As a music fan one would think I'd be their target group. But I haven't even considered their product and classified it as "some smart crap that is an excuse to syphon data out and lock me in". So all stick, no carrot.
It never really was that at the beginning. It was a good, locally-controlled system which would build itself a wifi mesh (back when that was unheard of) be configured to pick up things like samba/cifs shares and play your library, with some really neat features like combining speakers into stereo pairs or surround systems, and then playing your music and any input devices arbitrarily across these zones you have set up.
At some point they integrated spotify and other similar services, which risked what you talked about, but was fine. There are even third party controller frontends available on linux.
But recently (mid 2024) they delivered an absolute stinker of a new app which routes everything via their cloud, fails to load half the time, barely responds, and looks suspiciously like that grab for control you imagine
