In January 2010 Jonathan Benassaya lost the company he had built. Deezer's board replaced him as CEO with Axel Dauchez. The numbers behind it were brutal: of roughly 12 million users, fewer than 15,000 were paying.
Benassaya was born in Montpellier in 1980 and trained at the engineering school ENSAM and at ESSEC. He began in an investment bank, then in 2005 founded an online advertising agency aimed at the video-game industry, later renamed Magic Party. He took the business to Shanghai and Beijing to grow it, then decided to sell.
It also flagged that up to 70% of streams on AI-generated tracks were fraudulent and blocked royalties for them.
Back in France he met Daniel Marhely. In 2006 they built Blogmusik, a site that let people stream music found on the web. It was popular and, in 2007, shut down as illegal.
What the founders did next is the part most people skip. They did not walk away. They negotiated with the rights bodies, including SACEM, and relaunched in August 2007 as Deezer under licensing agreements. A pirate site had turned itself into a licensed business.
Legal music is expensive. In the first half of 2008, revenue of EUR 875,000 did not cover licensing fees. In October 2008 the company raised $8.4M from AGF Private Equity and CM-CIC Capital Privé, taking total investment to $15.8M. The big money arrived in October 2012: $130M from Access Industries for international expansion. Access has held about 41% since 2016.
The company that listed on Euronext Paris on 5 July 2022 was a different animal. Its shares fell 29% on the first day. It then spent three years proving it could make money, and in 2025 reported EUR 534M in revenue and its first full-year net profit, EUR 8.5M. It also flagged that up to 70% of streams on AI-generated tracks were fraudulent and blocked royalties for them.
Benassaya had left by then. He left the presidency in November 2010 to work on other projects, including Stream Nation. For a founder, there is a harsh lesson in his story. The person who gets a company out of trouble with the law is not always the right person to get it through the long slog of making subscribers pay. Knowing that, and leaving anyway, is rarer than building the thing.