The announcement of the Deezer UK launch and its tie up with Orange shows how important it is to be clear when you make your “bid” as a negotiator. If you don’t then the impact of your bid will be lost and the other side will be much less likely to accept it. In this case the “negotiation” with users over whether to accept the Deezer offering may already have been somewhat lost

There was definitely some initial confusion over what the Deezer offer is in the UK. The Telegraph reported the UK launch of Deezer by simply stating the standard Deezer offering:

– £4.99/month to listen to unlimited streaming via computer only
– £9.99/month to listen to unlimited streaming via computer or/ mobile device and an offline mode (presumably recently streamed songs are stored somehow in the device/pc)

This was followed within days by Mobile Today reporting the Deezer/Orange offering which provides mobile streaming only to all of their pay-monthly customers (but not PC streaming from what I can gather) to bypass the £9.99/month tariff that would otherwise have been paid for this service.

To cap it all I also read that Deezer are still finalising their licensing agreements with the UK labels and publishers, so it is not clear if this offering is ‘live’ yet (there is nothing on Orange’s website about it despite the announcement that this would be in place from last week).

When you are negotiating, offering confusion and complexity are not great ways of persuading other people (in this case the public) to accept your bid. So, it will be interesting to see what impact (if any) this service has on Orange’s sign-up rate in the UK.