strategy has proved very lucrative in France, where it partnered with France Telecom's Orange.
France Telecom also took a stake in Deezer in the deal. Since them though, paying users jumped from 250,000 to 1.4 million, a huge number any way you look at it.
It is now working to partner with about a dozen carriers around the world to bundle the service, a plan that could lead to a significant rise in paying user numbers. The company is already close to being profitable.