I’ve used Roon for three days so I’m still on trial. Ever since I used a music player that had a module that automatically pulled in Wikipedia articles on the artist in focus, I’ve missed something like Roon. That player was called Amarok and it played on Linux, and that was before audio streaming services existed.
But there’s data missing in many places in Roon. Artist pictures and record covers. And artist descriptions. How much of this will the users of the service be able to supply? Now and in the future. The Wikipedia model seems to work OK, so perhaps it’s possible to develop along those lines.
I’ve noticed the option to supply a picture - which I cannot because of my trial status. But it must open a can of worms regarding copyright issues?
And for the question of social media in my subject title: It’s not unthinkable that entries for artists and albums could support user comments just like you may know it from Mr. Zuckerberg’s social media platform. I don’t know if it’s desirable, I guess there are arguments both for and against such a functionality. But music is also about finding friends with similar tastes.
The new art director (the submit photos feature you can’t use on a trial) solves the problem of artist photos. Judging by Roons comments they will lean into this more going forward.
It makes sense to allow your userbase to fill out data they have on an artist particularly when the user base are music fanatics.
I would actually like to see Roon tackle the social aspect. No music service has done this well so far, each has shown cool features, none have the whole package.
SoundCloud let’s users comment as the track is playing, love seeing those reactions. Spotify allows you to see what your friends are listening to, only on desktop though (why?!). Tidal creates shareable top 10s each month. Last.FM shows a feed of your friends and compares you.
Features like those above and Spotifys blend could be incredible in Roon. A lot of the members on this forum wouldn’t like it, which could be easily solved by a toggle off in settings but I do think it will attract attention.
When roon moves to mobile, it would make sense to look at more social aspects as they would be open to a much larger user base.
For now however, they are focusing on core features (integrating more music services, device support and the move to mobile).
