A Comment:
There seems to be a lot of doom and gloom in this thread regarding the necessity of Roon to integrate with Spotify to succeed in the future.
I am of the opinion, as probably are the majority of the hardcore Roon users, that the streaming integration is just one nice, peripheral, feature of Roon but is not a deal breaker in any way.
For me, if Roon cannot, for whatever reason, work with Spotify or even loses Tidal because Tidal fails or changes it’s policy regarding 3rd party integration, it does not change my commitment to using Roon.
First and foremost, I look to Roon to make sense of my own digital collection of music. I always treat Tidal albums as inferior, the second best option, if you like.
There is something about the sense of ownership (previously Vinyl>CD>HDD stored material) which streaming cannot replace (Can streaming allow us to lovingly scan all our artwork and liner notes and display them at hi-res?). The very nature of the streaming services, ie the ephemeral aspect of not having one’s own copy of the data and the fact that one is at the mercy of what data is made available or is removed does not lend itself to any form of long term loyalty or feeling of actually having a music collection.
At it’s core (no pun intended ) Roon is for the perfectionist, the OCD of the audio world, if you like. I count myself as one of them, obsessing over collecting and filing and listening to a highly personalised collection. It’s why there are so many more threads about collating box sets, or album art of a certain album not being displayed “just so” than about the future of streaming integration.
Roon is a niche product, aimed at a highly specific audience, with wider implications (eg hitting a more main-stream audience with multi-room applications and streaming integration) but it will always have it’s quite substantial band of fanatical followers and supporters whether it is integrated with Spotify or Tidal, et al, or not.
I would even go further and say, in some ways, the purity of Roon is even tainted a little by the Tidal integration. It’s just a psychological thing but those Tidal albums in my Roon collection of curated HDD stored “perfect” albums somehow taints it for me. It’s a faint and irrational feeling but it’s there. Maybe I’m not the only one to think this
I only discovered Roon a month or 2 back and within minutes I was hooked completely. A whole new vista for organising my own collection opened up for me. I am quite sure that there are many, many thousands of potential clients for Roon on the worldwide stage who will jump on it once they are aware of it.
Roon has the benefit of having a fanatical fan base which the me-too streaming services cannot lay claim to having. Roon, provided they manage cash-flow, expansion and feature development wisely, will be here for the long term because of this (to my mind the development of other language options would be a great priority item for them to allow other cultures and countries to benefit from the Roon platform, I am an anglophone in Switzerland and my music buddies are loving what they are seeing, but are stumped because of the language side - sorry, digressing).
To summarise, and sorry for the long post… Streaming integration is just icing on the cake and I always tend to leave the icing