Despite a few companies falling by the wayside in recent years, the streaming music field remains highly competitive. Music-focused companies, such as LiveXLive and Spotify, are vying for your ear alongside tech giants like Amazon, Apple, and Google. In the face of such competition, a streaming music service needs unique features to stand out from the pack. Enter French company Deezer, which slid into the US market in 2016. The service doesn't do anything revolutionary, but its blend of traditional streaming music, live radio, podcasts, and exclusive video makes Deezer worth your consideration.
Platforms and Plans
Deezer is available on pretty much every platform. You can download it as a macOS or Windows desktop app, access it via a web browser, or check it out using an Xbox, Roku, smart speaker, smart TV, or smartwatch. Deezer is available for Android Auto and other car tech, too. You can sign up using a Google or Facebook account, or you can create a dedicated Deezer account from scratch.
Deezer's pricing falls in line with what's offered by competing services. Deezer Free is an ad-supported plan designed for mobile devices. If you listen to Deezer Free on your phone or mobile device, for example, you can enjoy an excellent variety of playlists, with lyrics support for most tracks. If you listen to Deezer Free on your browser or the PC app, you'll only hear 30-second song snippets. You can subscribe to a premium account to remove this 30 second limit, but if you stick to the free music tier, Deezer is largely useless for computer-based listening. This is pretty disappointing.
On anything other than browsers and the PC app, Deezer Free limits you to six skips per hour, has no offline mode, and has 128kbps, compressed MP3 streams. These are decent offerings, not unlike what you would see from a free Spotify account, but nothing to write home about either. That said, Deezer recently bumped its music selection to 90 million tracks, up from the previous 70 million.
Similar Products
Apple Music
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Tidal
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iHeartRadio
Next up the ladder is the ad-free Deezer Premium, which costs $9.99 per month, with an $89.21 annual subscription (you save 25 percent). Premium grants unlimited listening on all devices, unlimited song skips, full lyrics, and offline listening. Like Apple Music, Spotify, and a few other music services, Deezer also offers a $14.99-per-month family plan that blesses six people with Deezer Premium access. A $4.99 student plan is available for college students between the ages of 18-25. In terms of audio quality, Deezer Premium serves up 320kbps, compressed MP3 streams.
If you want High Fidelity listening, Deezer’s got you covered, too. The service now offers 90 million tracks in 16-bit/44.1kHz, lossless FLAC format via its $14.99 HiFi plan, meaning Deezer's entire music catalogue can be enjoyed with CD-quality sound. Some HiFi tracks even support 360 Reality Audio, which is a nice touch. That said, Deezer doesn't offer anything above CD-quality, so if you want cutting edge, Hi-Res Audio tracks, you must look elsewhere. Amazon Music Unlimited, Qobuz, and Tidal (a PCMag Editors' Choice for streaming music) feature Hi-Res audio tiers.
Mobile Deezer
By default, Deezer's mobile apps (available for Android, Blackberry, iOS, Windows Phone, and other platforms) stream audio at a lowly 128Kbps over Wi-Fi and data connections. You can bump the sound quality up to 320kbps if you subscribe to Premium, but we suggest you look for a Wi-Fi signal if you do so; that bitrate could potentially chew through your data plan (especially if you sign up for the HiFi plan).
The Android app, which we spent some time listening to, has a cool notification system that alerts you to important music happenings. When we logged into Deezer for Android, the notifications section contained alerts about the Santana (Legacy Edition) album and my subscription information.
Deezer lets you upload and stream your own MP3 files, with a few caveats. You can only do this from web and desktop versions; you cannot upload from a mobile device. You also cannot upload your own FLAC files. But any MP3s that are 200 MB in size and under are fair game, and they are all stored in their own playlist for you to enjoy whenever you wish.
Copious Content
If you've used LiveXLive or Spotify, two PCMag Editors' Choice-winning services, you know roughly what to expect from Deezer. You get a panel-driven interface that lets you explore music by genre (Rock, Soul & Funk, Pop, and so on) or playlist (Acoustic Soul, Blues Women, Rock Workout, and the like). Both categories are populated by a mix of songs from the genres you select when you set up your account.
