Here’s some interesting news that we didn’t see coming. Streaming music service Deezer announced today that they have acquired podcast and talk radio app Stitcher. Deezer started in France and now has streaming services available in 182 countries, but they just launched in the U.S. last month. This purchase means that they’ll have a foot in the door of the podcast and talk radio arenas as they expand in the States. Our own podcast, the Android Headlines Show, is available on Stitcher, among other places. We’ll be curious to see what this means for the Stitcher app and service.
Deezer is easing into the U.S. market, where they will be competing with big services like Pandora, Spotify, and Rdio. Stitcher caters to a different market than those streaming music services. They focus on talk radio, sports radio, and podcasts like ours. Stitcher has over 35,000 shows and more than 12,000 providers of their content. They aggregate it all and make it available in one easy place. Deezer is going to be able to tap into that established audience with this acquisition. “We think there’s a lot of underutilized potential in streaming talk and news radio content, which none of the leading music services offer,” Deezer North America CEO Tyler Goldman said to VentureBeat. “The perception that there are two different kinds of consumers that only prefer either streaming music or talk radio is incorrect. People are interested in consuming both, but right now non-music streaming content isn’t easy to find.”
Stitcher is one of the most popular podcast and talk radio apps available for Android. It’s also available on iOS, making its audience even bigger. Deezer isn’t so much focused on Stitcher’s user base as they are in driving new subscribers to their paid monthly services. Deezer currently has about 16 million active users, with 5 million of those paying for some kind of a monthly subscription. They plan on operating Stitcher as a separate company and generating revenue through ads, the way Stitcher currently does. That may change in the future. Deezer is going to integrate Stitcher into their own service and take it from there.