Deezer

Summary

As much as we believe in supporting artists and purchasing music so that they might collect the royalties, we can’t help but indulge in a little bit of online streaming from time to time.
Today let’s take a closer look at Deezer, one of the many music streaming services available on the Android Market.
 

There are many music streaming fish (sharks?) in the sea, be it Deezer, Rdio, Rara, Napster, Simfy, Juke—there’s an abundance to choose from. My personal favourite so far has been Grooveshark. Despite streaming illegally uploaded (by users) music, it is such a great library of tracks, and creating playlists is super simple.

However, Grooveshark has recently become unavailable in certain parts of the world, and we predict that more streaming services will follow suit and go the way of the dodo. This may have something to do with Spotify, the megastar of streaming, swooping in and becoming available in more locations.

But let’s get back to Deezer, the star streaming service in France. It provides three models for listening to music: a free one with which you can listen to tracks up to 30 seconds (can be augmented to 90 seconds), a premium version available for EUR4,99 and a premium+ version which costs EUR9,99. Both premium version are worth it IMO. Why? Because for less than 17 Cents a day you can stream on up to two mobile devices, download albums and listen to your music in your home.

Let me start off by saying that signing in via Facebook is compulsory. If you want to protect your own personal data I recommend creating a fake Facebook account.
If you want to share your music with friends, signing up via your own Facebook account is a viable option. I tested the app this way over a two week period and actually discovered a lot of cool new acts and tracks. Furthermore, I don’t mind if my friends see what I’m listening to, and what’s more there’s an option to deactivate the app’s tracking feature.

Deezer is basically a streaming service that pretty much the same as any other streaming version, or rather the Android versions thereof.

That said, Deezer has a few extra features that make it stand out: for instance, it will display the amount of MB of music is stored and the option to continue listening to music straight away after a phone call. Plus, if you’re a fan of mobile sharing then Deezer may be the right streaming service for you.

However, Deezer does not provide an option for adding local data and there’s no ‘temporary’ option for editing playlists.

Bottom line:
A good streaming service with a large music library to choose from, but no extra frills.
 

Deezer comes with a nice design that’s well suited to the Android operating system aesthetic: sharp edges, quite minimalistic, all about black and white.
Deezer is easy and intuitive to use.
 

Deezer is speedy and relatively solid—it didn’t crash at all during our test runs. A small glitch occurs every time I remove my head phones: I wind up back in the album selection and have to pick a track by hand.

Deezer is available free of charge from the Android Market, but the premium+ version costs EUR9,99 after a 15 day trial membership.