I’m not a music enthusiast. In my entire life, I’ve never bought a cassette, CD, or MP3. Fortunately, today we have music streaming services. For the past six months, we’ve been trying out Deezer instead of YouTube Music.
MEGA – Make Europa great again
Motivated by the political situation in the USA, I took a look at my IT landscape and discovered more services from there than I’m comfortable with. On short notice, I decided to use services from the EU whenever possible. While not everything is perfect here either, it’s still significantly better than on the other side of the Atlantic.
But how do you find alternatives from Europe? It’s not that difficult, as several people have had the same idea. For example, Constantin Graf has set up a website that shows European alternatives:
https://european-alternatives.eu/
Taking the first step
Even though there are alternatives for almost everything, not everything can be migrated easily and quickly. But when it comes to music streaming, the providers are largely interchangeable. Until now, I’ve been using YouTube Music. This had two advantages for me:
- YouTube Music provides access to all audio content on YouTube. This gives you a wide selection of remixes and mashups that aren’t available on other services.
- YouTube Premium not only includes YouTube Music, but it also makes YouTube ad-free.
Nevertheless, YouTube is from Alphabet (Google), making it part of one of the world’s largest tech giants – headquartered in the USA. In addition, the company has cozied up to Donald Trump, thus putting profit before morals¹.
Choose an alternative
There are currently four alternatives: Spotify, Qobuz, Deezer, and SoundCloud. The title of the post already gives away my choice: Deezer. But why?
SoundCloud isn’t a music streaming service in the way I’m looking for. It mostly hosts self-uploaded music, and major labels aren’t present there. So a lot of well-known artists are missing, even though I still want to listen to them.
Spotify is certainly the best-known music streaming service on the market and a pioneer. But Spotify has a lot of US-based investors behind it, the service still isn’t financially sustainable², and it doesn’t pay artists well.
That leaves Qobuz and Deezer. Both services are from France. Qobuz focuses more on high-res music and has a smaller library, while Deezer is more in line with Spotify but, unlike the market leader, also offers higher-quality audio.
In the end, I chose Deezer mainly because of the larger library and lower price.
My impression
Basically, music streaming services work quite similarly. There are personal and public playlists, you can search for artists, and there are recommendations. The Deezer app on the iPhone works without issues, but the Windows app doesn’t work at all. If I try to move the window, the app crashes without a word. I just use the website instead, which works flawlessly.
A fun little extra is the quiz feature. You can guess song titles with friends and see who knows their stuff better. Definitely not a core feature, but it’s implemented in a fun way. Deezer also offers audiobooks and podcasts. The former aren’t as convenient to listen to since there are no bookmarks. And I haven’t really gotten into podcasts so far.
All in all, Deezer is solid. The music library leaves little to be desired, apart from remixes. The apps are focused on music and do that well. Much is available in high-res, and lyrics are integrated into the apps.
Sources
¹ https://time.com/7218225/google-maps-gulf-of-america-search-impeach-trump-calendar-holidays/
² https://www.techloy.com/despite-adding-over-8-million-premium-subscribers-spotify-ended-q2-2025-at-a-loss/
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