So I ran a little experiment, because I was told that Roon makes some really great recommendations for music similar to what your listening to. I’m also determining which service to subscribe to.
I don’t really know how Roon makes these recommendations, but was hoping recommendations would be pulled from tracks outside of your collection from Qobuz (which I also am currently subscribed to.), which I think it does. My little experiment was to play a very obscure song, which is on Qobuz, Amazon Music and Tidal.
The story about this piece: My friend is a professional music producer and told me it was easy to publish your own music and I wanted to see how easy it would be. On a whim, one afternoon I wrote (very quickly so don’t judge if you hear it!) and recorded a classical piano piece published in 2017, just to see how difficult it would be to publish my own music. (If you would like to hear it, please DM me and promise to refrain from sharing my identity for privacy). I doubt if 100 people have even heard the piece and was expecting that none of the streaming services would give recommendations.
When I choosed to look for similar tracks to Amazon Music, it actually gave me classical piano pieces that sounded similar to my piece. I was shocked! I never added my piece to my playlist, may have streamed it to listen to a dozen times over five years, but not back to back with other classical piano pieces. When I looked on Qobuz, it just gave me classical songs, not classical piano pieces. On Roon, it gave me nothing, which is what I expected. What was hillarious and litterally had me laughing was that Tidal gave me hip hop, R&B and rap songs as recommendations. I told my girlfriend I should go to Capital Records with my piece and tell them I had a hit since Tidal was stating that my piece was similar to some big named hip hop artists.
I also did this with a few other pieces and found that Amazon Music actually gave me the most obscure artists that neither Qobuz, Tidal or Roon gave me. Artists that were not even a blimp on the radar. I listed to Porter Robinson, Musician then clicked on, Customers Also Listened to, and then I got City Girl, Endless and Artificial, which looked like it had some fan made cover art and Virtual Self. Roon also had Virtual Self, and a ton of information about Porter Robinson, which was awesome! I believe Amazon is leveraging it’s vast network of customers and what music they listened to, possibly looking at playlists created by users, to create a similar music list?
Frankly, I have no idea how Amazon somehow got music tracks that sounded similar to my piece. So in terms of recommended music, for me right now Amazon has won for very weird obscure pieces and Roon gives the most information on most artists. I wish Roon some how worked with Amazon Music.