Since my previous post on this particular topic, Deezer vs Spotify, I’ve used Deezer exclusively. For a month, I’ve been taking advantage of their generous Deezer Premium trial, and my conclusion is this:

There are no big differences between Deezer and Spotify. They are very similar services wrapped in very similar packages. Both services have a crapton of tracks available, they provide high quality streams, playlists, music discovery, and everything else we’ve come to expect from a modern music streaming service. How many ways can you stream music to people anyway? Not that many.

Deezer has some minor quirks, but they are mostly related to the Windows and Mac desktop clients, and not the service per se. The user interface is a bit clunky. The play queue view doesn’t show which album a song is from. I can’t control the Mac client with my headphones. I miss the artist concerts tab found in Spotify, but it’s not a huge loss for a guy who went to two concerts last year, both featuring the same band.

My biggest issue is that I still can’t pause Deezer on Windows by alt-tabbing to the app and pressing space. But with the money I save by moving from Spotify to Deezer, I can live with that. Also, it’s a mere software bug, a kink that can be ironed out by a code monkey¹.

Suggestions

It might be something I imagine, but I suspect that the suggestions I got from Spotify was a bit better than the ones I get from Deezer. This shouldn’t really be a huge surprise. Spotify has been learning from my musical habits for 10+ years, and probably knows more about my personal preferences than I do myself by now. Deezer has only enjoyed that privilege for a month, and considering it just has that data plus the playlists I imported from Spotify, the suggestions Deezer gives me aren’t half bad.

My free Deezer Premium trial expired yesterday, but for some reason I can still play music without restrictions on both the Mac provided by my consultancy client, and my work Windows PC. I haven’t tried to change playlists since the free trial expired, and it might be that if I don’t touch anything, I can listen for free without restrictions indefinitely.

One computer is playing Deezer’s Flow playlist, which never ends, and the other computer is playing my own Deezer Hits playlist (previously known as Spotify Hits, of course. So if I just add tracks from Deezer Flow to my own playlist, I might be able to keep this going forever - or at least until I have to restart the computers.

No Freebies! Or Perhaps There Are?

And as I wrote that, the Deezer app mysteriously closed itself. Coincidence? I think not. But I re-opened the client, and interestingly, it seems like I’m still on a Deezer Premium subscription - even if the client tells me I’m on the free tier.

Anyway.

I’m moving from Spotify to Deezer. There are no good reasons why I shouldn’t. And when the client finally realizes I’m not a premium user anymore, and starts playing ads and restricting how many tracks I can skip, I’m shelling out for an annual Deezer Premium Subscription. If you can live with the fact that pretty much everyone you know will be using Spotify (Spotify has 208 million users vs 14 Deezer’s million users), Deezer might be a good option for you, too.

Deezer is on par with Spotify in pretty much every way - and it’s way cheaper.