Deezer Taps Longtime E-Commerce Exec As New CEO — ‘His Leadership Will Propel the Company to New Levels of Success’

Incoming Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier. Photo Credit: Deezer

Deezer has officially named longtime e-commerce exec Alexis Lanternier as its new CEO.The Access Industries-owned streaming platform just recently announced the appointment, with Lanternier poised to take the reins from interim CEO Stu Bergen on September 2nd. Bergen, who’s expected to remain on Deezer’s board after stepping down, replaced now-former CEO Jeronimo Folgueira in April.

Under the latter’s leadership, the service made some commercial strides but failed to crack highly ambitious performance goals amid stiff competition from Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Tidal, and France’s Qobuz, among others.

Now, Deezer is once again looking to achieve largescale growth with a CEO hire from well outside the industry. (Before signing on with Deezer, Folgueira led dating-app developer Spark Networks.) Lanternier previously served as Walmart Canada’s e-commerce EVP and, prior to that, helmed the Singapore division of e-commerce company Lazada, in which Alibaba holds a controlling stake.

Addressing his new post, the Branded co-founder Lanternier emphasized Deezer’s advantageous positioning when it comes to supporting “the major changes happening in the global music industry.”“Deezer is an inspiring French tech pioneer and is uniquely positioned to support the major changes happening in the global music industry while ensuring all stakeholders benefit,” Lanternier said in part. “Its consistent strategy in favor of fair artist compensation, immersive and collaborative music experiences and its state of the art technology platform make it ideally positioned to seize future growth opportunities.”

Additionally, Deezer board chair Iris Knobloch expressed the belief that the incoming CEO’s “leadership will propel the company to new levels of success.” Time will, of course, tell whether that’s the case. But at the intersection of these expansion objectives and Lanternier’s aim of “ensuring all stakeholders benefit,” there may be room to improve revenue under tie-ups with the likes of Universal Music Group.

Though the collaboration has fallen well outside the media spotlight due to 2024’s extremely quick-moving news cycle, the major label and Deezer coordinated on a controversial “artist-centric” model last year.

As UMG has emphasized plans to keep on leaning into artist-centric initiatives in an effort to offset slowing streaming growth – and as France is far and away Deezer’s biggest market – the companies will presumably keep on working together, possibly on a larger scale, after Lanternier comes aboard.

Closer to the present, Deezer has scheduled its second-quarter and half-year earnings release for next Tuesday, July 30th. At the time of writing, the company’s shares (DEEZR on the Euronext Paris) were up slightly at €1.76 apiece, having touched a 52-week low of €1.64 each earlier this week.