You can see it as high street stores shut up shop
Thanks for the link
I can count the people I know with a stereo systems on one hand these days. So many just have gone for streaming speakers or bluetooth and their phone. The younger member of my extended family ones are just listening to music through their phone speakers. Even my daughter would rather listen to music off YouTube via her phone rather than use the wireless Roon system I built for her.
Same here: I bought my daughter a one year‘s Roon licence for Xmas, I implemented everything on her system, but Spotify and YouTube seem to be of much greater attraction! When I asked her if I should prolong her licence for another year, she said she much prefers a new bike as a gift 
I would love to get a peek at Roon’s “growth plan”. Are they going to clone 60+ year old men to serve as new customers?
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I’ve posted a comment by a Harley exec before.
He was questioning the future of Harley because “there are only so many fat bearded white men.”
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Wow. That’s really a IMHO situation, isn’t it?
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Many, many people have local music libraries, its just NOT true to say no one has a library anymore.
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To say Roon has no value without a local music library is entirely your opinion. I would pay for Roon with only an integrated Tidal (or Qobuz) account, if, heaven forbid, I lost all my HDD music in a catastrophe. For me, and for MANY users, Roon offers huge value, simply in the way it deals with music tagging, display, and integration with devices around the home, etc. Extend this to a mobile arena, and it increases the value further; in fact it makes integration of streaming services even more interesting.
The line is being blurred in any case between streamed music libraries and locally stored ones, what constitutes “ownership” of music is mental. Put a library of constantly accessible online “rented” music in a format which is personalised, tagged and invested in by the user and the psychological ownership of the music becomes transferred.
Roon offers a much more interesting interface than the crappy ones offered by the streaming companies. In a world where streaming companies mostly offer the same musical content but presented differently, the human interface and UX becomes all important to entice users to choose one service over another (ahem, Roon… xmas is fast approaching… hoping for santa’s extensive UX gifting this year… 
)
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If you have no local library you’re asked for a double investment when switching onto roon. And this prevents people from doing so.
roon must either work as a audio output device so that poeple could play any content they like through roon (in that case the hardware investment makes sense, since they do loose nothing against what they were used to (Kodi for example).
Or roon must integrated things like Spotify, Soundcloud, Youtube and such like so that poeple have the choice to lisense roon while saving bucks for the beginning. And after a while they would likely see that it would make sense to not only have a solution being able to play in high quality while the concent they currently use isn’t up to it. And then they would licence Tidal for example.
Perhaps also a roon-lite would make sense, perhaps with a limitation in the number of possible endpoints and without features such as DSP.
Stefan,
Just my opinions …
One of the biggest problems Roon faces is that its customers and potential customers tend to look at new features and new capabilities from the perspective of I think / I know that’s possible and I want it when in reality there are often practical / business / legal reasons why things can’t be done.
You suggest Roon should function as an audio output device and that sounds interesting but how well does that mesh with Roon’s current design of a database centric system where metadata is stored and can be augmented by users? Audio coming in via an analog or digital source could be played but that would be it just like Internet radio. Yes there are ways to analyze and identify music but using these would probably not be free and how would the music playback experience be affected if Roon had to analyze, identify and then download metadata while playing a song.
You suggest Roon should integrate services like Spotify, Soundcloud, YouTube and others. That would be fantastic but it appears those services have little or no interest in working with Roon or any other third party. I found some research on streaming music subscriptions recently that indicated the big boys had 86% of the market.
Of the 8 services that have 86% of the market the only one that seems like a viable candidate to work with Roon is Deezer but while they only have 3% of the market they may already be too big to bother with Roon. Note that both Tidal and Qobuz are lumped in with all the other services that combined only represent 14% of the market.
Your final suggestion about making a lite version presumably implies that this lite version would be available at a lower cost. Limiting features would incur some small development cost and added complexity but would it really allow Roon to offer the product at a substantially lower cost? Presumably the real costs associated with a new user ( licensing, support ) would stay the same. I realize that $10 per month impacts everyone differently but how much can that be reduced before it’s a bad deal for Roon.
Have you heard about Roon Essentials? It appears it is only available with the ELAC Discovery ( cost $1,100 ) and does not appear to have any monthly or annual fees. It’s limit appears to be in the number of tracks it supports and that support is from the vendor ( ELAC in this case ). As I am not an ELAC customer I have no idea if it has been updated as Roon has been.
Tim
Why is the Elac Discovery the only product to have Roon Essentials, I thought there would be a flood of products coming out with Roon pre installed. I do not understand, what is the issue that is stopping this from happening? Surely this is great introduction or an easy set up for someone getting into Roon.
No, it hasn’t been updated for a while as far as I can see. The feature set seems to be comparable with (a reduced) version 1.3 of Roon.
It won’t harm anything since in real use it would be nothing differnt to the web radio implementation while the benefit would be a much wider one since then it’s up each user what he/she might want to use it for.
It’s more or less a passthrough.
As a person who only fairly recently started using Spotify after having been a Roon user for a few years, I have to say that the Spotify UX is a joy. What mostly does it for me is the auto generated playlists based on my taste and the grouping of similar genres, and in general the intelligence of the Spotify engine when it comes to suggestions when you don’t know exactly what you want to listen to. This is an area where I think Roon is lacking (it won’t even go outside your library for suggestions). And of course Roon is only available in my house or in my office (and even then it’s a separate, much less groomed core) so Spotify wins when I’m in my car and the ultimate source quality is of little concern.
On the other end of the spectrum, there’s Tidal. Their UI/UX is truly atrocious.
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Am I alone in not listening to music on the move? That’s time for me to enjoy, talk radio (Good Old BBC) and audiobooks on CD (Yes CD) as I travel in my van.
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You’re not alone… Radio 4 / Radio 3 for me in the car.
But I would love to be able to access my roon library when in another location such as hotel room.
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Can we convert 60+ old men to newer versions with no Arthritis and 20:20 hearing instead , but to keep them registering as 60+ so they keep retired and enjoy listening
Now theres a plan 
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When I drove a lot I used to plan meetings so I could get back to the car for the Radio 4 afternoon play started
Admission time , how may people have sat in the garage once you get home until the Archers has finished
Internet radio tuned to R3 & R4
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That’s interesting. I’ve not visited Spotify now for a few years i guess. The auto playlists sound interesting. That would be really cool. Could use some kind of fuzzy logic, input a few keywords and/parameters and click CREATE and hey presto. I’d love that. Could have endless fun with that.
There’s so many ways in which current apps could be spiced up, but it’s all so same old, same old. Even a random album feature would be cool and so simple, but…no, let’s not bother.
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The devs have said that the current restriction of Radio to the Library is by no means the end of the road. A number of the devs are very familiar with Spotify and have opinions about what they like and where they think Roon can do it better. We may not see all of the elephant at once, but my guess is that 2019 is likely to be remembered as the year Roon got smarter.
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that’s very encouraging to hear Andybob… I might just renew my membership another year
Depends on the length of the drive and whether my sports teams won or lost the day before 
There is nothing better than a good car stereo with a subwoofer cranking out tunes where you know every word, and the drivers around you think you’re crazy. See Wayne’s World, Bohemian Rhapsody.
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