@danielle Welcome to the group! I look forward to new ways of discovering music. Your team submitted a new authorization code, which works for me now.
Best of success in this new journey!
Woots
I seem to be in the minority here but I think this is actually a really cool idea.
Iâm in a couple of audio discords and the way we share music kind of sucks. Its just dumping a share link in a channel.
Finding people who have similar taste to you and having them recommend music is the best way to discover music but it is difficult, particularly if you donât have a lot of friends that are into music as much as you are.
Spotify has the best kind of natural sharing (assuming you know to both follow and add someone as a friend) but if you arenât on spotify, there arenât any solid sharing features.
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Iâm not sure âfinding peopleâ part is important. What I see as most critical is the collective intelligence of the music lovers to help you fill gaps in your knowledge and experiences. It doesnât need to be, nor should it be limited to any subset of people. The Drops product will (at some point) make it easy to do the âsocialâ thing, but itâs not the primary goal.
Even if we ignore all the future music that will exist, there is so much great stuff from the past that each of us have not come across. Drops should eventually get to the point where Rooners use each others knowledge to fill those gaps. Itâs also a way for Rooners to share their experiences with the people that donât know all the gems they do⌠but if you donât want to share your tastes, or it feels too âsocial networkâ for you, then Drop can be used to just help you find new-to-you music.
A place where we can improve when talking about Drops is that people seem to gravitate towards the idea that its meant to replace listening to songs or albums. Itâs not meant to replace listening to complete songs or albums. Maybe itâs because of the endless scrolling on TikTok and Instagram that have taken over the brains of so many. However, many of those people still watch full feature-length films, and even longer forms of content like binge-watching entire TV series. Drops is meant to help you âsampleâ / âget a taste ofâ an artist or song before you commit to the time of listening to the full song or album.
Obviously Iâm speaking about the product as it would exist when out of beta, and it itâs not even close yet⌠but I hope you can see the vision of where we are trying to take it.
Iâve thought about Drops a lot since writing my first response a few weeks ago. Iâve also had the opportunity to speak with someone from the development team, which was very interesting.
As has been said before, this is an early Beta. Itâs the place where the development team gets broad user feedback to guide them. Yes, the music content is limited, and the interface has some problems. Iâm sure the Drops team now understands that lots of us donât like being bombarded with sounds when we open an app and I am confident they will respond to that and other feedback.
I think that one of the big questions is around the teamâs deep belief that most of the music we love has a âgoosebumpâ moment, and that moment can be shared in a 30 second clip. Iâm not convinced that I buy into that part of it. I created a few Drops with the music I could find, and struggled. I couldnât identify a special moment in many songs, and when I did, I couldnât seem to incorporate it into a Drop in a way that made sense. Ultimately, I just made 30 second samplings that looped around reasonably well and were representative of the song.
A number of people posting on this topic have commented that the special moments need context; I agree. Even on songs that do have a part that makes my heart sing, I canât just jump into it. I need the foreplay first.
I have been using it, just a bit. It is rather frustrating when you want to share something but canât find it. I also like turning people on to music a lot so, I like it. Why can it not work with my music collection?
Soon! Itâs the most frustrating part of the experience right now⌠but we do have a fix in the works!
Your collection is not licensed for sharing. You canât take your FLAC files and legally share them with people. We pay the licensing to music rights holders so you donât have to pay, but that requires us to get the right to do that. Thatâs the delay. We got Universal Music Groupâs music (thatâs what you see in the app now)⌠the others are coming soon!
The teamâs deep belief is a little more nuanced than that. I think there are a few situations that all can be resolved with the short clip:
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Often, the first few seconds of songs do not provide a good representation of the entire piece. The build-up, âthe foreplayâ, is a critical part to enjoy the whole thing, but sometimes you just want a taste of what the future is like before you commit to all 4 minutes. Itâs even worse if its a playlist. A small clip in the middle of the song that better represents the song is far more useful. Funkadelicâs âMaggot Brainâ has an intro that is weird, but it doesnât capture Eddie Hazelâs guitar at all. Siaâs âChandelierâ has no intro, but it almost sounds like Caribbean Pop or Reggae to start. Itâs only until you get to the chrousâ vocal leap that cements the song in your head forever.
