How to rank on Deezer charts

Deezer runs podcast charts and top-podcast channels, and like most streaming apps it has never said how they rank. So the honest route to rank on Deezer charts is the same as everywhere else with an undocumented list: get properly distributed, build follows and finished listens, and read the rank as a signal rather than a target.

What makes Deezer worth more than a passing effort is not the chart. It is the analytics. Deezer for Creators hands podcasters listener age, gender and device data that Apple and Spotify either restrict or do not offer at all.

What Deezer actually publishes

Deezer surfaces podcast discovery through channels in the app and on the web, including Top podcasts and a podcast charts channel, plus genre channels like News and Politics.

Nothing accompanies those lists by way of documentation:

• No stated ranking metric
• No stated window
• No statement of whether lists are per-country or global
• No eligibility rules
• No submission path into a chart

That puts Deezer in the same category as Amazon Music and Pocket Casts, and outside the small group of platforms covered in how podcast charts work that publish anything at all about their inputs.

Step 1: get listed, which takes one submission

Deezer accepts direct submissions and does not charge for listing.

1. Go to podcasters.deezer.com and choose Publish my podcast.
2. Paste your RSS feed at the verify step.
3. Confirm ownership. Deezer verifies through the email address published in your feed. If Deezer cannot confirm the show is yours, make that address visible in the feed and submit again.
4. Complete the show details, including producer name, title, genre, country and whether the show carries explicit content.

Most hosts can also submit on your behalf from a directories or distribution screen, which is simpler if you would rather not expose an owner email at all.

After that there is no maintenance. Deezer picks up new episodes from your feed on its own once the show is live, so a show that stops updating in Deezer usually has a feed problem rather than a Deezer problem.

Step 2: claim the analytics, because this is the real payoff

Deezer for Creators is the podcaster-facing dashboard, and its reporting is unusually generous for a streaming app.

On performance it reports streams, unique listeners, fans and shares, along with total and peak listening time and which episode performed best. On audience it reports listener age and gender, and splits devices across iOS, Android, desktop and web.

The age and gender breakdown is the part worth logging in for. Most podcasters build listener demographics from surveys, guesswork, or a sponsor's assumptions. A survey reaches the listeners willing to fill in a form, which is a self-selected group. Deezer's split comes from playback by everyone who listened there, which is a different and usually more representative population.

Two cautions on using it:

• It describes Deezer listeners, not your audience. A skew in Deezer's user base becomes a skew in your sample.
• Streams are not downloads. Deezer counts in-app playback. What counts as a podcast download covers why the two definitions never reconcile.

Step 3: build the behaviour any listening chart would measure

With no published formula, aim at what every plausible version of one has in common: repeat listening from people who chose to follow.

Three things do that work regardless of platform:

Fix the opening. Find the earliest large drop-off in your episodes and cut whatever sits in front of it. Housekeeping, long musical intros and unexplained references are the usual culprits.

Ask for the follow by name. For the slice of your audience on Deezer, "follow us in Deezer" converts better than a generic ask that names no app.

Publish predictably. A show that lands the same day each week accumulates repeat listening faster than one that appears irregularly, and repeat listening is what separates a chart run from a spike.

That is the same programme that moves position on Amazon Music and Pocket Casts, which is the point. Undocumented charts reward the same fundamentals.

Step 4: decide whether Deezer deserves the effort

Deezer is a French company and its listener base is distributed very differently from Apple's or Spotify's. Before you spend an in-episode ask on it, check whether anyone is there.

Look at your app or user-agent breakdown for the last 90 days. If Deezer registers at a fraction of a percent, treat the listing as a checkbox: submit once, claim the analytics, and spend your promotional attention elsewhere. If Deezer shows up as a real slice, particularly for a show with a European or Brazilian audience, the low competition on those channels makes it worth a targeted ask.

Either way, submit. It is free, it takes ten minutes, and the analytics are worth having even when the audience is small.

When your show is missing or frozen in Deezer

Three failures account for most cases where a show never appears, or appears and then stops updating.

Verification never completed. Deezer confirms ownership through the email address in your feed. Many hosts hide that address by default, and one host restores the hidden state after 12 hours, so a submission made too long after you unhide it will fail. Unhide the address, submit, and complete verification in the same sitting.

The feed moved without a redirect. Deezer polls your feed like any other directory. A host migration that drops the old URL leaves a show page that still exists and never gains another episode.

The show was submitted twice. Submitting directly and asking your host to submit can create two entries. Listeners split between them, and neither builds the repeat listening a chart would notice.

Search your show name in Deezer once a month and confirm the newest episode is there. That single check catches all three.

How to read a Deezer rank without overstating it

A position on a Deezer top-podcast channel says your show is among the more listened-to titles inside one app, by a measure nobody outside Deezer knows, over an unstated window.

The reporting rules are the same as for every undocumented chart. Never present a rank as an audience size, because the population differs enormously between apps. Never sum Deezer streams with your download total, because they count different events on different populations.

What you can legitimately put in front of a sponsor is the Deezer demographic split, clearly labelled as a Deezer sample with the date range it covers.

Put the Deezer slice next to everything else

Deezer gives you a good view of Deezer. It cannot tell you how that audience compares to your Apple listeners, or whether the demographic skew you see there holds anywhere else.

Podder measures your audience from the prefix up, so platform-specific reads like Deezer's sit next to one download baseline that means the same thing every month.