Spotify or Spotify HiFi in Roon [spotify will not allow this]

spot on. I am of the same sentiments.

I have to say, I jumped through the episode. They were saying things like… “Being on Spotify’s Top Hits Playlist is worth $100K to an artist”. They were not saying it explicitly, more me reading between the lines.

Having said that, Spotify is gaining leverage, not losing it. They are making a ton of money on Podcasts and advertising. They are becoming the “audio portal” (not for people on this forum!). So if most people listen to music on Spotify, and Spotify is putting competing content (podcasts) up, the record labels need to cut better deals with Spotify in order for Spotify to feature their songs.

I don’t see how a Label could “pull an artist” from Spotify, that would be career suicide for any but existing mega stars. Spotify IS the hit maker.

I am not an industry guy, so maybe I am offbase, but what other channels do the labels have, just Apple Music who is pretty aggressive on their own deal making.

I think labels wouldn’t pull an artist, they would threaten to pull their catalogue.

Also artists at a certain level, particularly the ones used in this leverage scenario, are not opposed to short term pain for long term gain.

Taylor swift is a good example of that in action. While i agree spotify undoubtedly has the most market share and creates all the hits thats really at the permission of the rights holders. Your platform is only as good as your content, if labels decide that spotify is straying too far from the line they set, they’ll take their content to the other platofrms instead. Users will wake up to spotify missing all their music and put pressure on them to cave.

Without other sources of revenue Spotify will never have true leverage. Apple, Google, Amazon can afford to take big hits to subscribers if they were to go down a route that ■■■■■■ off the labels on a longer term strategy, Spotify can’t.

Apple music is in the business of sapping the life out of spotify, thats their immediate goal. A more diverse market share is the target, to do this they can just cosy up to the labels while spotify bleeds revenue. In the aftermath Apple retains a higher marker share and after caving spotify is diminished.

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All good points. We also have to bear in mind the fact that there are only 3 major labels. If one label pulls the plug on Spotify then that’s a hell of a lot of content. I don’t see this happening, but it does give the labels leverage when it comes to dealing with Spotify.

Yup, they also make an obscene amount of money:

“UMG’s overall adjusted EBITDA in Q3 – across all of its divisions – weighed in at €461 million (approx $535m), up 20.7% YoY. Yes: Universal Music Group is now comfortably posting profits in excess of half a billion US dollars each quarter.”

UMG could buy Qobuz and charge their own lower subscription if they really wanted to.

Spotify has no real leverage.

I think if we get to a world in which Apple, Amazon and Google are the majority of streams, that can be a different story.

As of now, rights holders dictate the rules.

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8 posts were split to a new topic: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek investing €100million in AI defence technology

They told us that our business is to provide a custom user experience on top of a streaming service and that is not something Spotify is interested in. They would rather the customer stay within the Spotify experience and avoid the Roon experience altogether.

I understand that line of thinking. I think it’s wrong (as do TIDAL and Qobuz) but I do understand it. They fear that streaming will become a commodity service. A utility company. They don’t want to become that, so they want to own the experience.

We’d move mountains to integrate Spotify. Our total addressable market would grow so much larger. It’d be a business changing event for us, the largest opportunity we have ever had. Same goes for Apple and Amazon. Unfortunately, we are a tiny blip on all their radars, even with our popularity in this niche. I personally don’t think they care about the niche, and Spotify is still only offering lossy content.

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This answer fits with the comments quoted about there view on Spotify being the product and service they are pushing not the music itself , which seems to be just a means to an end for them. They care little for audiophiles they are in it for data and keeping you in thier eco system to mine what they can from you.

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Whenever I’ve thought about Roon in the past, I’ve always thought about Spotify and what would I do without it? I really like Roon, the first time I saw it in all its majesty, well, it blew my mind and I have a gigantic hard copy music collection. I pride myself on it. Ridiculous but there you go.

Anyway, I had a Qobuz and Tidal sub just for Roon. Fired them up for the first time when I got a Roon sub. I loved them. They were really different from Spotify and each other. So why don’t I have still have subs to them all? Money.

But this response, the honesty, hell, just the response, well, it deserves some consideration. I need to look at my Spotify account and see how I can get it across to Qobuz or Tidal.

Many thanks.

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Soundizz is a good bet, I know a lot of people love the recommendations from spotify and that tool lets you set up syncs. So you can take spotifys playlists (release radar, discover weekly etc) and pull them into Tidal or Qobuz automatically.

Also handy for the wealth of playlists that spotify has, the electronic ID playlists are great, this tool lets me have them in Tidal.

Very interesting discussion :slight_smile: Just to add another personal experience after using spotify for over 2 years alongslide apple music and Roon (with local files only).
Sound quality on single end point + DSP + happiness of local library: Roon hands down
Spotify does not sound bad to my ears (even being lossy) but I find it does not let me listen to what I want. Playlist management is basically impossible. I hit shuffle and that means spotify will repeat about 30% of my tracks. Interface includes so many options which also change in the way they are presented. I fiddle with it non stop and it becomes annoying.
Apple music offers control with smart playlists and I never have to worry that it hides away 50% of my library like spotify does.

And you can do this with a free Spotify account.

Yup, still works

A horse’s head in the bed can go a long way.

Tried and tested :joy:

It is not clear to me from their streaming plans, but it seems that Spotify streams at CD quality:

Somehow I doubt that given their app still has all the same quality settings as before. That looks like the output of a converted stream as it’s saying PCM. Nobody streams raw PCM it would be Flac or oggflac in Spotifies case.

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Wanted to bring up an idea I had of a “poor man’s integration with Spotify” that might go some distance to what people want. If Roon treated it like a radio station where only the user’s pre-existing playlists were available, but no structured data about songs / etc was available (you couldn’t search the Spotify catalog, for instance) it might get us some ways towards what people are looking for. It would inevitably still be frustrating that we couldn’t go further, but I wonder if this would be helpful - and doesn’t seem Philosophically different from the integration of radio stations.

Anyways, I wrote the idea up, and I’d welcome thoughts and votes on that feature request at the thread below:

Hello,
I have the Elac Discovery, with Roon essential. I like it a lot with tidal and Qobuz.
Can Elac or Roon please also add a Spotify to it?

Greetings Ralph.

It won’t happen. Spotify won’t waste time and resources.