[France] Music search and discovering service Deezer is currently caught up in a storm of controversy: its co-founder and CEO Jonathan Benassaya has effectively been forced out by his investors. After Deezer faced mounting competition from services like Spotify, it’s emerged that investors ousted the founder in order to put in place a more experienced business manager to both reorganize and perhaps prepare some kind of exit. They’ve been disappointed with Deezer’s performance towards a premium service and low advertising revenues.
The rumour that this was about to happen began last week grew a head of steam over the weekend, as reported by music expert Philippe Astor on French site Electronlibre (Google translation). Midem, the annual conference for the music industry, is currently taking place in Cannes, France and the departure of Jonathan Bessaya from Deezer was one of the buzzing topics during the weekend. One of the things that confirmed this rumour was that the CEO was due to participate on a panel on Saturday during Midemnet (the part of Midem focused on the online music industry) but he conspicuously did not show up. His name was even up on screen during the panel he was supposed to attend. On this panel was also Paul Brown, SVP of Spotify, that is widely regarded as a Deezer killer.
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