Deezer buys Stitcher Internet talk radio service

French digital music company Deezer expanded its presence in the United States on Friday by acquiring the San Francisco-based online news and talk show service Stitcher.

Terms of the deal were not announced, but the sale gives Deezer a catalog of 35,000 radio talk shows and podcasts, including shows from NPR, the BBC, Fox News, MSNBC, Glenn Beck and This American Life.

The deal also gives Deezer a major inroad to the automobile industry. Stitcher was a launch partner with both Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto platforms. And the Stitcher app is integrated with the in-dash entertainment systems in about 50 current model year cars made by BMW, Ford, General Motors, Jaguar and Mazda.

That’s important for Deezer, which offers about 35 million music tracks. Stitcher’s catalog of on-demand news, talk, sports and other entertainment shows will give Deezer programming that competes with traditional radio broadcasters, which are still popular with motorists.
“About 35 percent of terrestrial radio listening is non-music,” Tyler Goldman, Deezer’s CEO for North America, said in an interview. “We thought it was an important offering to provide to our users.”

Stitcher, launched in 2007, lets its 1.5 million users create their own radio-style programing by “stitching” their favorite podcasts and radio shows into customized stations. The shows are streamed to mobile devices and computers.

The Paris-based Deezer, also launched in 2007, has about 16 million monthly active users around the world, chiefly in Europe and Latin America. The company has about 5 million paid subscribers.
But Deezer is hardly known in the United States and is trying to get out of the shadow of more established online music companies like Pandora and Spotify.

So Deezer opened a U.S. headquarters in San Francisco in January and introduced itself to the U.S. market in September with a high-quality streaming music service called Deezer Elite, launched in a partnership with wireless music system maker Sonos.

And earlier this month, Deezer partnered with high-end audio products maker Bose to integrate a Deezer Premium service with certain Bose systems.

Goldman said Deezer will keep Stitcher, which has 1 million active users, as separate brand. But Deezer plans to widen the seven-year-old company’s U.S.-focus to the rest of the world, he said.


“Becoming part of Deezer is an incredible opportunity for us to scale our mission and bring amazing radio shows and podcasts to even more people across the globe,” the post said.

Goldman said Stitcher’s 23 employees will remain with the company, with co-founder Peter deVroede joining as an engineer and co-founder and CEO Noah Shanok remaining as a consultant. Stitcher’s offices are two blocks from Deezer’s U.S. headquarters.