Is Tidal in trouble?

Personally I have tidal for on the go music as its a free data allowance on my local phone carrier. I use it on Roon too otherwise I probably would have dropped at least one subscription (my wife has one too).

If it does die then I guess have to rethink the non library data streaming. but there is always internet radio too.

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Your post is better than that article. It extends an understandable opinion and reads like you have a clue. You didn’t take one small aspect of the company’s details and extend it into doom and gloom. You instead painted a picture of a core problem in the business’s offering based on expertise in a certain field.

I feel like like you articulated my feelings very well.

Disagreeing would be one thing. But failing to see this point of view is a little extreme, no? I mean, for many people, the interface is secondary to the integration between a streaming service and a locally stored collection. Were Roon to manage a locally stored collection only, a huge amount of its value proposition would be lost in my eyes. Still a cool media manager, but no longer a real paradigm shift. I mean, I do like the artist and album data, and the cross-links, but that stuff does get stale after having been read once, and it is the way this hooks into Tidal that is most groundbreaking in my eyes.

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I totally agree. Tidal has good sound quality, but ignoring that as it is unfortunately a very niche advantage at the moment, using Tidal without Roon is a fairly terrible experience. I mean, it is “fine”…like if I know exactly what I want to hear, I can find the album and play it - so it was good when I spent 2 months abroad and didn’t bring my FLAC collection with me to listen to music I knew how to search for (i.e. by artist). But it is really very similar to just knowing where something is on your local collection and playing it. Trying to find interesting new stuff without Roon on Tidal is non-functional.

So they are in trouble unless they can make a million more audiophiles.

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The Tesla analogy is both useful and limited. Useful in the sense that almost all of these transformative companies go through existential threats on a regular basis and at Tesla we several times were at far less than 6 months of cash (try a few days worth). But, as already pointed out by others, Tesla was the category leader and had a very finely tuned sense of what the customer wanted, even when the customer wasn’t yet asking for it.

The problem with the streaming services is that like so many of these other modern networked businesses, we don’t really need more than one, or at most two or three and the process of dwindling things down to those survivors is brutal. Here, what worries me is that the question of whether audio fidelity matters as a critical customer trait may hang in the balance. Interestingly, the consumer that Tidal seems targeted at isn’t necessarily the same audience that cares about/is willing to pay for ultimate audio quality – that is probably a better fit with the Qobuz market. But neither Tidal nor Qobuz are Spotify/Apple.

So the next six months may turn out to be critical, less as to which company wins/loses but more as to whether hi-res as a value proposition is viable. You might argue that that question re Tidal is limited to streaming, but I would argue that at this point streaming is the future of audio and if we, as customers, don’t care about resoltion in streaming, we will lose more broadly.

How interesting it would be if music “devolved” to lossy streaming and vinyl, giving up greater sound quality for consumer attributes like convenience, cost, form-factor, etc. that are inaudible but somehow seem to overwhelm the role of our ears in making purchasing decisions…

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Its now wonder the streaming services are in trouble really when they have to pay out 30% of the subscription charge they get from custumers to Apple. i’d imagine Google do something similar.

@sete, @sdolezalek, I made no comparison between Telsa and TIDAL. My Tesla example was just showing that this type of ridiculous article is written by journalists with no real understanding of business. I was not comparing Tesla to TIDAL. I was comparing bad journalism to bad journalism.

Read @Jamie_Biesemans’s post (linked below), and you will see a much better analysis of the TIDAL situation at hand, something we can probably all get behind – but don’t confuse it with the clickbait in the original article(s) – his post actually adds value.

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Danny: Yes, I read Jamie’s post before writring my own and I agree very much with his views. I was just trying to clarify that there are a lot of lessons to be learned not just from Tesla, but from the entire group of companies that have become leaders in this new, much more rapidly changing, volatile and tech driven world of ours.

Where I think people continue to underestimate Tesla is in its very highly evolved understanding of what both delights its customers and, more importantly, in what emotionally attaches them in a very strong way to the user exerience their cars provide. Others may well figure out how to scale electric car manufacturing, or cost reduce, but I have yet to see another manufactuerer that really understood exactly why Tesla owners are so passionate about their cars.

Roon shares some of those characteristics in that most posts I see that are dismissive of Roon see it in a single dimension and have clearly failed to see all the different ways in which you have made this an extremely powerful piece of software. Those of us who take advantage of that power, love Roon as much as we love our Teslas (well, not quite :sunglasses:).

But, I do believe that HIFI streaming is a critical component of the Roon product offering, perhaps even more than “electric” is for Tesla.

This is off-topic, but I’m 100% agreed with this idea. I’m a recent Tesla owner and it is impossible to explain this feeling. The experience is so different from any other vehicle. It can be compared to the euphoria that a first time iPhone user got back in 2007.

