Deezer

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Introduction

If you subscribe to the ‘less is more’ principle, Deezer may well be the music streaming service for you.

While others have expanded into ‘extras’ such as audiobooks, videos and spatial audio, offer more personalisation features than a Tesla, and are clearly keen to shove as many algorithm-led playlists into your ears as possible.

The French service is comparatively more music focused and minimalist, with a huge song library (supported only by podcasts and broadcast radio stations) and an easily digestible user experience headlined by a few strong music discovery features. It’s been here a while – longer than Spotify, in fact – and knows who it is.

Sure, it’s different, but whether it can be deemed ‘good different’ or ‘bad different’ depends on your priorities, preferences and indeed your expectations of how far your monthly music streaming fee should go.

I’ve gone twelve rounds with Deezer and compared it against Spotify, Tidal, Amazon Music and YouTube Music to gauge how it fares as an all-round proposition in today’s ever-competitive music streaming market.

Price

• Free tier available
• Premium plans for individuals, couples, students and families
• Decent savings on annual subscriptions

Deezer Free is, as the naming suggests, completely free, allowing anyone who signs up for an account to play the 120 million-strong music catalogue. The usual playback limitations apply, however.

Listening is ad supported and limited to 128kbps audio quality. You can pick and play any song on your Daily playlist and some other personalized and editorially curated ones, though you’ll only get 30-second previews of specific songs you’ve searched for. Flow is a continuous stream of music based on your listening habits, while Songcatcher works like Shazam to identify songs playing for you.

It’s a fairly robust free experience, though Spotify’s free service has the edge, with recent improvements giving users greater freedom over playback control. US readers should be aware that Deezer Free is only available on the mobile app (not the desktop one) too.

Paying for Deezer Premium naturally banishes those playback limitations while increasing audio quality (to CD-quality 16-bit/44.1kHz) and allowing songs to be downloaded for offline consumption.

An individual subscription costs £11.99 / $11.99, which is reduced to £5.99 / $5.99 for students. A Duo account for two people in one household is £15.99 / $15.99, and a Family membership for six people under one roof is priced £19.99 / $19.99.

Those monthly fees make Deezer one of the most expensive streaming services, with only Spotify and Qobuz costing more at £12.99 / $12.99. That said, paying for an annual subscription brings the cost down substantially – Premium is the equivalent of only £8.99 / $9 per month then, for example – making it highly worthwhile if you can afford the upfront outlay.

Platforms

• Universal hardware support
• No Deezer Connect anymore

Having launched in its native France in 2007, Deezer is one of the oldest music streaming services, so it’s had almost two decades to grow its hardware device support. It shows.

Deezer has its own mobile and desktop app for Apple, Android and Windows devices, a web player, and is integrated into most audio platforms, including HomePod, Sonos and Amazon Wi-Fi speakers with their respective voice controls, Google Cast, and most smart TVs, car infotainment systems and smart/fitness watches. The Deezer app tends to be available in most hi-fi apps, too.

Similarly to Spotify Connect, Deezer Connect allowed one device (such as your phone) to act as a remote to control playback on other connected devices, but disappointingly that feature was discontinued in May 2025.

Catalogue & Curation

• 120m+ podcast and music library
• Original content prioritises quality over quantity
• No spatial audio anymore

In terms of claimed, published figures, Deezer has the largest music catalogue of them all, with over 120 million tracks (most services quote ‘over 100 million’). That’s a lot of music, and indeed I couldn’t catch the catalogue out with even my niche track searches.

With the rise of AI-generated music existing on music platforms (Deezer says it receives 30,000 fully AI-generated tracks every day), the French service has in 2025 made a concerted effort to make subscribers aware of such music. Its proprietary AI-detection technology detects and tags all-AI tracks on the interface, and you won’t see them featured in algorithmic recommendations or editorially curated playlists.

There’s plenty of suggestions and playlists in Deezer’s discovery camp, the headline being Flow. This is pretty much a continuously-playing radio station just for you, delivering a non-stop stream of music Deezer’s AI algorithms think you’ll like, and you can tailor it to your mood.

I picked ‘chill’, and tamer tracks from the likes of Warpaint, Wet Leg, Kacy Hill and The Smile appeared, tallying with my indie-led listening, interspersed with a good mix of artists I hadn’t played before. If you need some inspiration, Flow is a great go-to.

