After years paying for Spotify, and having flirted with Apple Music for years as well, and abjuring Pandora, I’ve finally decided that YouTube Music does by far the best job of curating songs for me based on just a little bit of criteria. In short, YouTube Music is the coolest. And yet as has been well noted by other commenters, Sonos completely sharts the bed when it comes to software integration with YTM. Don’t know about others but I can get mine to do a sum total of zero functioning, as far as YTM is concerned. It honestly feels to me like there was some spat between programmers or companies that resulted in a what is essentially a big eff you from one to the other, or a detente perhaps, where someone pissed someone off or had a huge ideological difference of opinion, words were said and then everyone walked away from the conference room table, and left to sit there what is basically a 1/8th developed integration option that does nothing but get people angry. How else can you explain such a failure of action? I can’t imagine it’s just inertia. Maybe it’s because Google wanted to buy them and they didn’t want to get bought and Google was like “then you’ll have nothing and like it.”
I have to say, I’ve had my Sonos system for 10 years now, and I still recommend it to others, but between this, the whole forced deprecation of S1 products thing, and the resultant absurd hassle of having to set up dual systems (S1 and S2), plus my other favorite listening option SiriusXM frequently erroring out due to encoding errors, the stuff has not lived up to its early promise, and it pains me to say that because I’ve been such a staunch supporter. In closing how hard can it be to get YTM working? Not that hard, so it’s not the difficulty of it that is the impediment. It’s gotta be something we’re not privy that boils down to competitiveness or something else petty, like ego.
I’d love to be enlightened to some broader picture showing that this assessment is incorrect.