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Songs have meaningful moments. Miles Davisâs âRight Offâ on the Jack Johnson album has a very meaningful part that isnât at the start of the song. Miles Davisâ trumpet on âRight Offâ doesnât come in until over 2 minutes into the song. It doesnât give me goosebumps, but I do enjoy it and the trumpet is a critical part of the song. I would never share that song with anyone without telling them to skip 2 minutes and 15ish seconds in. Itâd be a shame to give up after 1-2 minutes and not get to that part.
Others off the top of my head:
- Missy Elliott, Work It: the reversed vocal/hook moment.
- Benson Boone, Beautiful Things: the screamed chorus lift.
- Phil Collins, In the Air Tonight: the drum fill
- Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody: the operatic section
- Adele: most of her choruses
- Fleetwood Mac, The Chain: the bass breakdown
- Gorillaz, Feel Good Inc.: the bassline/hook section
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How often have you heard a song you like, but then never again? A clip thatâs been charged with emotional energy from the clip creator (goosebump triggering or just a âthats a fun partâ) will definitely be better at finding those gems you were exposed to but failed to properly discover. You donât need the goosebump instilling clip, just the recognizable one.
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Sharing music on the internet is just bad. I often browse Reddit looking for new music or new ways to enjoy my favorites. For example, on this Reddit thread on the best lyrics from the band Tool, or this one about electronic music with a âMiddle eastern soundâ, users offer up personalized suggestions, and many of them are very emotionally charged. If you collected up these song suggestions into a playlist, that would be so much better the current experience (copy/paste to search for them). But even then, 40 clips I could flip through TikTok style is such a better way to get through that list. The goal is to go listen to the things that resonate with me. Yes, the clips might make me miss some gems in there, but its infinitely better than having to sit through what could be hours of music I donât trust to be a waste of time.
Another place I would love this idea implemented is on the most popular Roon community threads of all. Album covers, artist photos, song names, etc⌠itâs so much worse than just flipping through a feed of clips of all those songs, with a quick swipe to get to the full song.
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Clips expose people to songs that they wouldnât get to if forced to discover them through full listening. I would think that Roon users especially would benefit from discovering and sharing deep cuts, older songs, non-obvious catalog tracks, music from outside someoneâs usual taste, long songs with one transcendent section and most importantly: artists whose best work is not captured by their top track(s).
I feel like I could think of many other reasons, but for Roon users, the thing that really hits me is how much musical greatness we all know in our heads, how much we could learn from each other and share with the world. But in 2026, we donât have time for that using song names or playlists that are days long.
So whatâs the actual deep belief? Clips should help us reach more music that we get to fall in love with. Drops isnât meant to replace Roon or any other music app. It is meant to replace social networks like Instagram and TikTok by giving you something productive to do: find new music!
As always during beta, we arenât there yet⌠but I hope you can see our vision more clearly and can help us by creating clips (Drops) that the world needs to hear.
All that said, we do need the criticism and complaints too, so keep it coming. It truly helps us understand how to make that vision achievable!
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I can go to hdtracks or Qobuz and sample all the music they have before buying something. So, I am not convinced Drops fill a need and looks more than a solution looking for a problem. I do not want to disparage the people working on the project it is just an opinion. Music is a trip, a moment, an state of mind, it is art, it is an experience and however, many people think it is a âproductâ that can be shared in 30 seconds snippets. When I was 14 and a friend of mine lent me Close to the Edge Istarted listening âsnippetsâ jumping from a groove to another. It was unintelligibly and of course I did not like it. I told my friend Yes was pure crap. He asked me to sit down and listen to it from begining to end. Not snippets. Now, 50 years later, Yes is one of my favorite bands.
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I agree completely, like reading a book there is no context, no intent, no message, no understanding unless you listen to a whole song, and i many cases a full album.
Music is not fast food for the brain, this generation needs less snippets, less reels and to sit the f* down and listen. Oh my, how old iâve become 
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Me too - Drops is clearly not for the likes of us oldies⌠
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I havenât been invited but I get the point, in principle. But its all in the detail and the red flag for me is this roon fixation on âwisdom of the crowdsâ.
