A little bird advises me there might be a new Roon service called Drops.
Invite only maybe.
Is Roon going to make an announcement soon?
Drops seems like a social app for music discovery and sharing. You’re asked to select preferred genres, examples of artists you like, and then can “Drop” a section of a track similar to what we do in the “what are you listening to” threads in the forum.
I don’t know where Roon is getting the music from. Connecting to Tidal and Qobuz is a work in progress.
In their Privacy agreement they mention Massive Music:
3.3 Business Partners
Harman and Massive Music
Usage data related to licensed content
Content performance metrics
Licensing compliance information
This taken from Massive Music’s front page:
I have a few invites to share if your interested. Send me a PM.
Thanks all for posting this info.
FWIW and because I’m not under a NDA, I knew this was someone’s idea at Roon HQ around this time last year.
It’s not for me but I wish Roon all the best with it.
Shhh.. It’s a secret 
The problem I find so far is that most (all) of the music I’d like to drop is not found. I think Roon said only 30% is available?, but growing.
It seems to be in a very early stage.
Some did 
I didn’t get the email though.
Apparently my forum work and 782 solutions don’t qualify me for perks
But it’s not in Germany anyway, and not for me - though it seems like a neat idea for some. I wonder if there will be any integration into Roon.
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I have a few invites if interested
I received an email invite yesterday from Roon. I don’t know why I was picked, but I do have a lifetime subscription. Social media isn’t my style for communication or music discovery, so currently I have no interest in participating.
The best thing that Roon can do to help my music discovery is to just fix the damn search function.
.
.
Four years ago, we started writing down an idea we couldn’t shake — a vision for what music discovery could feel like if it weren’t run by an algorithm with no taste and no context. At the time, we were heads-down on Roon, and as much as we wanted to build it, it wasn’t something we could take on as Roon Labs.
Then Harman acquired us. And suddenly, the opportunity to assemble a new team and finally chase this idea was right in front of us. The result is a new app called Drops, and today we’d like to invite you to be one of the first people in the world to use it.
Here’s the idea, in a nutshell: think of a song you love. Now think of the exact moment in that song that gives you goosebumps — the chorus that levels you, the guitar solo, the lyric that lands a little too hard. With Drops, you select just that bit of the song, pair it with an artist photo or some lyrics, add a few hashtags, and publish it to the world. That’s a drop.
Why does this need to exist? Because in a short-attention-span world, nothing is delivering new music to listeners in a form that actually fits their lives. Streaming services are great when you already know what you want. “The algorithm” is good at finding adjacent songs but terrible at conveying why something matters — the context, the moment, the human reason a song is worth your three minutes. Drops is built to put that back at the center: short-form, easy to consume, and driven by people who care.
There will be two kinds of users on Drops: curators, who create the drops, and explorers, who discover music through them. When you accept this invite, you’ll join as a curator — because if anyone in the world has the depth of musical experience to make this thing sing, it’s you.
We’re keeping this preview small and quiet on purpose. The drops you create over the coming weeks will help us tune our recommendation system so that when Drops opens to the public later this year, the experience is genuinely spectacular. Your taste, very literally, will shape what this becomes.
Our goal is simple: maximize the “aha” moments — and get people listening to more music, with more meaning, than they ever would otherwise.
If that sounds like something you’d want to be part of, accept your invite here and help us start a small revolution in how the world discovers music.
Please note that this is very much a preview release, and it has plenty of rough edges. The feed of drops you’ll see isn’t being tuned to your taste yet, and we’re currently only licensed for about 30% of the major label catalog. The upside is that you’ll see lots of improvements happening in those areas over the coming weeks.
Thank you for being part of Roon. We can’t wait to hear what you drop.
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I got 2 or 3 invites in the mail already, but damned if I can think of any single reason I would ever want to do something like this…
Somehow I can absolutely see Samsung prioritizing this over… I dunno… fixing boxsets or some other boring stuff like fixing Roon bugs though.
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True!
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Hmm… the reference to licensing is interesting. If they have to have a license to stream the audio segments that is this an avenue to becoming a streaming service?
I received an invite, but it’s not something I’m interested in using.
I got the email a few days ago, and I thought it was depressing.
“We know you don’t have an attention span, so we’re going to help you make that worse by giving you a way to send tiny fragments of songs to other people who can’t be bothered to evaluate music in a real way either.”
Gross. Anti-music. Anti-thought. Icky in every possible way.
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It’s hard to fathom how the greatest proselytiser for Roon outside of North America wasn’t invited or at least alerted to this new initiative but I suppose I’ll just have to suck it up.
My first drop would undoubtedly be the sax intro to Rat Trap by the Boomtown Rats.
.sjb
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@sloop_john_b - got that intro up there for you, Sir, until we can have the honor of your reclaiming it!
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This is the picture I’d most likely use (as Rat Trap was the first “punk” No 1 and knocked the hegemony of Grease off the top spot) but otherwise as we say on this side of the Atlantic, “fair play to you”.
.sjb
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you want punk BR and i shifted with new wave BR. arm wrestle later!
Welcome to the modern world. 
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@Saturn94 my own personal experience (which reaches a ways back from both the listener’s chair and the studio desk) shows me there are more and more people being introduced to music in ways that feel rudderless. it’s not my place to judge but, personally, i’d argue there’s a better way and it’s when you are exposed to something someone else pointed at and said, “this!” the modern world can make things faster but the real unlock is when it’s backed by the taste of other people -real people- who have an opinion and might actually know something. isn’t that the element that’s always exposed the next gen to music they’d have never found or heard otherwise?
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