Deezer

[mortslim]

play individual songs(for free

Wow, your right ! I searched for "Wonderful World" by Joey Ramone, it can up and I played it.

One possibility is that Deezer seems to be based in France. I don't think it could be a pirate type company. But it is in France. You never know with those Frenchies.

[Siduhe]

This is entirely speculation (I have no inside insight) but I can think of a large number of commercial and legal reasons why the Deezer plugin may operate like this. It's also not unusual - you can select individual, full tracks to play via the Last.fm website, but not via the official plugin.

Deezer has (after a very tortous and well documented process) negotiated rights for itself to stream on-demand full tracks from its website. It will have done this with two groups of people - the rightsholders themselves and the regulators. We have no way of knowing what is in the agreements with the rightsholders, but they may also impact on what Deezer can do with third parties, or it may require Deezer to go and get further agreements with the rightsholders every time they want to give a third party like Slim Devices access to their services (this is quite common).

As others have mentioned, there may be restrictions on SD itself based on other agreements it has with third party providers.

Also, Deezer may not want to give full functionality for commercial reasons - by offering limited, free, functionality through SD you create awareness of the service but still have the prospect of driving traffic to the Deezer site.

Or the price offered for full streaming functionality was too high for SD, so they went for a more limited model.

Finally, there are the regulatory issues - here, Europe is in a pretty sorry state compared with the US. There is no single model or regulator to deal with and each country seeks to impose its own licencing requirements. Some are easier to deal with than others (and this I do have direct knowledge of). Some countries draw a distinction between streaming via web pages and streaming via third party hardware, that may be an issue in this case.

These are just the initial thoughts that occur to me - there are probably many more. I doubt SD will comment on commercial issues - the agreements will no doubt be subject to confidentiality provisions - and I wouldn't expect them to in any event, particularly when they've just increased the functionality of the Squeezeboxes, for free, albeit to a limited group of users.

As someone who really loved Pandora until is was withdrawn from non-US users, I understand the frustration. However, if it was as easy as that to get relevant streaming worldwide streaming licences - surely everyone would be doing it?

[y360]

That's probably because streaming on demand requires a DRM imlpementation at the firmware side which is not trivial for the current Slim devices.
Currently the only DRM that's supported is Rhapsody's.
We've been hoping for Napster integration as well, but that requires PlaysForSure DRM support which is yet to be announced.

All absolutely true, yet what remains unexplained, is why one can access the deezer webpage and play individual songs(for free), and yet this feature is not available in the Slimdevices implementation...

[andyg]

Deezer does have an on-demand service as you know, but we only implemented support for the radio service in the first version. On-demand may come later.

[gbruzzo]

Deezer does have an on-demand service as you know, but we only implemented support for the radio service in the first version. On-demand may come later.

Dear Andy,

thank you - the door is not shut, then.

Regards,

Giacomo

[niptuck44]

Andy,
It's a great news for squeezebox french owners that you want in the future extend the Deezer application in this version on-demand !
I'm impatient...
Best regards.

[autopilot]

Deezer does have an on-demand service as you know, but we only implemented support for the radio service in the first version. On-demand may come later.

Great, so the API allows for this then?

That surprises me. I had assumed that this was just a hook to get people using the full fat web service, where they can be forced to look at the adverts that pay for the service. Other than intrusive audio advert breaks in the music playback (as other services are planning/trialling) i cant see how they can make any money via a platform such as this one.

[andyg]

Yes, and on-demand would be a premium pay service.

[gbruzzo]

Yes, and on-demand would be a premium pay service.

Absolutely fine in my book, not trying to be a freetard...what many in the UK and EU have been asking for is a choice. I would be perfectly happy were Rhapsody to offer a "paid for" service in the UK/EU (or Napster for that matter)!

The divide "free radio vs pay for choice of individual track" is an acceptable one...

regards,

Giacomo

[-Stef-]

Absolutely fine in my book, not trying to be a freetard...what many in the UK and EU have been asking for is a choice. I would be perfectly happy were Rhapsody to offer a "paid for" service in the UK/EU (or Napster for that matter)!

The divide "free radio vs pay for choice of individual track" is an acceptable one...

regards,

Giacomo

Just as long as the quality of paid Deezer music is acceptable.