Not that familiar with Discovr or Tidal as I have a Qobuz account. I’m not a Roon user, a confirmed Squeezebox user for many tears, sorry, one of the things that out me off was being asked my age when creating an account so that my music tastes could be more easily determined.
Sometimes I just want to listen to something I know or in a particular vein, however much of the time I want ti discover new music and music genres. This is something that music suggestion algorithms are not good at doing.
I work in media and attend a number of conferences for work, last year I attended teh DPP conference in London, most of the speakers were talking about cloud broadcast and VOD and how to monetise viewer and listeners, but amongst this was so,eone from a Scandinavian public service broadcaster who said they were investing heavily in developing systems to insert wildcards into the suggestions pushed to their viewers. This was for news feeds and the idea was to stop people going down the path of ever more narrow minded views as suggestions based on past likes just reinforce already held beliefs.
I feel the same is true for music and the arts and does nothing for innovation. I have loved music for as far back as I can remember and at the age of 6 loved receiving the new records my parents music library sent us, I then progressed to cahrt music for a while to keep up with school friends. Then came John Peel’s radio shows… I doubt doubt a Roon’s predictions would play me ‘Max Harris and his Novelty Trio’ Followed by Aswad then Theatre of Hate, ‘Fast Eddie’ (house/Rap) and Philip Glass for example (add modern acts where necessary). This kind of eclectic mix hugely widened by musical knowledge and enjoyment and is what;s missing now.
One suggestion I’d make would be carefully chosen playlists from radio music shows, in the UK something from Radio 6
music and were it still running Radio 3’s Late Junction, is this possible?
Apologies for the rather lengthy mild rant, but it’s something I would love to see.
P.S. add support for Squeezebox software players, or better still a Squeezebox plugin and I’ll think about joining, not prepared to give up the excellent squeezebox Iplayer plugins for Roon at the moment, especially considering the price difference!