It is reassuring to find that even the boss of a music streaming company can have his listening app commandeered by his children.

Nestled among Alexis Lanternier’s top picks on Deezer is the Aladdin soundtrack, fighting for competition with Creedence Clearwater Revival and rapper Jul, the most listened-to artist in France.

“My kids have their own accounts, but it can happen in the car,” says the father of four, who has run Deezer since September.

The app is France’s answer to the big beasts of the streaming world: Spotify, Apple, Amazon and YouTube. Deezer is popular in its homeland but a smaller player in other markets it operates in, including the UK, US, South Africa and Brazil. It has nearly 10 million subscribers, recorded 11% growth in revenues in its last quarter and is “on the verge of being profitable” for the first time in 2025. Spotify, by contrast, has 263 million paid subscribers.

Lanternier has spotted an opportunity to position Deezer as an artists’ champion as its rivals come under growing criticism for paying fractions of a penny per stream.

In late 2023, it struck a landmark deal with Universal, home to Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey, to create a new royalty model designed to give popular artists greater rewards and slash revenues going to click-savvy players using bots to game the system.

Big-name artists like Harry Styles should receive more from the royalty pool than tracks of white noise such as “a recording of a washing machine”, it argued. Artists above 1,000 streams a month and more than 500 unique listeners on Deezer receive more, and there are further payments for those actively sought out through search.

Lanternier says the company is doing more than rivals to tackle bad actors plundering the royalty pots. “There are stream farms which generate a song, they listen to it for 30 seconds to count as a stream,” says Lanternier at our meeting in a hotel in London’s King’s Cross, near the Paris-headquartered company’s UK offices. “To fight against those frauds [Deezer] identifies weird behaviour and patterns which don’t make sense using machine learning.”

Deezer’s technology has also been used to eradicate some white-noise or muzak tracks which do not use an instrument, replacing them with its own tracks of, for example, the sound of rain, which provides the background noise some users want without sharing in the royalty pool.

The company has backed calls from artists including Paul McCartney to respect creators’ rights, signing a statement condemning the use of unlicensed work to train generative AI. However, AI-generated music isn’t banned from the platform; instead, it is kept out of playlists and clearly tagged.

“If people want to listen to them, it’s their privilege,” says Lanternier. But doesn’t that make it harder for new acts trying to break through? “It’s harder for new artists in general. We now have almost a million songs a week coming, it used to be 150,000 three years ago … It’s harder given the higher competition there is, inherently, in the market,” Lanternier says. However, he declines to give an average figure on what Deezer pays out per stream.

Tech entrepreneur Daniel Marhely founded the business as Blogmusik from his Paris kitchen in 2006 and rebranded it Deezer the following year. By 2012, the company had landed investment from billionaire media tycoon Len Blavatnik’s Access – which remains its largest shareholder – as well as telecoms company Orange. In 2022, it listed on Paris’s Euronext stock exchange – although the stock has fallen almost 75% since, stalked by fears over subscriber growth and rivals’ muscle.

Lanternier’s appointment to Deezer represents a homecoming for the Parisian, who moved to Frankfurt as a teenager as a result of his father’s job at a payments company.

In his early 20s he worked as a paramedic, attached to Marseille’s fire department, a role he describes as “fascinating” although not without its bleak moments. He recalls attempting to resuscitate the corpse of an elderly person because he was not qualified to pronounce them dead. “That’s probably the most difficult thing to do when you clearly see the person is dead,” he says.

His first step in a career which would later span tech’s big beasts was with Boston Consulting Group, in France and then Chicago, before three years working for Amazon. Even now, he believes in Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s method of a “silent start” to meetings to ensure executives read prepared memos.

“I’m still trying in all my next companies to implement [that], and still struggle as it requires a lot of commitment. It’s very effective, actually,” says Lanternier, who is casually dressed in a brown corduroy shacket and jeans, with a Canada Goose coat slung over his chair.

Lanternier would go on to spend five years with the south-east Asian e-commerce group Lazada, and stayed on to run it from Singapore after it was sold to the Chinese behemoth Alibaba.

A spell running online shopping for Walmart in Canada followed; he then returned home to France to launch e-commerce specialist Essor, and invest in startups, before taking the Deezer job.

Now firmly in the role, Lanternier is broadening the subscriber experience: hosting “Purple Door” live shows, making the app more social and gamifying it with music quizzes. He argues its point of difference is that users dictate what is shown to them, free from the artists that are pushed forward through commercial interests on other platforms. “The overwhelming feeling for a lot of people is that their life is more and more dictated by algorithm, and there is this ask that we see from our user base, and especially the young generation, to kind of take back control, understand how the algorithms work and be able to influence it.”

Long-term, Lanternier wants Deezer’s royalty system to become increasingly “user-centric” with fans’ listens rewarding the artists they love. “Your subscription goes to the artist you listen to – nobody can fraud that because you cannot influence the rest of the pool.” He accepts this will take complex talks with labels and music publishers: “It’s a long journey, but it’s a journey we’re well into.”

CV

Age 42
Family Married, four children.
Education Engineering and entrepreneurship graduate of École Polytechnique and HEC Paris business school.
Last holiday Skiing in the French Alps.
Best advice he’s been given Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s advice – “When taking life-changing decisions, visualise yourself 80 years old.”
Biggest regret “Not having a fifth kid – my biggest source of joy in life is still that relationship with my kids. If we’d had had a fifth one, it would have been even more joyful.”
How he relaxes “Sleeping in a tent in nature.”