Reason enough to look a second time at the music portal to see what has changed and if there is still an option to download music to the local computer system.

Deezer.com is a French music streaming service, which becomes obvious when you look at the artists and descriptions on the website. Most of the menus are available in English as well, but there are certain elements like the information about Deezer Premium on the startpage that are in French.

Deezer has come to an agreement with the rights holders and pays part of its advertising revenue to those organizations.

Deezer Features

Guests can play music on Deezer just fine. This includes songs from individual artists or tuning in into one of the web radio stations. Some songs may be restricted based on the visitor’s country of origin though, this is indicated by a gray play icon. Users who hover over the icon see the message “sorry you do not have access to this track from your country of residence”.

Deezer.com guests can use the search to find music and play it right in the browser, with an option to launch a custom radio station that is playing the search results; Again without registration.

The music player sits at the top of the website and plays the music continuously even while navigating the site. It offers the usual controls like pausing, skipping or changing the volume.

Registered Deezer users get additional features on top of the freely available ones. They can create playlists, favorite songs, comment on tracks and interact with other users of the music streaming service.

Deezer Music Availability

I have already mentioned that Deezer concentrates on French music and France. If you are looking for the latest US or UK hits then you will largely be disappointed. Still, there are songs by Cheryl Cole, Rihanna, Nelly or Kings of Leon available on Deezer but usually only in the search results and listed as tribute to, as made famous by and a different artist. Still, it seems to be the real deal. Not sure if this is a loophole that is used by Deezer members or by Deezer itself.

Music is also available in different genres including pop, RnB and Soul, Rock or Jazz. Generally speaking, Deezer offers music for all tastes, and lots of it. The owners claim that Deezer offers more than 7 million music tracks on their site. Deezer is an excellent service to discover lesser known artists, especially if you are not living in France.

Deezer Downloads

I have tried several free tools and none of them worked at this point in time. Some have downloaded samples of the selected songs (400 Kilobytes, 25 seconds) while others refused to work outright. Deezer seems to stream the music in 400 KB chunks, that’s at least what the browser cache shows when it is opened.

Let me know if you know of a way to download music from Deezer.

Verdict

Deezer offers an interesting service that reminds me a lot of Jamendo, another great music streaming and discovery website. The main difference is that Deezer offers signed artists with a larger catalog of music available.

The official reasoning behind that change is that Last.fm users have for some time now used other music services as well to listen to music and that it would be in the best interest of all parties involved if Last.fm would concentrate on their core mission and leave the music streaming to those music providers instead.

The changes are already shown on the sites. Single music tracks like the one shown above now display a preview this track link (to listen to 30 seconds of the track) and links to partner sites which vary heavily depending on the user’s location in the world.

The beta launch partners are Spotify, MOG and The Hype Machine with more – including Vevo and We7, in the pipeline.

Last.fm will concentrate their efforts on music strategy including statistics, scrobbling and their music recommendatino engine as well as community features offered on their websites.

The move itself can be seen as a positive one for users who are not living in the countries that were able to access the on-demand streaming feature. These users actually benefit from the change as they can now access those third party music streaming services, some of which are available for a worldwide audience, directly from within Last.fm.

Users from the US, UK and Germany on the other hand lose the ability to play full-length music tracks directly on the Last.fm website but the partner services ensure that they can still listen to full-length tracks on those partner sites.

Users from unsupported countries can enter their email address to be informed when Spotify opens registration for their countries as well. There is however a way to register an account right away even if you are living in a country that is currently blocked from registration.

All that needs to be done to bypass the country check during registration is to use a web proxy from the United Kingdom. Why United Kingdom? Because users from this country can register without invitation. Spotify did a good job of blocking many UK web proxy servers and it might take some time before you locate one that is actually working for you. Someone let me know that this one is working quite well currently. You then need to paste the following url into the web proxy form:

https://www.spotify.com/en/products/overview/

The registration asks for the usual information including email address, username and password. Make sure you remember the username and password as these are used to log into the software program that is downloaded after the registration has finished.

Spotify does not perform country checks in the Spotify application which means that the web proxy is currently only needed to create the account. Another solution would be to ask a friend from the United Kingdom to create the account for you.

Feel free to add comments (and working proxies) in the comment section.

Update: Spotify will block access to the software after 14 days if the IP did not resolve to a country currently supported officially by the application.