Feature Parity with Spotify

Deezer has built a solid foundation in the global music streaming market, offering competitive sound quality and pricing. However, its future as a serious contender depends on closing the feature gap with Spotify—particularly when it comes to core user experience functionality. Among the most damaging shortcomings are the arbitrary limits Deezer imposes on favoriting songs, albums, and artists. These constraints not only frustrate engaged users but actively encourage churn by signaling a lack of platform maturity.

Firstly, Deezer’s current limitations fall short of user expectations that are now defined by Spotify. Spotify has set the standard: users expect unlimited personalization, seamless interaction, and frictionless organization of their music libraries. When a user switches to Deezer and discovers there’s a hard cap on the number of songs, albums, or artists they can favorite, it feels like a regression. This is not a minor UX inconvenience—it’s a core violation of what modern users perceive as basic functionality. In a market where users have dozens of alternatives, any friction at this level drives disengagement and abandonment.

Secondly, these feature gaps directly contribute to user churn and inhibit long-term engagement. Users build emotional and functional investment in a music platform over time. Spotify’s lack of arbitrary limits allows users to amass large, personalized libraries that act as digital memory banks. Deezer’s constraints cut this experience short, causing frequent users to feel penalized for their engagement. This leads to churn among precisely the kind of loyal, high-value users most likely to promote the platform. Moreover, these limitations discourage users from recommending Deezer to others, weakening its ability to generate organic growth through network effects.

Thirdly, visible feature gaps contribute to a broader perception that Deezer is stagnant or outdated. In the tech space, perception often defines reality. As Spotify, Apple Music, and other competitors continue to innovate, any lag in feature parity causes Deezer to appear dormant, even if the platform is evolving in other ways. Once a service is perceived as second-tier, recovery becomes difficult. Users don’t want to invest their time and preferences in a platform that may not be around—or up to date—in a few years.

Fourthly, unlimited personalization is no longer a premium perk—it’s a baseline expectation. The technical rationale for limiting favorites may have once made sense, but that time has passed. In an era of cheap cloud storage and scalable infrastructure, there is no credible justification for restricting how much music a user can save or organize. These limits now feel arbitrary and outdated, and their presence alone suggests that Deezer is not taking the needs of serious listeners seriously. Users want digital shelves that grow with them—and any cap feels like a wall around their music experience.

In my opinion, Deezer should act now to demonstrate that it is a full-fledged competitor, not an alternative for compromise. Removing caps on favoriting songs, albums, and artists should be a top strategic priority. More importantly, this change should be publicly communicated as part of a broader commitment to meeting and exceeding the expectations of the modern streaming audience.

Parity with Spotify is not about mimicry—it’s about acknowledging the baseline for relevance in today’s competitive landscape. And now, with Spotify’s brand trust under fire, Deezer has a rare chance to position itself as the more ethical, more user-centric platform.

Users shouldn’t have to choose between high-quality audio and a fully featured, values-aligned experience. Deezer should deliver both.

Deezer must move beyond simply being “good enough” and eliminate the feature constraints that are quietly undermining user trust and satisfaction. Every small gap widens the distance between Deezer and its competitors—but every removed barrier brings Deezer closer to claiming its rightful place as a premium, future-facing streaming leader.

In my opinion, the timing has never been better for Deezer to capitalize on user disillusionment with Spotify. Recent headlines highlighting Spotify’s financial backing of AI technologies tied to military applications have sparked a wave of public concern. For ethically minded listeners, this creates an opening to re-evaluate their streaming choices. If Deezer can offer a truly compelling alternative—one that matches or exceeds core functionality without moral compromise—it has a powerful chance to convert users who are already primed to switch.

But that opportunity vanishes the moment these users encounter basic feature roadblocks. If a user leaves Spotify for ethical reasons, only to discover they can't favorite more than a few thousand tracks on Deezer, they’ll likely turn to another platform entirely—or go back, compromise and all.