Short feature description: Enable my playlists, including the 6 Spotify “Daily Mixes” that are “made for me” for playback at best available quality through the Roon Home Screen, and do not make the constituent songs findable or playable any other way. Do not import the meta data. Treat these 6 ‘made for me’ playlists effectively as “radio stations”. I follow mine. I also have a bunch of other playlists I’ve made and like.
Background: I had a thought. I really like Spotify for background music, not critical listening. In part because they have amassed a larger data set on musical preference and musical adjacency than anyone else. They have a lead and a believably insuperable one in the near term in what is a market that has relatively strong network economics (I benefit from you using Spotify because as it learns your preferences it makes my suggestions better). Roon has far more and far better structured data, and far better SQ / DSP, and RAAT is a thing of beauty for those of us with systems we care a great deal about. Roon is great for discovery of things I know I want to listen to, Spotify is great for finding things that I didn’t know I wanted to listen to, and which I may (or may not) want to “add to my collection”. While I am a huge Roon believer, as a niche product I do not think they will ever get to a large enough user base to create the kind of data density that Spotify has.
So I like my Spotify playlists, and its what I use on my phone and in my car. Don’t see that changing. It learns well, and makes great suggestions across a lot of genres. My daily mixes change often and well. It’s even interesting to listen to them to try to figure out what the algorithm is suggesting (mentally reverse engineering whatever signal it’s found in my listening).
So taking as a given that Spotify will ‘never’ expose the structured data in their catalog, how about taking their best feature as a primitive? Surely they expose the song name, album art, album name, and artist name, right? So why not let us play (but not otherwise interact with) these playlists we’ve already made or which Spotify makes for us on an ongoing basis? Yes, it might be weird that I’m playing a Black Sabbath song but the word “Black Sabbath” is unclickable, but that’s the price I pay. Or maybe Roon is willing to take its best guess on the fly and make it clickable if it has high enough confidence.
I know it’s theoretically possible through the WebAPI to access the list of user playlists and to play a playlist. That’s all I’m asking for. Thoughts?
