Deezer raises $110M round led by billionaire Len Blavatnik's Access Industries
Deezer Replaces Its $330 Million IPO With a $110 Million Funding Round — Last fall, streaming music service Deezer announced it was going to go public and raise around $330 million in the process.
Context & Ripple Effects
Deezer spent the fall of 2015 marching toward a French listing — first floating a roughly €1B valuation to private investors, then filing to raise $343M in an IPO planned for year-end. Instead of ringing the bell, it has pulled the offering entirely and taken a $110M private round from its existing backer, Access Industries — less than a third of the intended proceeds.
The retreat lands just as the broader streaming market tests public appetite: within days of this round, Spotify opted for $500M in convertible notes carrying IPO-share discounts rather than a straight listing of its own. Both moves suggest the sector's two biggest European players read the same thing — public markets were not paying streaming valuations in early 2016.
First-order effects
- Deezer gets its balance sheet extended but with far less firepower than the ~$330M IPO would have delivered, while majority-backer Access Industries deepens its ownership and control instead of diluting it through a public float.
- Deezer's retail and institutional IPO investors — the buyers of the shelved French offering — lose their entry point into the company at the €1B valuation it had been marketing since August 2015.
Second-order effects
- Spotify's decision to raise via discounted convertibles rather than equity days later confirms the forced response: streaming rivals are competing on private capital terms, accepting costlier structures over public-market pricing they judge too low.
- With the IPO off the table, Deezer must keep funding its Spotify rivalry from insider money, which pushes it toward later raises at flat valuations — the pattern that played out in its $185M round at a $1B+ valuation two years on.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, streaming companies stay private through their capital-intensive growth phase and only reach public markets through backdoors — which is exactly where Deezer landed, agreeing to a SPAC merger at a €1.05B valuation in 2022, essentially the same price it sought before abandoning the 2015 IPO.
- A decade of insider-led rounds concentrated streaming ownership in a few strategic holders like Access Industries, structurally weakening the case for standalone public music-streaming equities outside the market leaders.
The trend: Music streaming is following a stay-private-longer path, with strategic insiders substituting for public markets whenever listings threaten to price the sector below its last private mark.