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Thanks for the link, @danny. Of particular interest to me was the quote of Enno stating that streaming services like Pandora, Spotify, etc. are concerned about becoming too easy to integrate for fear that they will all be seen as offering the same product (approximately 30 million tracks). I don’t subscribe to any such services, so maybe it is irresponsible to ask these questions: what DOES differentiate the various services? For us, a tiny fraction of the business (I assume), it is integration with Roon. What makes people choose Spotify over AppleMusic, whatever Google offers, etc.? Are those differentiating factors dominant in the market, or do they simply draw lines around very small sectors of the market as a whole?

I am inclined to believe that none of those differentiating factors are all that special. Also, it seems that if Tidal were to die, another streaming service (don’t more now offer lossless?) would be happy to integrate with Roon under some exclusivity deal. If none of the differentiating factors are really of any real significance, isn’t the brand dilution that is of concern to streaming services an inevitability?

Again, I don’t stream, so maybe this is a worthless post, but it seems like Pandora does bring something of significant value to the market: the Music Genome Project data/algorithms. If Pandora were to allow itself to be easily integrated, especially with a user’s local collection, it would be like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. This raises more questions for me: would Pandora be able to apply its algorithms to a user’s local collection downloaded using a different service, such as Spotify? Why doesn’t Pandora offer a service where you can download individual tracks/albums from them (do they allow that now?)?

In short, and given my potentially deep ignorance, it seems like Pandora is well-poised to destroy the competition by offering a value that no others can. If they were to collaborate with Roon so as to integrate Roon’s meta-metadata (the historical data that makes Roon so awesome), it seems like Pandora could dominate the market in beast mode. Seems like a no-brainer, no?

If Tidal dies, @danny, please consider approaching Pandora yet again. What a bunch of knuckleheads…

P.S. - If Roon were to join with a streaming service in such a was as to expose Roon to a large sector of the market, I would buy a lifetime license immediately, in the hopes that it would get grandfathered when Roon goes streaming-only. :upside_down_face:

They all have some unique USP and overlap on others. It’s down to your musical tastes and usability.Tidals original USP was cd quality streaming, now they have mqa and purchases, quoboz again offers cd quality streaming and hires purchases to your collection and is better focused for classical and jazz listening. Spotify has the largest online library of any of them and has for me the best algorithms and playlists generation for discovering new music and your own tastes. Deezer has a unique playlist generator in flow, and has good sized library. Apple and Google are similar to Spotify in lots of ways but allows you to tie your own music in as well, apple via itunes, Google you can upload 20000 tracks for free.

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I would echo what others have said in that a major reason for a Roon subscription for me is to integrate Tidal and particularly MQA into my own collection seamlessly.

I’ve been advocating for some time two things -

Firstly, for Roon to integrate other streaming services which have a sizeable MQA library.

Secondly, for MQA to release more albums for purchase, rather than relying solely on a streaming model. I actually prefer to own my favourite music, but a large majority of MQA material is not yet available to actually purchase.

I’m not sure if I would pay a Roon subscription next year if Tidal did go under and none of the above had happened.

Is there any intention to partner with and integrate e.g., Deezer?

So maybe this thread should be renamed “Is Roon in trouble?”. I certainly hope not. Even without Tidal integration, Roon is a great product - lets not forget that!

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This question keeps being asked over and over…based on what I’ve read from the Roon team on this forum Roon will gladly integrate additional streaming services if a service is prepared and able to integrate the way Tidal has so that it’s a seamless part of your library. If they’ve not integrated with a streaming service I think you can safely assume it’s because the streaming service is unable or unwilling to do so. Go bang their door down and let them know that you want them to rethink it.

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If the question keeps being asked, that would suggest it’s of some importance to a good deal of users, no?

Deals of the kind in question are rarely brought about by individuals lobbying companies; e.g., I highly doubt MQA’s partnership with Deezer was a result of consumers screaming their desire to either company, or the deals they brokered with the major record labels either…

That said, I asked Deezer anyway. For anyone else interested in adding a voice, this would appear to be the place - https://en.deezercommunity.com/got-an-idea-9/roon-compatibility-843/index1.html#post9018

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It is of concern to a good deal of users and thankyou for taking the initiative with Deezer. Danny has set out what Roon requires in order to integrate:

As I understand it Roon would be pleased to integrate with any streaming service that is willing to provide such data. So far none are. The more that users ask them to do it, the more it is likely to happen.

I assume these companies have been actively approached on a corporate level about integration, over and above simply what Roon requires from them to integrate?

Again, although I’ve added my voice to a wish list on Deezer’s user forum, I’m somewhat dubious this is actually how these types of partnership actually come to fruition - was Tidal integration due to user demand, or was a deal of some kind brokered in a completely different way?

(I take it Tidal don’t have some kind of exclusivity deal with a Roon currently, à la Deezer/Sonos?)

I’m hoping Tidal do survive, for many reasons, but it would be disappointing in the extreme to have no real streaming service integration, particularly one with MQA, if they did fail.

If I remember right (I started using Roon in May 2015), Tidal was already integrated. Which probably means that Tidal integration was already in at launch.

That correlates with my memory also.