Universal Music Group (UMG) has announced a new partnership with Deezer that will see the two companies investigate potential new economic models for music streaming and recognize the value artists create.
The agreement follows the recent growth of Deezer and other paid streaming services, which is still the biggest development in the music business in decades and has created opportunities for artists and fans worldwide. Despite the fact that music fans all over the world now primarily consume music through streaming services, the streaming remuneration model has not significantly changed in that time.
In addition to reimagining and modernizing the engagement model for Deezer’s consumers and the musicians they adore, UMG and Deezer hope to create new strategies that holistically reward recording artists and composers for the value they produce through this partnership. One of the first platforms to pledge to looking at alternative payment structures to ensure that artists get paid fairly was Deezer. The company’s ongoing and consistent commitment to promoting these initiatives across its platform is highlighted by this initiative.
The new initiative between Deezer and UMG will seek to better align the interests of artists, fans and streaming services and explore ways in which artists at every point in their careers and from every genre and geography can more fully benefit commercially from streaming. With a foundation in deep data analysis, the partnership will look at the benefits and evaluate the viability of different economic models aimed at driving subscriber growth, forging stronger bonds with music fans on the platform and developing commercial opportunities that benefit artists and the broader music community.
Deezer is devoted to highlighting the value of music, artistic creation and fan engagement, continuously developing new ways of connecting artists with fans. Projects and features include super fan rewards, in-app livestreaming and VOD concerts, alongside lyric translations, music quiz functionality and much more. Through this initiative with UMG, Deezer will gain insights that will inform future experiential features and monetization options.
Jeronimo Folgueira, CEO, Deezer, “As a key player in the music industry, we work with all labels to find ways to make the ecosystem fairer and help artists monetize their music better. The current system has clear issues that need to be addressed, such as increasing amounts of non-music tracks uploaded on platforms, poor quality covers with misspelt artists’ names and songs to ‘steal’ streams, and people trying to trick the system with the length of tracks. This hurts true artists, makes it harder for new ones to emerge and also damages the fan experience. We believe in quality and fairness at Deezer and with this initiative together with UMG we will look into how we can improve the model to everyone’s benefit. Music is extremely undervalued today and as part of the artist-centric discussion we are keen to find additional ways of increasing monetization, to the benefit of real artists, the labels and platforms like Deezer.”
“Deezer has long advocated for a re-evaluation of subscription’s economic model,” said Michael Nash, UMG’s EVP, Chief Digital Officer. “We’re thrilled Jeronimo and his team are partnering with us to explore how we can evolve streaming for the benefit of the entire ecosystem of artists, labels, platforms and fans. Such collaboration is critical to the success of the Artist-Centric initiative. While there won’t be one uniform quick fix—subscriber acquisition and retention dynamics and metrics vary by platform—our partnership with Deezer will help accelerate this entire enterprise.”
