A TuneIn Premium subscription offers more than 600 commercial-free music stations and an ad-free experience, but unfortunately it is currently not possible to add a TuneIn Pro or Premium account to Sonos. And even if you could add a Premium account to Sonos, there would still be many radio stations that would stream commercials. So, for now, commercials will always be part of the TuneIn listening experience.

Read more here:
https://support.sonos.com/s/article/83?language=en_US
https://help.tunein.com/categories/tunein-premium-rJe7xMpvz

You could perhaps go onto add your own link to the internet radio station via the Sonos App, if you can establish the streaming URL (if applicable) from the station provider. Here’s a link briefly explaining how to do that:

https://support.sonos.com/s/article/260

Is there any alternative for TuneIn to listening to radio through Sonos? 

Listening to ads to listen to radio on a premium system like Sonos is just wrong. When I get in my car and turn on the radio I don’t have to listen to an ad in order to start the radio station.

Mytuner radio, radio net

YMMV

I found this exact same thing is now happening every single time I swap stations throughout the day. I listen to a lot of Soma FM and other stations which are specifically use are supported and add free. Simply changing a station after an hour or two means I am now getting a pre-roll TuneIn ad. Every time that this happens

I am stuck listening to 15 to 30 seconds worth of commercials.

This is specific to playing a station in the Sonos app, as if I use Alexa to start a station, there’s no tunein bumper jingle or pre-roll ad. 
 

It never used to be a pre-roll ad before every single streaming station would play.

Why does it work with no ad if I ask for the same station verbally through Alexa? Alexa plays the same tunein station with no pre-roll ad and no advertising. When using the Sonos app on my iPad or iPhone, I always get stuck with a pre-roll add. Even if I swap stations within seconds it is still playing me a pre-roll at this seems specific to the latest Sonos app update.
 

It never used to be  this bad.

What’s worse is I contribute directly to Soma FM to keep them add free. Instead tunein is now monetising the free stream from Soma FM where they deliberately avoid having ads to not annoy their listeners.
 

There must be something going on with the way this is working with my Sonos app and tuning.
 

tl;dr:

If you ask Alexa to play a SomaFM station on the Sonos speakers Alexa will do so with no pre-roll ad.
Using the Sonos app to play a SomaFM station guarantees a tunein bumper and pre-roll ad now, every station, every time.

it’s the way the Sonos app is accessing the SomaFM station - because using Alexa to start the station = no tunein ad or pre-roll, or bumper.

Simply grab the direct URLs from https://somafm.com/listen/ and add them to TuneIn/My Radio Stations in Sonos. See https://support.sonos.com/s/article/260

No pre-roll ads, and you can typically obtain a better quality stream. 

(FYI the URLs are stored in the Sonos system, and don’t actually go through TuneIn. The ‘My Radio Stations’ container is parked in the TuneIn menu for historical reasons.)

Thanks @ratty - It’s kinda annoying to have to consider manually adding at least 10-15 stations like that, especially when on my Sonos app, that means not having the cover art of the station, which really helps with identification of what station you are aiming to play.

So to make it work as it used to for SomaFM, I will end up with 10-15 generic grey icons in my favourites/stations? No way to get the cover art? I guess that’s still better than ads every time you start a stream using TuneIn.

Are others not maddened by the idea that just to stream an ad-free radio station easily we have TuneIn now inserting commercials into commercial free stations? SomaFM would surely also be appalled at that. Having a tunein pro account that can’t be added to sonos (why I don’t know) and being a financial supporter of SomaFM myself I find that so intrusive.

Simply swapping from one SomaFM station to another means a bumper tunein ID, followed by an ad. To do that to a commercial free station makes me irate.

And why is it if I ask Alexa to play Groove Salad Classic from SomaFM on my sonos speakers, it works instantly and flawlessly with no pre-roll?

This behaviour is present on the OSX app on my desktop, and on my iOS devices when streaming stations from TuneIn within sonos.

Asking Alexa to play a station gets you straight to the commercial free music from SomaFM. Anyone know why that is?

Alexa = ad free from TuneIn

Sono app = bumper ad+pre roll ad every single station every time

I actually have the tunein app on my iPhone, so I thought I’d check this. Playing a SomaFM station from the tunein app streams immediately, no pre-roll ad, no ‘tune in’ station id jingle.

This tunein ad/bumper/pre-roll behaviour playing before every tunein station is unique to using the Sonos app to play via tunein only.

Play SomaFM on Sonos by asking Alexa to play station = no ads 

Play SomaFM on Sonos through Apple Music via Airplay = no ads 

Play SomaFM on Sonos through the stand alone tunein app = no ads (Even tunein’s own app doesn’t insert ads into SomaFM’s streams)

Play SomaFM on Sonos through the Sonos app via tunein =  ADS 

Sonos still doesn’t host any of that content, including any pre-roll ads, nor do they get any of the revenue generated. See Sonos’ financial statements.

All Sonos does is point to the server that TuneIn has specified. If there’s a pre-roll ad, then it’s TuneIn that’s put that in the stream, Sonos doesn’t do it. 

Sounds like the server that Sonos has been told to point at is a different one than the TuneIn app, and Alexa use. You should be letting TuneIn know. 

I tried several different ways of contacting TuneIn detailing the behaviours above (no TuneIn ads via Alexa to Sonos, no ads via the actual TuneIn app to Sonos speakers via airplay), and have no idea if I will ever hear back. I was kinda hoping as a major client/big business Sonos might have more luck, or even some understanding of what’s going on here.

