What happens when you stop letting streaming apps pick your music?

Please correct me if I’m off here, but so far, @panyc77 doesn’t seem like he’s doing this for money.   If he were, $30 for a lifetime subscription wouldn’t cut it.

I’ve found the playlists generated to be quite good and interesting.   For Jazz, Classical, and Rock they work well.   For Prog Rock, less so, but I suspect the underlying fault may reside with Qobuz and Tidal’s libraries as they are both weak in that genre.   I can take the generated playlist and add or remove songs as I see fit.   There is nothing stopping me from using my brain at all, in fact it is just the opposite.   Now I have more time to use my brain (not that it works all that well anyway as I keep pondering arch and subject like audipophilia).

Anyway, count me as a happy customer and a fan.

@noodlyarm 

Appreciate the kind words. Am I doing it for the money? It started as a side project to fill a gap I personally felt needed filling. Then I realized a lot of other people saw the same gap and needed a fix.
A year and countless hours later, here I am. The current pricing reflects a newly launched product. As more features get added and the costs of running and expanding this grow, prices will change. The people subscribing now are getting in at the ground floor.

And you're spot on about the prog rock results. Sonic Oracle finds the artists, but the tracks in your playlist come from what Tidal or Qobuz have in their library. If their prog rock catalog is thin, the playlist reflects it. The discovery is mine, the tracks are theirs.
Database keeps growing. 10 million+ artists now and I'm always expanding coverage in genres where the results need to go deeper.

Alessandro

Correction, 10M+ tracks DB and always expanding 

No fillers, No AI content 

OP, Thanks for the writeup, genuinely interesting to see someone trying to attack the popularity-bias problem head-on rather than just tuning it. A few questions before I try it:

What's actually happening under the hood when you say "no AI"? If it's not ML-based similarity, what is the matching logic — metadata tags, personnel/label/producer overlap, something else? "No AI" is doing a lot of work in the pitch and I can't tell if it means "no black-box model" or "no data-driven method at all."

On the Vault: you ran Aretha twice and got >90% different tracks. How is that a feature rather than noise? If the underlying selection criteria are stable, two runs against the same artist should converge on a similar pool, weighted or reshuffled. A 90% swing sounds more like the tracks are being pulled from a low-precision pool than that there's a coherent notion of "70 hidden Aretha tracks worth hearing." What's actually constraining the selection?

How was the depth-level distinction (Essential/Balanced/Adventurous) validated? Genre-adjacency algorithms are notoriously easy to make *feel* adventurous while just reflecting whatever metadata taxonomy you built on. Curious what the actual basis is — audio features, collaborator graphs, something else.

Also, about the "real person, real discography" claim. How are you filtering out the flood of AI-generated tracks and ghost-artist catalogs that Tidal and Qobuz are increasingly full of? If The Vault surfaces obscure tracks by design, it's pulling from exactly the part of the catalog where synthetic content is least policed. Do you have a verification step, or are you trusting the streaming platforms' own filtering (which is known to be weak)?

Finally, about the claim of "no promoted content." Sonic Oracle depends on continued API access to Tidal and Qobuz. If either platform changes terms, throttles, or decides discovery tools like this cut against their own recommendation/licensing economics, what's the contingency? Roon at least has direct commercial relationships with those services — do you?

Not trying to be difficult — I'd actually try this if the mechanism holds up, since Roon Radio's popularity leanings are a real limitation. Just want to understand what's driving the recommendations before I hand it my library.

I’ll also add I’ve bought the app and really enjoy it.  I appreciate all people who take the time to handcraft their playlists.  In fact, I wish we had the ability for people to post their playlists in one place on this website so we could all share in them.  
 

However, I rarely have the time to make my own playlists.  Sonic Oracle has done a great job of filling that gap for me. 
 

it would be interesting to learn what Sonic Oracle’s top 5 searched for artists might be over a weekly or monthly period.  Maybe even get a representative playlist based on how users are searching for them.  
 

The app is one more tool to help me enjoy the music and I am appreciate of it.