Eamonn Forde Meets… – each month, the veteran music business journalist speaks to a senior industry figure about the topics that really matter – and gets the opinions of the people who make the decisions that count.
July 2025: Alexis Lanternier, CEO of Deezer. Deezer dichotomies: Alexis Lanternier became CEO of music streaming service Deezer in July 2024 with an agenda to “accelerate the company’s future development while continuing its path toward profitable growth”. He joins at a time when debates around the mushrooming of AI music (Deezer says 18% of its daily uploads are now fully AI-generated) and the tackling of streaming fraud is seen as essential by all but heavy-handed by some.
He talks about carving out an important distinction between additive AI and destructive AI, how user-centric streaming is a key tool in combating fraud, why domestic acts over-index in streaming in their home markets, how huge tracks can result in “surfacefans” but not “superfans”, why parallels with Netflix pricing are misleadingly reductive and why the next generation of streaming subscribers do not want the archaic limitations of what their parents are used to.
Spotify and Apple Music (and, increasingly, Amazon Music) grab most of the headlines due to their size in the market, being treated as metonyms for the entire streaming ecosystem. Deezer, founded in 2007 (the year after Spotify) and with a subscriber base of 9.4 million (over a third of whom are in its home market of France), has endured; and, what is more, it has proven to be one of the more prescient and proactive DSPs.
It launched high-res streaming in 2015, it was early in tackling streaming fraud (more of which below), it replaced “non-artist noise content” (e.g. white noise) with its own (royalty-free) content in 2023 so this did not dilute the overall royalty pool, it introduced “artist-centric” streaming payouts two years ago in France (which it had long been lobbying for), and was the first major DSP to break from the “9.99” subscription model by raising prices in key European markets to €10.99 and raising them again to €11.99 in 2023.
We begin, topically and inevitably, with the issue of AI, especially given how open Deezer has been on just how much AI-generated music is being ingested onto its platform (20,000 tracks a day as of April, almost double the amount ingested in January).
“It’s been transformative in the streaming industry, because that’s what enabled Deezer to create the algorithms that recommends the right song to the right person, and make music streaming such an appealing product for users who generate billions in revenue and royalties,” says Lanternier. “I think for now, it has been mostly positive for the industry in the sense that it has enabled artists to be more creative, because there are more tools to create music, with artists leveraging those tools and creating real art.”
All those practical and functional benefits, however, come with consequences. New platforms and tools that generate music “with just a prompt are really what we are struggling with”. He appears to take the sampling argument when it comes to generative AI, that it should be allowed, but only when it commercially licenses its use of source material. “Whatever revenue is generated by those solutions should pay a part of that revenue [back] to the content they are using to create the solution.”
Lanternier estimates fraud on Deezer to be between 7% and 8% (although earlier this year, Apple Music claimed to have successfully policed it to under 1%). He says moving from a pro rata model to a user-centric one for royalty payouts is one way to address industrialised streaming manipulation head on. “By moving to artist-centric, we cap the impact that one subscription can have,” he claims. “And, as a result, the streaming farm business disappears.” He adds that when they detect fully AI-created tracks, they strip them from Deezer-branded playlists and its recommendation algorithms.
Without naming names, he is clearly dismissive of Spotify’s policy of only paying royalties on tracks that do over 1,000 streams a year. “We didn’t go in that direction,” he says. “We didn’t demonetise under 1,000 streams. We think it’s a little bit harsh for smaller artists, and it may not be very efficient because actually those fraudsters manage to get above the 1,000 streams.”
In the early days of streaming, French labels in particular were concerned that, unless there was some kind of protective quota system like there is on French radio (although radio stations kicked back and it was reduced slightly in 2016, but in a way that would favour newer acts), local acts would be washed away by wave after wave of the biggest international acts.
“We didn’t demonetise under 1,000 streams … it may not be very efficient because those fraudsters manage to get above 1,000 streams.”
Alexis Lanternier
Lanternier hints this was either fear-mongering or misguided. “The streaming industry has favoured local artists,” he claims. “Last year, out of the top 20 albums in terms of streaming, 18 of them were local artists, French artists.” He says overall 41% of streams on Deezer in France are of French acts and the rate is “even larger” when looking at Brazilian acts streamed on Deezer in Brazil (its next biggest market). “As a result, there was no legislation as with radio, because they saw that, generally speaking, it was a good force for local artists.”
Which segues into the next topic coming over the horizon for DSPs – the rolling out of superfan tiers. Goldman Sachs’ Music In The Air report is forecasting that the “superfan” market could be worth $4.3 billion globally next year while Universal Music Group reportedly insisted on a superfan element as part of its latest licensing deal with Spotify. Lanternier confirms Deezer is talking to all the labels (certainly the majors) about what shape this could take, but is firmly against this reverting to the Streaming Exclusive Wars that gripped the business, well mostly Apple Music and Tidal, almost a decade ago but which the majors soon reversed away from.
“You need to find a solution that is either all DSPs at once, which is very complex because you have to align all the DSPs and all the labels at the same time, or outside of DSPs on a separate solution,” he proposes.
Surfacefans vs Superfans
I ask if he thinks this paid superfan tier could really only work at scale (i.e. for the global megastars). He says it depends on the context of listening, separating out deep listening from much more superficial listening.
“There are a lot of smaller artists who have a much more engaged fanbase,” he says. “But there are large artists who actually have a shallow base, meaning they have lots of streams, they are the top of the charts in terms of streams, but their fanbase is not that engaged. They like to listen to the song, but they’re not that interested in the actual artist or person. The best example is EDM. They love the track. They will listen to it all the time. But the actual artist behind it is not something that they care so much about.”
This, then, should lead to a new fan typology that goes from “surfacefan” at the bottom all the way up to “superfan” at the top.
The next evolutionary step for DSPs is responding to the needs of the newer generations of listeners. The basic streaming model has been around since Rhapsody in 2001 and has not shifted much since the early 2010s. This risks looking and feeling archaic to tomorrow’s young subscribers.
“They don’t see as much innovation as they would have liked on the streaming apps for the past 10 years,” he argues. “You need to listen to what they want. You need to adapt your solution and your functionalities. What they want is more customisation, more control and more connections.”
Such expansion will not only draw in younger subscribers but will also make increasing prices for long-established subscribers somewhat smoother.
“It is very important that you keep adding features that make people more engaged and more in love with their streaming app,” he suggests. “That enables you, when you ask to increase prices, to actually retain users.”
Music can’t follow Netflix
Unquestioningly following what the video streaming platforms are doing is not, he feels, the most effective way to drive up subscriber numbers and ARPU.
“The big difference with video is that they have exclusives,” he says. “As a result, they have been able to increase their prices much faster. Netflix didn’t really reduce their price with ads; they actually increased the main subscription. Now their subscription with ads is actually more expensive than their subscription without ads five years ago. That’s a route that we don’t think is sustainable in the music space – to increase the price at such a pace. Having a solution with ads that is cheaper [than the main subscription] will be more like reducing the overall royalty pool, which is not a great thing for the industry.”
As streaming subscriptions start to hit saturation point in mature markets, finding the next growth opportunities for all will be critical. Deezer may operate in the shadows cast by the dominant DSPs but, as its track record shows, it has an innate sense for what is, or should be, coming next.
