Christian Pierre reacts on the Heineken-incident in the Belgian media on the Knack-website.

• He confirms that Universal asked Co-Operative Music to disable the streams on the Heineken-website
• He says they Universal doesn't know everything about the international deals
• COOP is part of Universal so in fact it's one record company
• They've done a couple of other actions with Myspace (the Slow-video), Last.FM (The Architect), Les Inrocks (Oh Your God in the podcast),...
• dEUS thinks the internet is a very important medium to promote and sell music
• The deal in Heineken wasn't that exclusive, they've done other things in the rest of Europe
• They picked Heineken in Spain because their music site is the best way to reach the audience they're aiming at. It's not a marketing-website, it's a normal music site.
• They're not promoting Heineken, they're just using a platform offered by Heineken to promote their new album
• The embargo and the 25.000-euro thing for the Belgian media is just a way to prevent the media-battle they see each time the band releases an album. Three years ago they asked the media the same thing, but De Morgen broke it the day after.

Vantage Point is no longer available on the Spanish Heineken-website. Yesterday all Belgian newssites (starting with Het Laatste Nieuws) reported about the pre-listening possibily as Heineken.es. Obviously Universal (the record company for Belgium) wasn't very happy about it.

The deal with Heineken was made by Co-operative Music (COOP), the late V2, the record company that is representing dEUS in the rest of the world. Universal didn't known about the deal.

Yesterday evening, while the news had been widely spread in Belgium, Heineken removed the album. It's still unclear if this incident will affect other (already announced) pre-listening possibilities such as the VPRO-luisterpaal.

(Source: De Morgen, Gazet van Antwerpen en De Standaard)

Update: dEUS manager Christian Pierre was interviewed by Focus Knack about this.