In the old days I would skip through a pile of store recommended CDs at my favorite physical record stores as funds were more limited and I wanted to be sure about purchases. I would even proactively ask for recommendations, particularly from store owners whose taste I found I shared. I can remember, Grammophone magazine used to supply sample CDs you could skip through backed up by trusted reviewer text in the magazine itself. There were also recommendations from other magazines and music press I stopped buying a long time ago. I still regularly listen to a few radio stations with programming I am interested in or want to gain familiarity with unfamiliar genres/content. I regularly skip through Bandcamp samples before purchases.
None of this is really easy to do in roon although there are the âwhat are you listening toâ threads on the forum and I occasionally dip into the âplaylists by roonâ. I often queue up 2 or 3 tracks from recommended albums from various sources in roon and skip through those in listen later before deleting or adding to my library and putting on the normal queue to listen through completely.
What all this has in common is âexpertâ recommendations of one sort or another. What I find with the roon approach of biasing the recommendation engine to some kind of stochastic user base, lowest common denominator are results I have very little interest in. As a result, I rarely use roon radio and/or the recommendations, or âplay lists for youâ. It sounds like very early days for drops but if the basic recommendation philosophy is âwisdom of the crowdsâ it just seems to result in a lot of lowest-denominator âslopâ rather than some more challenging recommendations that stretch my listening tastes that I am really looking for. I rather suspect that the generative-AI bubble will burst soon under its own weight for much the same reasons, so I just see a basic logical flaw in the âwisdom of the crowdsâ approach, particularly for media and art. It may work for other types of human activity.
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Itâs easy to point your Ai of choice at these threads (or all of Reddit), and tell it to present you with a list of urls to YouTube or Spotify, or Tidal or Qobuz for every track or lyric-leading-to-a-track.
For instance:
âTake a look at this forum page and give me Qobuz links to the first ten songs or albums you encounter: https://community.roonlabs.com/t/what-ambient-music-are-you-listening-to/280165â
Here are Qobuz links for the first ten works mentioned on that Roon thread, in order of appearance from the top of the page you linked.[community.roonlabs]
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Brian Eno â Ambient 1: Music for Airports
https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/album/ambient-1-music-for-airports-brian-eno/0724386649553[qobuz] -
Brian Eno â Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror
https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/album/ambient-2-the-plateaux-of-mirror-brian-eno/0724386385857[qobuz] -
Stars of the Lid â The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid
https://www.qobuz.com/au-en/album/the-tired-sounds-of-stars-of-the-lid-stars-of-the-lid/0887396825918[qobuz] -
Stars of the Lid â And Their Refinement of the Decline
https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/album/and-their-refinement-of-the-decline-stars-of-the-lid/0887396833401[qobuz] -
Hammock â Mysterium
https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/album/mysterium-hammock/0889212321444[qobuz] -
Hammock â Universalis
https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/album/universalis-hammock/0889212577742[qobuz] -
Hammock â Silencia
https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/album/silencia-hammock/0889212577841[qobuz] -
Art of Noise â (general artist page; ambient-related releases vary by territory)
https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/interpreter/art-of-noise/download-streaming-albums[qobuz] -
Michael Stearns â (general artist page)
https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/interpreter/michael-stearns/download-streaming-albums[qobuz] -
Hearts of Space â (label/series rather than a single album; Qobuz has multiple compilations)
https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/label/hearts-of-space/download-streaming-albums[qobuz]
These correspond to the first ten distinct artists/albums cited in the thread text before the later radio streams and live-ensemble Eno references.[community.roonlabs]
Here is that Tool Thread you pointed at. See the right sidebar:
Thank you for taking the time to explain the thinking behind Drops. I do understand the vision much better now, but Iâm still not convinced itâs addressing a problem that many existing Roon users actually have.
One factor that perhaps deserves more consideration is Roonâs customer base. I suspect the average Roon subscriber is considerably older than the typical TikTok or Instagram user. Many of us actively avoid the endless scrolling experience that those platforms encourage. We came to Roon because it offers a more considered, immersive way of enjoying music, not because we wanted another social media feed.