As I support these radio stations directly to be ad-free, having TuneIn think that this is OK to force an ad on you before the station plays, and to interrupt an ad-free station by inserting their own ads is pretty outrageous, and I had certainly hoped that Sonos had some sway or influence. It makes me question what the point is of 99% of Sonos Radio is, as that’s almost all TuneIn stations that also play the bumper ad/pre-roll as well. It’s the same as streaming it from TuneIn. What value is streaming a TuneIn station from within the Sonos Radio feature if you are still locked into 3rd party ads I wonder?

There seems to be no way to add a pro or premium version of TuneIn (ie your TuneIn account) to Sonos. Why is that? Anyone understand why you can’t just sign in to your TuneIn account within Sonos? That seems crazy also.

The TuneIn experience is now so bad within all versions of the Sonos app I have had to give up.

I have resorted to two work arounds:

1. Direct Stream URL where it’s easily accessible (which means no ‘cover art’)
2. Using myTuner Radio (which doesn’t carry every streaming station)

To say this is frustrating would be an understatement. 

Given the state of the world, I have to say the phrase “first world problem” hardly begins to do this issue justice.

What you seem to be overlooking is the demarcation between the SomaFM and TuneIn services. SomaFM is funded by listener support. The basic TuneIn is a free directory service funded by … what exactly? It’s certainly not the consumer, and I very much doubt that Sonos pays on our behalf. So how does TuneIn manage to pay for its staff and operations, unless it’s by ad revenue, cross-subsidy or perhaps a benevolent sponsor?

Apart from the loss of station art -- which one only glances at fleetingly -- what exactly is the problem with using direct stream URLs for SomaFM? The streams start more quickly and, as I noted, actually deliver better quality. For example, Groove Salad is available directly at 256kbps, yet when I measured it the stream via myTuner was 128kbps. As for TuneIn, for legal reasons I can no longer access SomaFM through it in my country, but when that station was still available through Sonos Radio (backed up by TuneIn) it was apparently only at 64kbps.

At the end of the day TuneIn can't run for free so you either put up with the adverts or don't use it imho.

Never really been an issue for me.

Perhaps the complaint that would be actually actionable by Sonos would be that there is no way to link a TuneIn premium subscription. I am not necessarily against TuneIn inserting ads when they are hosting/distributing the actual radio station audio (which incurs high bandwidth costs).

The problem is TuneIn (as far as I know) does not distribute the audio. They are basically a directory and we have had free and open source directories available on the internet for some time. TuneIn also makes money through the sports stations and such that they license and run further ads within.

To be honest though, I don’t really care about the behind the scenes business dealings. The appearance is that Sonos is injecting ads into local and independent radio stations without their permission. If you call up a station via Sonos Radio, it plays via TuneIn too and injects an ad. It looks like Sonos is injecting the ads and that looks bad.

I’ve tried for years to get Sonos to implement a TuneIn premium subscription. I’ve since killed my TuneIn subscription (baseball is available elsewhere), so it’s no longer an important aspect to me, but I’d certainly support the concept.

To my knowledge, Sonos does not insert any ads into TuneIn streams. I agree that it’s a bad look, but I’m not sure beyond adding the “premium” version of TuneIn, there’s much they can do. Much like every other streaming company, all Sonos does is point at the server that they’re told to. 

Last I checked, which has been a while, there’s no member of Sonos on the TuneIn board, or vice versa, so complaining here will not likely do a lot. TuneIn does not maintain a presence in these forums. 

The artists expect to be paid for their work. They cannot afford to invest thousands in equipment and years of training, then give their work away for free. And, someone needs to pay for the streaming server time. This can be done with commercials or subscriptions.

I too am very frustrated with the Ads being inserted in the Sonos implementation of TuneIn as of late.  It is really annoying - especially considering I am already paying for a TuneIn Premium subscription, in part to have an ad-free experience. I couldn’t agree more with those that have already stated that Sonos should implement the ability to add your TuneIn premium subscription on the Sonos platform.

Sono doesn't implement a service.  They supply an API and the service has to implement itself.  So the responsibility for a TuneIn premium implementation is with TuneIn.

This has frustrated me as well, especially because I am an A/V integrator and install Sonos on a regular basis.  I have been listening to Groove Salad since the early 2000’s, before there was a Groove Salad Classic station.

Groove salad is my regular go-to test station for audio system installations because a) there are no ads, b) it’s so chill and non-offensive no client could possibly be upset by it, c) there’s usually a little of bit of bass so I can test subwoofer performance, and d) I can test it right after installation, without signing in to any music service.

There were NEVER pre-roll ads for any streaming radio stations until Sonos switched to using Tune In for it’s internet radio services.  Why on earth did Sonos switch from their previous ad free internet radio to Tune in with pre-roll ads!!!???

If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it!

Sonos has always used TuneIn, even before it was TuneIn.

I’ve never known Sonos not to use TuneIn. Although I suppose at some point, Groove Salad may have had their own integration with Sonos that has been dropped along the way, since they got the same customers through using TuneIn as a carrier for their signal. 

Groove Salad is SomaFM. As noted earlier in the thread SomaFM list direct URLs for all their stations, at a range of bitrates, which can be easily added to Sonos. No ads. I'm surprised an integrator wouldn't be familiar with this option. 

Just on a historical note, I may be wrong but when I first installed Sonos in 2007 I believe the radio directory service was provided by Sonos themselves. They apparently outsourced this to TuneIn a while later, without ads. It was more recently that TuneIn introduced pre-roll ads.