The subscription- based music streaming service Deezer is far more popular in Europe than it is here in the United States. Its basic tier costs the same as Spotify at $9.99/month, but you can upgrade to CD-quality streaming for an extra $5/month.
As we mentioned in our Deezer review in April, there’s not much to distinguish Deezer from its better-known competitors. The company is looking to change that with an update to its SongCatcher feature.
This news story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best music streaming services.
Previously, when selecting the “What’s this song?” bar on the search panel inside the Deezer app, the service would seek to identify the music. Then you could immediately favorite the song to save it to your library.
Deezer has now added an option where you can sing, hum, or even whistle a melody that’s stuck in your head and Deezer will attempt to identify the song based on what it hears. If you get the right song, you can favorite the song to save it as before.
Field testing of the sing/hum/whistle function indicates that Deezer does a far better job when the person trying to use SongCatcher can carry a tune. Lyrics alone don’t seem to get the job done. At this location, one person has a very nice voice and their humming yielded good-to-excellent results. The other person is more than a little pitchy and Deezer couldn’t make sense of anything coming out of their mouth.
Deezer acknowledges this is early days for the feature and says it’s looking forward to improvements in the algorithm as more people sing, hum, or whistle into SongCatcher. Granted, Google Assistant already includes this feature, but the idea that you can identify and save a song from within your preferred music app is very appealing.
Author: James Barber, Contributor
James began his career as music director at college radio station WHRB. Over the past three decades, he’s managed the legendary Georgia rock band Drivin’ N’ Cryin’, signed Grammy-winning recording artist Lisa Loeb as an A&R executive at Geffen Records, and worked as a producer for artists like Ryan Adams. He currently advises the startup music companies Soapbox Studios and 24/7 Artists and writes about the history of the entertainment business on Subastack at Stars After Stars After Stars. As a freelancer, he has contributed to Slate, the Robb Report, and Rick Beato’s Everything Music channel on YouTube.