Track Mix is another highlight, and a generously integrated version of ‘artist’ and ‘track’ radio features found on other services. Play a song, and on the playback screen you can tap ‘launch track mix’ to spin off a stream of music similar to that track. Again, I couldn’t fault the appropriateness of the tracks Deezer’s algorithm engines served.

There’s no spatial audio (Deezer stopped offering content in Sony’s 360 Reality Audio format in October 2022) as featured on Apple Music, audiobooks as offered by Spotify, or community-focused, video-led material as pushed by YouTube Music.

Whether such omissions will be considered glaring or not will depend on your tastes and priorities, but either way it does feel as though Deezer is a bit behind on the catalogue front when music services are now often much more than music libraries.

Deezer does have its own slate of ‘Deezer Original’ content, though, which is by no means vast but, I believe, a valuable addition for music fans who like to tap into the pop music industry. I particularly liked the short (EP-length) live sessions from popular artists, recorded at Deezer’s HQ, as well as the 20-track ‘POV’ playlists, curated by specific music artists. Song-identifying music quizzes, which you can play solo or with friends, make for pleasant procrastination, too.

Original content also includes podcasts, although these are typically in the French language. Fortunately for English-speaking streamers, popular, charted podcasts are plentiful and have their own section, found towards the bottom of the home-screen or in the ‘Explore’ tab.

The ‘editor’-recommended and ‘by duration’ categorisations give the impression that cataloguing and layout have been carefully considered by Deezer’s designers, and that impression is generally felt across the user experience.

User Experience

• Pleasingly clean, minimalist interface
• Easy to navigate and digest

Deezer has resisted presenting users with seemingly endless scrolls of content and recommendations, instead running with a clean, easily digestible interface that feels ‘just right’ on a density scale bookended by ‘bare’ and ‘overwhelming’. It’s certainly very palatable compared to Spotify and YouTube Music’s busy presentation.

Home prioritises your recently played music, giving you an easy shortcut to jump right back in, as well as Flow and other mixes and playlists based on your listening habits. It’s a neatly laid out launchpad into everything Deezer offers, from podcasts and Deezer Originals to over 32,000 national and international radio stations, the latter a really nice integration for broadcast radio fans.

Favourites is where you’ll find your ‘liked’ and ‘downloaded’ songs; Search serves up the search bar and the useful aforementioned SongCatcher; and Explore is a gateway to music quizzes, radio content, podcasts, concert listings, and a Shaker feature where you and your friends can collaborate to build a playlist.

You also get some timely suggestions, such as ‘This week’s freshest releases’. This last tab is arguably where the interface could offer a bit more in the way of music inspiration and discovery, though I never felt short of a path to go down.

Sound Quality

• CD-quality audio for Deezer Premium subscribers
• Engagingly clear, clean and full-sounding
• Hi-res Spotify and Tidal streams sound superior through revealing kit

Deezer was among the first services to offer CD-quality streaming, way back in 2015 when fellow French service Qobuz had just become the pioneer of hi-res streaming. That 16-bit/44.1kHz (1,411kbps) quality was initially offered as a pricier paid-for pier, but is now available to all Deezer Premium subscribers.

That falls behind Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal and Qobuz, who are now all firmly members of the hi-res music streaming club and offer 24-bit/44.1kHz streams and beyond.

While, technically, the higher the bit depth and sampling rate, the more information (detail and dynamic range) in the digital music file, whether you benefit from actually hearing that extra information depends what you’re listening to music on.

For example, stream the same song on Deezer and Tidal through the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones 2nd Gen wireless headphones (£450 / $450), and while the streams sound ever so slightly different (which could be down to several factors), the Tidal version doesn’t sound clearly and meaningfully better. Got less capable headphones? Realistically, it’s unlikely you’ll hear any clear benefits at all.

The quality gap becomes more evident – and yes, valuable – when I play the same songs through headphone/DAC pairings costing £1000 and beyond, and indeed through my speaker-fronted hi-fi system. The B&W Px8 S2 wireless headphones (£629 / $799) prove sophisticated enough to divulge significant discrepancies, too.

Such higher-end hardware is simply transparent enough to reveal the extra information offered by those higher-bitrate Tidal streams.

Is CD-quality streaming ‘enough’? For most folk, yes. And throughout my testing, I found Deezer’s streams perfectly enjoyable – clear, full and forthright, and most of the time preferable to Spotify.

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