To me, Drops feels a little like a solution looking for a problem. If the objective is to help people discover new music, thatâs already something streaming services do very well. We can browse recommendations, explore curated playlists, listen to radio stations based on our tastes, and skip tracks instantly if they donât appeal. The commitment to a four-minute song is rarely more than a few seconds before we decide whether to continue.
I completely agree that many songs have defining moments well beyond the opening bars. Your examples are excellent. But those moments are often powerful precisely because of the musical journey that leads to them. Reducing a piece of music to a single highlight risks turning great compositions into little more than memorable sound bites.
I also wonder whether Drops is being designed primarily for existing Roon users or for a different audience altogether. If the intention is to attract younger listeners who are comfortable with swipe-based discovery, thatâs a perfectly reasonable strategic decision. However, I suspect many long-standing Roon subscribers wonât naturally embrace that style of interaction because it runs counter to the very reasons they chose Roon in the first place.
Ultimately, I think many of us see Roon as a destination where we deliberately slow down and enjoy music, rather than another place to consume short-form content. Thatâs not a criticism of the engineering behind Drops, I can see the amount of thought thatâs gone into it, but Iâm still struggling to see evidence that it solves a widespread problem for Roonâs existing community.
As always, I appreciate the openness to discussion. Healthy debate is part of building a better product, and I hope the team continues listening to both the enthusiastic supporters and those of us who remain unconvinced.
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Iâm actually trying to reply to the whole thread that I havenât read but skinned. It seems your take is on point. I am disturbed by how I was approached by the Roon founders.
Drops is not targeted exclusively at Roonâs existing community. There are Rooners who are enjoying Drops, but as you predicted, they tend to be on the younger side (at least the handful Iâve spoken to who are highly engaged).
This project is quite expensive to pull off, and the market it is targeted towards is much larger than the Roon market. It doesnât mean Rooners can not benefit, and many are enjoying it. But we do recognize itâs going to be a subset and possibly the hardest group to convince. Iâm not involved with the effort, but there has been even more success on the non-Roon sides of Harmanâs business.
Think of this introduction to a pre-release of Drops as a perk of being a Roon user. If you donât like the gift, just smile and carry on. If you do like it, enjoy!
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Fair, but I was looking for albums from INXS that charted worldwide. Not obscure by any definition.
I guess it depends on the design and implementation, but most recommendation engines end up so noise filled that the recommendations are incredibly tenuous and worthless. (cough, Netflix, cough).
The problem with âcollective intelligenceâ in recommendation engines is that it ends up recommending me a movie starring Adam Sandler because I loved âThe Taste of Thingsâ (La Passion de Dodin Bouffant).
It ignores that a collection of likes and dislikes matters and pretends the problem is more atomic and one of awareness, ignorance, or lack of experience. I donât need to be aware of every Adam Sandler movie, see moments from every Adam Sandler movie, if I already know I donât like Adam Sandler or his movies. The problem is some people out there will like both, and Iâm not interested in paying attention to those people. âPeople like you, likeâŚâ treats taste as an aggregate collection, the container being each individualâs personal taste (or a set of taste genres that are extracted or inferred). It minimizes noise and increases user trust. Itâs possible to profile user taste similarity and find things one user likes, that are new to an otherwise similar user. Still, human curation for discovery is tried and true. It seems like that was what Drops was trying to do. Get a bunch of humans to curate Drops that other humans somehow (magic happens here!) discover and listen to. I think @crowlem has a point that a people driven or algorithmic âpeople like you likeâŚâ approach is one that has worked.
Like some others here, Iâm not sure the âgoosebumpâ moment or âhookâ in a song or piece is what does the trick. I get needle drop moments in movies and TVs, but thatâs music amplifying a moment in some other much longer media. Iâm just not as sure about your faith in the virality of these small musical moments alone. Is there user research that pointed to this as a powerful driver of discovery and other outcomes you care about?
Cheers.
Donât understand it, donât use it, donât like it, donât use it, donât want it, donât use it; itâs not rocket science.
Iâm not keen on the band Queen, so I choose not to listen to them; I donât complain that they take up space on my streaming service, I just donât play their albums. I appreciate that other people do enjoy their output, but itâs not for me.
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Iâm still trying to find out how to become a creator. I have tons of music in my roon library.