Even for people on the Standard plan, they still have to pay! Tidal doesn’t have a free tier. Spotify has millions of users, but the majority is on the free plan. That’s a very different user base.
To be completely honest… I have always found Roon’s business plan to be flawed at best. Surely the product is great but it’s betting all of it’s money on a single horse. A horse that has been crippled from the start. Surely it should be possible to craft a profitable business relation with other streaming services. Roon is the kind of software that takes the audio listening experience to the next level. I find it very hard to believe that neither of them is interested in a cooperation.
A few days ago my annual subscription ended, I am contemplating wether I am going to continue my subscription. Not much use for Roon if Tidal goes under.
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Thank you very much
I’m not as fortunate as you must have been since roon didn’t let me see its business plan. 
Also, roon convinced me to buy a membership even so I’m not interested in Tidal or any other streaming service. If Tidal would vanish I don’t known what it would mean for roon in hard numbers but it wouldn’t affect my use case. roon surely won’t tell us (like asked for in a qobuz discussion) how current roon memberships and Tidal subscriptions relate - it would be interesting though.
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I would likely use a streaming service to skim through music I really like and buy the cd’s used .
That’s what I was doing before Tidal
So much speculation. If Roon used another streaming service now I suspect someone would be posting “Is Qobuz | Deezer | Spotify in trouble?”
No streaming service is profitable, but they’re here to stay and there’s no going back to 1990s when CDs were overpriced and profits high. Illegal downloads changed that, yet streaming is still too expensive for the average person: £120 a year for a Spotify subscription is very likely near or the same as average yearly spend on music. For the average user it’s got to get a whole lot cheaper. I read that the average Brit owns just 36 CDs.
For the enthusiast, we get a good deal with TIDAL, but I doubt we’re the target market for most streaming companies.
So, I think this continued speculation is unhelpful. I’m sure Roon Labs know the market better than we do and have done a fantastic job integrating TIDAL into Roon. Moreover, they are absolutely right not to compromise their vision when integrating streaming services. Indeed if they simply added other services with little or no integration into the Roon feature set we probably wouldn’t be so passionate about Roon.
The music industry and streaming services need to diversify and that means engaging with the likes of Roon (on their terms) instead of chasing profits and being dishonest about subscriber numbers.
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Like you, I don’t use Tidal. I find Roon to be very worthwhile only using my own 100k tracks. I have lifetime membership.
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That’d be a good outcome.
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I left Spotify and went with Tidal, because of Roon. It did not make sense to not use Tidal once I jumped into Roon.
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I just can seem to get into Tidal. I’ve tried, I really have, but it’s still not perfect in terms of buffering properly and giving me a consistent playback.
If they could nail the perfectly consistent playback (and allow offline playback on devices other than Android or IOS), then I’d invest more time in it.
I am fortunate to have a very large HDD based library, so I’m really not bothered either way if Tidal stays or goes but I don’t think it’ll go, but be taken over by a much larger conglomerate who will use it as a loss leader for other products.
I do have a Tidal account and use it for casual phone use and dipping into stuff via Roon, but its not really as exploited as it could be, by any means.
Just remember that with Qobuz’s much heralded entry into the US market, the hope is people will abandon their streaming source of choice to move to Qobuz. Creating stories of Tidals’ impending doom helps that scenario. And it isn’t because Tidal is the weakest out there. It is because with MQA, and the interest in the format, they are actually in quite a strong position.
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So the French deploy Norwegian press to storm the States’ market. It’s even more far fetched than all our other speculations here. I almost like it - at least it made me chuckle. 
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I agree that it is more common that in a business failure like that being discussed as the potential for Tidal, the owners lose their stake but the business does not disappear. It goes through bankruptcy or some sort of reorg/turnaround and then there are new owners.
Whether Tidal is really in that sort of trouble is one question. Whether some other owners would recapitalize it and take it over is another question. It’s very open ended.
However, there are two real concerns: (1) in that scenario, Tidal could lose artists and labels, and/or (2) new owners might not allow the Roon integration to continue, since Tidal cannot control the user experience or collect the same user data through Roon. If that is their business plan, that could be an issue.
My gut feeling, though, is that the cash flow that Roon subscribers represent to Tidal would be considered very relevant in its ability to reorganize and survive. Thus, any move to de-integrate is really a long-term concern, not imminent.
I’ve come to the point where I don’t pay much attention to any of it. It could be accurate or it could be more fake news. When I can’t find my selection and Tidal crashes, (then) I guess I’ll look into a Plan B. Until then, enjoy the music…
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While not a lot compared to the market leaders, Tidal claims 3 million subscribers. The portion of those who use Roon can’t be more than 4 digits, and those that would dump Tidal if it lost Roon integration would be somewhat less. I really doubt that the word Roon ever comes up when Tidal management discusses business.
You may be right. However, as a lawyer with some professional experience in the area, any entity discussing financial/capital reorganization (bankruptcy) is not likely to shed any reasonable revenue/cash flow as part of that process, unless it is also an operational burden. Since Roon is probably no burden to Tidal, they would be likely to try to preserve every dollar of cash flow to max their chances of a successful reorganization.
If the assets were immediately bought out by a strategic acquiror to integrate into their business, that might be a different issue.
An interesting link here.
Great. Change your PWs!
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I suspected someone was using my Tidal account for a few months now as it was stopping a lot.
They’re talking about a breach because somebody got ahold of some of their very sensitive playback data. There’s no word about passwords leaking. If the data is real, this is much more likely an inside job rather than somebody breaking into their system.
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