“There are stream farms which generate a song, they listen to it for 30 seconds to count as a stream,” says Lanternier at our meeting in a hotel in London’s King’s Cross, near the Paris-headquartered company’s UK offices.
Deezer’s technology has also been used to eradicate some white-noise or muzak tracks which do not use an instrument, replacing them with its own tracks of, for example, the sound of rain, which provides the background noise some users want without sharing in the royalty pool.
Lanternier has spotted an opportunity to position Deezer as an artists’ champion as its rivals come under growing criticism for paying fractions of a penny per stream.
In late 2023, it struck a landmark deal with Universal, home to Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey, to create a new royalty model designed to give popular artists greater rewards and slash revenues going to click-savvy players using bots to game the system.
Alexis Lanternier, chief executive of the French streaming service, says it can compete with bigger rivals by rewarding the real musicians its subscribers want to support.
