Yes, I think that is the way to go. They have all the take down processes in place if you accidentally use an image you shouldn’t have. They do however have a lot of rules about the quality and multi-device use. The examples here are very roon specific. They work well on the performer page on landscape devices but do not work well vertically (smart phones) or even in other parts of the roon navigation. I’m taking a closer look.
But we have no way of knowing which image roon picks. Perhaps in a future version of roon you might consider letting the user pick their own image from the fanart db from within the software
That way they can pick something that is optimised for roon… roonready artwork 
I agree with the steep learning curve and the price, but if some of you happen to be subscribers of Photoshop CC, there is a really cool feature for this type of editing that is called “Content Aware Scale”. Check out this tutorial for instance.
Since A.I. based image editing becomes more and more available, maybe roon can do the “optimizing” on the fly one day. 
@TJay. Very interesting. The freebie paint.net has a crude version of that. Even very plain backgrounds often need to be “stretched” otherwise you can see the joins. Of course you can do much more with Photoshop and that may interest some but I think the average roon user needs simpler solutions.
@stevev1’s tip is a an excellent one for duos. This is the default roon image for the Eurythmics. I can see it comes from fanart.tv but in a roon context it rather misses the point of what a duo is:
A simple solution is to off-center hard to the right an image like this:
But with even the simplest image editing software you can usually split the artists, rotate them and flood fill or "stretch gaps in the new background like this:
You can also usually do a similar thing with an action shot and turn this:
into this:
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I’ve submitted a few roon friendly images to fanart.tv as a test. It is a heavily modded and QA’d site and there are a lot of rules images must conform to as they want the images to reach as wide an audience as possible. The main restriction from a roon perspective is that images must be 1920 x 1080 DPI. This is an aspect ratio of about 1: 2. This is not ideal as the roon performer page will usually work better with an aspect ratio of about 1: 2.5. On the other hand the tiles work better with this aspect ratio so it’s motre general purpose. In most cases it is still possible to make much better roon images as the vast majority of the existing ones are centered and were not made with roon layouts in mind.
I’m waiting to hear if any are accepted and what the issues are.
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Well I’m skeptical that Roon-blessed distribution of non-public domain images is fair use.
The pictures do look good though!
fanart.tv, does seem to have quite a comprehensive system of copyright protections in place. It is a heavily modded and QA’d site and they simply will not accept a submission unless you follow the rules.
The basic advice is to use images from an artists official promotional site. When you submit you also have to add the artist web-site link. These sorts of images seem to fall more straightforwardly into a “fair use” category and fanart.tv are not expecting any copyright challenges as it is the purpose of these images / sites to promote the artist. They do also have what look like a quite comprehensive set of complimentary take-down procedures in case something slips through the net.
If you have sourced the image from anything other than an artist promotional site then that is treated differently. You are expected not only to attach the link but also the copyright attribution. I’m not really sure but I interpret this as fanart.tv saying they will probably not accept the image if there is a copyright attribution. But in general the large image libraries like Getty watermark their images or use low rez ones so those images are unusable anyway. Smaller independent photographers who earn their living this way don’t tend to watermark or restrict resolutions but they usually clearly attribute their copyright. From comments by fanart.tv this is the category they are most concerned about. That leaves the category of “copyright unknown”. If you go to the fanart.tv website you will see a ton of these.
Fanart.tv is clearly targeting media players and there are a lot of image categories in different aspect ratios. The examples we are discussing here fit under the artist “background” category. But there is also a square artist/composer “thumbnail” category that might work better on the roon composition page which is currently using album covers.
Fanart.tv also imposes very high quality standards and quite apart from the copyright issues they will not accept images not meeting these stringent technical requirements. These quality measures go way beyond what I think is strictly necessary for an attractive roon page but that’s how it is. One example is they seem to be reluctant to accept “historical” photographs of long dead classical composers and artists from the vinyl era. I’m waiting for clarity on that. But there is a long list of reasons why they will not accept your image:
https://forum.fanart.tv/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=97&p=654#p654
It all adds up to a lot of restrictions so finding suitable images for exchange via fanart.tv will be a challenge. However, there are a lot of bad images currently on roon so in principle most can be improved. The fanart.tv forum also supports groups so maybe there is a scope for a roon user group for exchanging roon specific tips and images. It all depends of course on whether you consider the fanart.tv copyright safeguards secure enough or not.