Deezer’s also features extensive selection and recommendation categories, all of which are worth perusing. Deezer devotes a section of these to international charts, with top 100 tracks from all over the world, including Brazil, Jamaica, Mexico, and the UK. Fresh Picks of the Week presents robust collections of the hottest trending music, divided into various playlist categories, like New Dance, Fresh Rap, and Radar Weekly. Deezer’s podcast offerings are also very impressive, with hundreds of original and collaborative podcasts, across a broad range of topics, from true crime, to politics, to comedy, and lifestyle.
The coolest original content lives in Deezer Sessions, which are EPs recorded in front of a live audience. Some of the artists who've participated in Deezer Sessions include George Ezra and Dua Lipa. Deezer Sessions recalls MTV Unplugged, and you can either listen to the music in audio form or watch the performances in video form. Sessions can be found in the Deezer Originals section, which also features exclusive podcasts and eclectic, curated playlists. This may not quite challenge LiveXLive’s extensive video streams, Stories, and informative Artist DNA shows, but it is a step in the right direction, giving you something beyond basic music streaming to enjoy.
Like iHeartRadio, Deezer has a significant number of live radio stations—hundreds, in fact from all over the world. These include jazz, news, pop, and decade-centric tunes from around the globe. Naturally, due to the nature of live radio, you can't skip tracks, and you will hear ads regardless of your subscription, as these are played by the station, and not Deezer. Still, we wish Deezer had the ability to rewind live radio—a powerful feature found in SiriusXM Internet Radio, an Editors' Choice for live, streaming music services.
The newly added Tune My Music functionality acts as a library importer that lets you transfer songs and playlists from other services to Deezer. This is a handy tool that makes transitioning to Deezer a cinch when migrating from a different streaming music service.
The Listening Party
Unfortunately, Deezer’s Hear This section, which highlighted albums new and old that were tailored to your tastes, has been removed since our last review. Deezer’s current recommendation system, called Flow, is decent, but doesn’t scratch the same itch. Flow factors your liked/banned songs, albums, and playlists to form a personalized soundtrack. It contains your favorites, as well as recommended music that Deezer's algorithm determines to be a good fit. Our Flow streams contained many disco, funk, alt rock, classic rock, and 1980s-era tracks—exactly how we want it. Flow is solid, but it doesn’t feel all that different, functionally, from what Spotify or even YouTube Music offer. It was nice to use the old Hear This function to find and listen to relevant albums, rather than suggested tracks or playlists.
We fired up Beck's Modern Guilt on both the desktop and mobile sides, and enjoyed the tracks and related tunes through a pair of headphones. Like Deezer's live radio streams, the default curated streams sounded a bit tinny. Naturally, Deezer HiFi has much better audio quality than the base streams; its sound is on par with the excellent Tidal HiFi. With Deezer HiFi, there's greater audio richness, especially if you listen with quality headphones. The Dirtbombs' Ultraglide In Black sounded extremely fresh and lively. The extra audio data makes a notable difference.
Worth Your Ear
Deezer is a great place for streaming music, live radio, and podcasts. The service stumbles in a few areas, as it doesn’t have as many fun or informative extras that competitors offer, and the free browser version is essentially a glorified sampler that is all but useless for at-work listening. Still, the excellent selection of international music, MP3 compatibility, lyrics, and other features make it an attractive service nonetheless.
If you want a streaming music service with extra pizazz, take a look at our Editors’ Choice picks. For an encyclopedic selection of live radio shows, check out Sirius XM Internet Radio. Tidal is your go-to for superb Hi-Res Audio. And Spotify is a well-rounded service that delivers a rich podcast catalog, collaborative playlists, and the ability to hear albums before they're released.
Featuring numerous playlists, original video, and CD-quality audio, Deezer is a great middle ground between Spotify's awesome music curation and Tidal's high-fidelity streams.
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