This statement is the absolute antithesis of what the Roon Team believes and puts into every Roon release. It demonstrates laziness and a lack of open-mindedness.
Every new artist today builds on the shoulders of giants of the past. The tools are better, the inspiration is better, and the history is better. If you haven’t found better music that’s new, it’s on you. Every generation says the same thing about “today’s music”, and they all end up wrong.
While I too do not care much for today’s pop music, crap music has existed forever. It’s just that history has helped filter it out for you. That’s the laziness I speak of. But it’s the lack of trying is the most offensive to me – that’s the closed-mindedness.
To my mind, this attitude typifies exactly what is both right and wrong about Roon, and why many of us find it so frustrating.
It is good that the developers have a vision, and are pursuing it with passion. However, it is bad that they are so contemptuous of their customers, and so dismissive of what their customers like or want, and this is borne out in the way Roon works. For example, my Roon account shows 49 genres of music in my collection, and yet Opera is not considered a genre even though it probably has better credentials to be a genre than, say, “2 Step British Garage”. I also find this irritating since I have a large opera collection and actually want to see no more than five genres - and only genres of my choosing.
The idea that people who do not seek out the latest hip hop or EDM releases are lazy and stupid - sorry, they lack ''open mindedness" - is not just insulting, it is wrong.
First, contemporary music is fundamentally stale. I often to try to find new music, follow discoveries through Roon, read recommendations on music forums. But music today is doing nothing new. Whenever I listen to contemporary music I am inevitable disappointed. Almost all of it could have been produced at any time in the last 30 years, even the last 50 years. Electronica was new in the early 70s when Kraftwerk did it, and modern takes on electronica have not really progressed since the early 90s. Ditto for EDM, and hip hop, which is painfully stuck in a rut of simple rhythms, simple music and simple lyrics and more about posture than anything else. Bands featuring guitars and drums are still stuck in a time warp from decades ago.
Jazz was the great American musical invention. Nothing like it had been heard in the world before. The same for rock’n’roll in the 50s, electronic, punk and disco in the 70s. These were revolutionary. Nothing as interesting or experimental or progressive is being produced today. Nothing that truly pushes the boundaries. If you think it is, send me a recommendation, I truly want to hear it.
That is why I mostly listen to classical and jazz. It may not be new but it is still interesting, has real intellectual content and is timeless. Hip hop not so much.
But the other aspect of this is the contempt that this attitude shows to the people who - like me - pay a large amount of money for a lifetime subscription, only to have their musical choices pooh poohed as lazy and stupid, and their preferences (I am one of the many who still want folder browsing) rubbished as ignorant.
As I mentioned, this contempt for a large volume of Roon’s customers comes through not just in threads like this but in how Roon operates, in how it fails in some genres, such as classical, and refuses even to recognise some important music, such as opera.
