This is not going to be one of those salty angry posts about leaving and slamming the door behind - I do enjoyed the experience and hope Deezer will grow with time, just want to share some feedback I have after using Deezer as my main streaming platform for almost a year.
The good:
- Simple and functional interface - you are not trying to reinvent the paradigm of music listening like other companies and keep stuff simple. All UI sections are clearly separated and no page is ever overcrowded with sections and unneeded info. Nor you seem to test some new UX features at the expense of users, kudos for that. And your latest design update is neat - just do make sure that the typography makes sense (some people noted that black letters in purple background are barely legible) and cut down on wasted space.
- Sound quality - let’s not get too nuts about lossless and hi-rez stuff, most of the hype it gets is snake oil and it will only make a difference with decent listening equipment. But man, Spotify does suck a lot when compared to Deezer in sound quality. Like noticeably so. And it seems like other streaming platforms have their reservations in reencoding their library for lossless formats, so you did a great job in rolling it out without major upsells and stuff.
- Support and forums - while I can’t say that every single issue I have was solved by support, having a real human interaction when you need to share your problem or give feedback is great. Deezer has some problems but CS staff on this forum does their best to respond. Now to the problems…
The bad:
- Desktop and web app support - it’s like it is nonexistent, and unfortunately seems like a trend in the industry. Compared to mobile apps, your desktop app seriously lacks in functionality and it seems that the development resources you spend on them is minuscule. One major problem I had over this time is that your desktop app does not support gapless playback, while web and mobile apps do. Music genres I listen to rely heavily on gapless mastering, i.e. tracks in the album play continuously, without breaks between the songs, and because of that desktop app is simply not suitable for listening. Web app, while being similar, requires either to run the browser constantly or installing it as a separate web app, which is suboptimal and feels janky. Things like flow and the new shaker thing also seem to be a bit nerfed compared to mobile version. It is true that mobile users make up the bulk of your userbase but note that desktop experience in other streaming services is even more dire - in apple music desktop app is just unbelievably bad, for youtube you only have a web version and a community maintained wrapper, and Spotify gets worse with every update. You can capitalize on that by making your desktop experience not suck.
- About gapless - mentioned earlier, I cannot believe your company cannot dedicate the resources to enable gapless support in desktop app for YEARS after it has been implemented in other apps. This was a major disappointment for me and one of the main reasons I’m leaving for now. Why would I expect things to go good with Deezer if you cannot dedicate your resources to do something that’s considered core functionality and present in every other streaming platform?
- Feature development - Deezer has a lot of cool features like Shaker, music import from other platforms, Deezer connect, so on and so on. On paper it sounds great, but on practice they seem to be shallow MVP versions of features you just rush to release, as hey are unstable and perform only the most basic functions. Shaker cannot really interact with other platforms apart from forming a playlist which is neither accessible within connected third-party streaming nor through the yet again desktop Deezer app. Music import kinda works but often mistakes albums and songs, and I have encountered issues with favorite albums and songs - because of it this transfer actually wasted more time than I would otherwise by moving manually. Deezer connect just disconnects after a few minutes so controlling my PC playback from phone works literally just once before I have to reconnect. There’s a lot of neat stuff in Deezer but nothing works properly. This “fast development” paradigm made sense in times when music streaming services were new but now the market is saturated with established solutions - why would anyone leave AM or Spotify for Deezer if it feels like a brand new fledgling company that can’t afford to have some polished features? At this point you cannot grab new users by just existing and shotgunning new half-baked features until someone sticks, instead you need to prove that you are better than the stuff people are already familiar with. I honestly hate Spotify now when it became the Facebook of music streaming and having total disregard for both users and performers, but they have 1) already established features that work perfectly; 2) huge userbase which sees no real reason to move from there (until you give them a great alternative). Why would someone want to move if your features are not polished enough compared to what they have right now and basically disconnect themselves from sharing music with their friends who stay on their streaming platform?
The ugly:
- One point but it needs to be seriously addressed in the long run. Your discovery mixes and generated playlists are not good. Like, really not good. Not that you don’t try - I got to meet a lot of new artists through your mixes but sometimes they are almost bizarre. Example - started a song mix for a track by Hirsch Effekt, a German avant-garde/prog metal band. After it came a classical piece...sure, whatever, HE had one orchestral EP once, maybe you got confused. Then came Lil Gaz. Then came soul music. Four tracks that have literally nothing in common between them in terms of mood, sound and artists. On top of glitches like this, it seems like your library has a wonky and limited music genre database. One specific thing I noticed is that you do not have separation of music subgenres. You got your rock, indie, metal, alternative, electronic, whatever. But there is an absolute difference in sound between say symphonic metal and sludge metal - yet both of them are “metal” and treated the same way by your recommendation engine. People can be the fans of one specific subgenre of music but not care at all or even avoid some other adjacent one. My discovery queue was 70% filled with bands and genres I do not listen to and not interested in, just because for you it all fell into the broad “metal” or “hip-hop” category. It’s not the issue of “having more of the familiar music in your playlists versus having more discovery of the unknown” - your discovery is simply not close enough to the tastes people have, and sometimes the system thinks that artists and genres I do not care about are actually familiar to me. You have to address your library classification and recommendation engine if you want to be treated seriously. Nobody would suggest a streaming service whose recommendations mash weird metal, Ukrainian indie and cloud rap together in one playlist for no reason.
That’s it, hope it helps. Wish you luck and hope this feedback gets to someone who forms decisions. Cheers!
