If like to try Roon since I have a Chromecast Audio coming. BUT its SOOOO hard to justify paying the ridiculous prices the better music management software's charge. With a streaming service like Tidal its $10-$20 a month but your paying for all the music in the world! A LOT of your fees goes to the artists....I believe I saw that somewhere between 60-80% of your Tital fees ends up in the hands of the artists you listen too. That means your paying very little for the platform itself.
Where these managenent platforms are charging the same money (or more in some cases) as Tidal and giving NOTHING but the platform.....its pretty crazy.
Tidal and others in comparison should be twice as expensive as they are......they are probably looking at this saying "you mean we could have got away with letting them use the app with no music for the same price!" Heck Tidal should just charge another $5-$10 and let you upload your own music along side theirs.
It does look like Tidal is better than Spotify in terms of how it pays artists per stream but it still is $0.00876 per stream. Interestingly, amazon music unlimited pays artists $0.01123 per stream. This is 2019 data as presented here:
https://thetrichordist.com/2020/03/...ible-youtube-is-still-the-1-problem-to-solve/
The per stream payout is of course not the only metric that matters... market share of listeners differs a lot and it will affect the total number of plays per song and hence total revenue payout to the artist. From the above data though, I can see Tidal pays more per stream but we are still talking about 0.8 of a cent per stream. Amazon unlimited appears to pay more than double that.
I can see what you mean regarding using the streaming service app alone. It is simple, does not require additional software / subscription and kind of works. These services do indeed offer access to almost all the music in the world. Having said that, they make it hard for you to sort / organise and access all the music in the world. Take Spotify / Tidal for example. I can build a wonderful playlist with say 500 tracks of what I like. Spotify / Tidal then makes it difficult for me to listen to what I want. I can shuffle that playlist of 500 tracks in hope that I will listen to all the tracks gradually. Unfortunately Spotify will repeat a lot of the tracks and others will almost never play. The bigger my library the worse this becomes.
With Tidal / Spotify, I have the
potential to access all the music in the world but the streaming apps won't let me choose what to listen. Instead they 'shuffle' for me... meaning that part of my library becomes 'lost' and inaccessible while other tracks repeat frequently.
Apple Music is great at solving the above with dynamic playlists which are brilliant. Unfortunately I don't like the way Apple Music sounds (listening fatigue within 5 mins).
Then we can consider DSP and multiroom. Sonos ensures good multiroom sync with their own speakers but try to integrate an AVR and you will soon realise that you cannot adapt timing for multiroom sync (AVRs introduce a processing delay which causes multiroom playback to be out of sync).
Roon solves the above and allows you to organise and listen the way you want + it allows you to sync multiple rooms + adapt the sound using DSP.
Sadly, Roon adds complexity, it is expensive, it does not work as smoothly as the stock apps (no lock screen widget, no volume up down with the phone buttons, takes time to reconnect to core every time you access it). It also requires a bit of regular TLC. Updates bring in bugs as they solve old ones (check the latest QNAP issues reported in the Roon forum). The UI is unpleasant for some people and generally speaking non tech people (i.e my family) do not like to use it.
I don't know which is better to use... simple yet limited streaming apps ... or... powerful yet complex and demanding Roon / LMS.