1.8 a wasted opportunity

Everyone here cares about Roon. We are all Roon users, AFAIK. There is nothing wrong with your feedback except how you gave it. Enter a feature request, by all means. Start a discussion of the features. But really, are you expecting to get the changes you want by being so deeply negative, pretending you know the market better than the CEO of Roon who has the market data, or by tossing insults?

7 Likes

If Roon only has 100,000 users, the battle is already over. Apple music claims 60M subscribers, Spotify 130M subscribers and twice that in users. They’re all approximately 3 orders of magnitude more than Roon.

But that’s OK. Roon is not a product. Roon is a journey for the Roon folks, and we are just buying tickets to ride along with them. Our money means they can keep employing people to build what they want. Canny!

My suspicion is that a lot of the UI issues the OP, Mark, calls out are due to the continued use of that Windows-centric .NET infrastructure and the Mono ports. Don’t even know if you could do lockscreen widgets with it. Maybe on a Windows phone.

3 Likes

IMO, you totally misunderstand Roon’s business model. It is obviously not a music streaming service. Those streaming services need economies of scale due to content licensing costs.

3 Likes

Unfortunately, just like Qobuz, these are not the numbers that will make Roon survive in the long future.

They really need to grow the number of customers significantly, and collaborate with at least one extra, prefarably one of the bigger streaming services.

Dirk

1 Like

Closer to 250k at present…

2 Likes

I’m just a guy that really enjoys music and I intend to be around another 30-40 years. I’ve spent a modest amount of cash to enjoy music. Pretty sure I live in the real world too.

And I’m pretty sure someone said the same thing you did last year, the year before, and the year before that …

2 Likes

Where do youget that number? Even in their interviews, Roon has never mentioned hundred thousands.
Dirk

2 Likes

I think perhaps some imagine that Roon wants to be the size of Spotify, which has thousands of employees. I assume that they are more realistic and want to be a successful small software company. Even if they only have 100K users who paid $450 for the product and no other revenue streams, they are doing just fine as a small software company. In fact, that makes them larger than most in that category. (I might be out of date on this, but I believe the rule of thumb for software is that about 200-300K of revenue per employee is considered very good. I’m not sure how many employees Roon has, but I get the impression it is low double digits.)

Edit: I forgot the Roon no longer offers lifetime subscriptions, so the revenue streams are even more favorable than I realized.

3 Likes

Sirius XM is satellite radio. Sirius and XM were competitors, and they joined forces as one provider.

Pretty common listening method in the United States, both in vehicles and online.

Giving feedback is good, but the “way” you present it is deeply negative, perhaps designed for provocation?

3 Likes

I think it’s more focussed than that! They want to be a company that makes enough money to maintain the product so that the owners of the company can continue to use it. Nothing wrong with that, either.

Could be. I don’t know what motivates the owners, but that sounds reasonable. Maybe they hope to sell it one day, like they did with Sonos. Either way, they will never be of the scale of a Spotify, etc.

That’s a rather odd argument. My local butcher can’t compete with the big supermarkets but he’s still in business because he appeals to a different (niche) market. Neither Roon nor TIDAL/ Qobuz are competing with Spotify/ Apple Music et al.

But what if Roon converted 0.0005% of that market? Or more TIDAL/ Qobuz users use their service alongside Roon?

3 Likes

New to Roon. Curious, is there anything this community doesn’t argue about? :rofl:
Carry on and
Cheers!

12 Likes

welcome to the forum @InVinoVeritasty

The forum is a bit on fire right now due to the release of version 1.8. Some of the users are having issues and the forum traffic is definitely higher than normal.

1 Like

Decisively we could find out about it only when the financial year is summarized. And certainly not from the phantasmagoria of a few forum users…

@Mark_Laufer1 Can you offer an explanation of where the Roon CEO and COO is missing the boat? I’m curious, since Roon management has always been engaged and responsive to providing a great product for the end user. Hope you can be specific in where Roon falls short. Are there some bugs that need to be fixed. Sure there are, but they’ll get fixed in time.

Yep. Every thread is a 2021 version of “I Want My MTV!” but without the sweet guitar riffs.
I have noticed that my Captain and Tennille collection sounds a little dry on 1.8, but I guess that belongs on a different thread.

2 Likes

Danny their COO just confirmed that today:

Also answered that approximately 70% of these users have 1.8 running on their cores:

1.8 is a Massive Failure! - #1112 by danny

1 Like