This article in the Guardian suggests a new ecosystem of smaller scale music providers and communities is emerging in the wake of Spotify’s dominance, and the backlash to AI slop streaming. From the article:
the timing is fortuitous for a growing number of independent streaming and music community platforms, such as Nina Protocol, Coda, Subvert, Lissen, Vocana, and just last week a new one launched in the UK: Cantilever. “More people are definitely looking for alternatives,” says Nina Protocol’s chief executive Mike Pollard. “We strongly believe the future of music is independent.”
I wonder whether Roon would be well placed to incorporate these platforms as soon as possible. This would potentially tempt current Roon users to join their ranks, and help raise Roon up as the meta-music service to unite all music services.
Not that I wouldn’t like to see Roon integrate with some of these new new indie / micro platforms, along with their fresher (dare I say younger!) editorial and curatorial slants, in fact I’d love to see it.
These platforms remind me a lot of how MUBI started out with indie films. Cantiler in particular have copied MUBI’s original 30 films, 30 day window — although interestingly, MUBI today is far more of a traditional streamer than it was at launch and have since stopped selling themselves on their community or editorial features.
But I suspect the main value proposition for these platforms is their own ecosystem ie. rich and highly tailored editorial content, a deep understanding of their core audience, their communities, not to mention the visual design and feature set of their apps.
If all you’re doing in terms of Roon integration is pulling across audio stream from these platforms then you missing out on a lot of what makes them unique in the first place. Roon would, al the very least, probably need to bring across the editorial content as well, which I don’t think they do currently of any partners other then Qobuz’s various picks, which are a bit formulaic in layout.