Has anyone else noticed that the support for playing local music files is incrementally just withering away? As someone who tends to buy music digitally (Bandcamp, Amazon etc) rather than stream, my entire reason (and many others’) for investing so deeply in the Sonos ecosystem is becoming moot.

First, they removed the ability to play music stored on a mobile device. This was a big step down for me personally, because I tended to keep the ‘heavy rotation’ stuff in my collection on my phone, due to  (relatively) limited storage space.

It wound up sending me to my computer to manually divvy my collection into two folders (‘Heavy’ and ‘Light’ rotation). Not the end of the world, but still a pretty big inconvenience.

Next, they recently disabled the ability to search for songs on a local music library. This was pretty awful and sent me to look for Sonos alternatives, despite the big investment. If you wanted to listen to your  local music library,  you had to manually navigate to it and browse. Absolutely terrible.

More recently, the coup-de-grace: no music library access at all. Some users have reported solutions that to be perfectly blunt are far beyond the technical prowess of a casual user. I applaud the users for trying to help the community in a way Sonos seems unwilling to, but this is just beyond the pale.

I’m trying to be as objective as I can, but I can narrow it down to only two possible conclusions:

1 - that the product strategist folks at Sonos are completely inept; or,

2 - that they know exactly what they’re doing, and don’t care. I tend to think it’s this latter one. I don’t think it would’ve been hard to completely decapitate local music library support in one fell swoop, but the cynic in me tells me that they know they’d alienate too many at once going this route. So they chip away at it, and in the end we’re left with speakers that don’t do anything that a lot of other speakers out there can’t do already.

I really don’t understand why Sonos would take this approach here. They had something cool and unique, and they’re leaning on their reputation and established userbase to buffer them against backlash as they turn their product into middling.