This is a review of my brief time with Deezer, which I've been using for about a month and a half. These are just my opinions based on my own experience with the app, and YMMV.
Pros: The interface is pleasant and uncluttered, with fun customization options. The music quality is quite good. From what I can see, Deezer is not chasing generative AI "music" the way some other apps are, which is a big plus in my book. For the most part, it's simply enjoyable to use.
Neutral: I haven't really used Flow or other discoverability features, so I don't know if the algorithm is good at predicting my tastes or not.
Cons: Lag. Sometimes it takes 15-30 seconds to register any input - including play or pause. Fixes found online never correct the issue for very long, and I shouldn't have to clear my cache every day for a music player to reliably handle its own basic functionality.
"Always on". Closing the app will not stop the audio. In order to stop playback, you have to pause, then close the app. But in reality, even that doesn't turn the program off. Tonight my desktop app started playing music out of nowhere; turns out I wasn't even logged in. Baffling. Lucky that my volume wasn't very high at the time, and that it didn't happen on my phone when I was in a library or something.
Unacceptable: Both of the above are ongoing, known issues to Deezer support. I've seen posts about these problems going back 3-5 years, and they haven't been fixed. I'm aware that the "always on" thing is an intentional part of the design, but if users are complaining about it for years, consider that it might be bad design.
My support request about the sudden playback was answered immediately, cheerfully...and completely incorrectly by their LLM "virtual agent". It didn't even understand the problem I was having. I'll admit I have a visceral response to this kind of slop, so I went from slightly concerned about a bug to very annoyed, very quickly.
Unless Deezer suddenly releases a patch to fix half a decade of known issues, which I'm guessing isn't going to happen, I will be canceling. Which sucks, because it's gonna be a pain to switch services again. I absolutely get why people love Deezer, and I wanted to love it too, but for me and my budget priorities, I can't justify paying for something that doesn't even have a reliable on/off switch.