Lets get real here: Google are an advertising company, period. They were losing money on Google Play Music, and it didn’t do anything for their ad revenue, so they decided to kill it, and send folks to YTM which does generate ad revenue.

The number of ways of playing your personal connection from the cloud has been tending to zero over the years, as it costs money to run the service but no-one wants to pay for it. There was Groove, Amazon, Google, probably others. All gone now.

Sonos can’t do any more about this than they can get Spotify to order their playlists sanely, or Apple to include every album under My Music. In fact less than this, as at least Sonos can ask them to fix these things: Sonos can hardly be expected to ask Google to not delete Play Music.

If you want to play your personal music files on you Sonos, do it locally, there are many ways of doing that.

Couldn’t Sonos develop and operate their own cloud-based player? There’s a difference here between “nothing they can do” and “nothing they will do”. At the time of Sonos selling their product to me at a cost of several thousand pounds, a certain service was available, my reason for getting involved as it happens, which isn’t any longer.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting at all that Sonos could ask Google not to delete Play Music.

They can of course have many discussions on whether it will be replaced by an equivalent replacement and what it could mean for them.

As can the users.

I work for a large corporation who are currently switching across to G Suite from M$ and in addition to the ongoing dialogue that the company has, it's made very clear that anybody can (and are encouraged to) click that Feedback button and the more that do it the more focus it may get.

Why would Sonos want to get into the cloud-player business? There is no money to be had (cf. all the dead services) and its a legal nightmare (albeit technically pretty straight-forward). Their remain many ways of playing local files, although that is an ever-diminishing user scenario.

When I bought my first Sonos gear there wasn’t a cloud, all my music was on my PC, and it worked great. In fact that still works great. Then Pandora came out, and that still works (mostly as great). Now they support ~70 different music services, which is fantastic.

Google kill products all the time, its not very wise to rely on their “free” stuff long term, unless it generates significant ad revenue.

I don’t fully disagree, I’m just a bit miffed personally! “Why would Sonos want to get into the cloud player business?” - well, only from some old-fashioned notion of customer service and product improvement for their customers, I agree it’s not compatible with raw capitalism.

Regarding local solutions then, which I accept I’m going to have to get into, have you any advice for me? I’m a music lover, not a tech lover, and I must admit that most of the solutions I have seen described look intimidating. Other than WD My Cloud Home, but then that kind of looks like I’d be over-spending maybe? And then what happens when Sonos remove that from their services list/WD withdraw it?

Thanks for the discussion and thanks in advance for any help.

See my reply to Controlav - I would see it as an enabler to the profit they get on their hardware, just as access to Google Play Music was. But anyway, I know it wont happen, I was using it as an example of the difference between “can’t” and “wont”.

For local music, just use any suitable NAS (it must support SMB1) and run your music from there… It partly depends on how much music you have - if you don’t have much then it could fit onto a USB stick that you may be able to plug into your router. Or, if you need more space, then a USB hard drive could also be plugged in to your router. Obviously, there could be an impact on performance, so a NAS is the better solution. I have other NAS devices available for my main data and as backups to my Sonos NAS, which is a fairly cheap LG device. This has been running 24x7 for over nine years so far - so the overall cost has been about £10 pa. 

Sonos are unlikely to remove local access support, but they haven’t improved it for years. 

Personally, I don’t use streaming services and only use local music, and lock down my system so that Sonos can’t accidentally ‘improve’ it and thereby mess something else up.

Thanks. I don’t know what NAS is, I don’t know what SMB1 is, and I dont know what “run your music from there” means in practical terms. So you see my problem.

Haven’t counted lately, but I’m guessing about 20000 songs.

Obviously I’m being a bit flippant - I can google and work out what NAS and SMB1 are - but I really am struggling with “run your music from there”.

And of course, it’s not your job to educate me! This is why I’m banging on - where is Sonos customer support and service in all of this? I could make another expensive mistake.

Anyway, I really do appreciate the help. You can probably sense that I’m just a frustrated individual who’s out of his depth technically and just wants to listen to music, around the home, easily. I guess the mistake was getting Sonos in the first place.

Look at it this way. How much influence does Apple or IBM (do they still make PCs?) have on Google’s choices? Sonos is a hardware maker. They provide an API for other companies to use the platform to connect to their services, but Sonos doesn’t charge anything, nor pay anything to provide those services. Check Sonos’ annual report, you’ll see the only income and expenses are based in Sonos, and not any agreements or income from other companies, other than licensing agreements from those who have attempted and failed to steal the patents (see Denon and BlueSound). 

In fact, Sonos is currently suing Google for patent infringement, and Google has countersued, for whatever that is worth.

But Sonos only makes their money from selling you hardware, not by any subscriptions or free services that they connect to. So, Sonos is motivated to make their platform as diverse as possible by allowing as many companies as possible access to the API, so that the stream will play on they’re hardware, so more people will purchase their hardware. On the other hand, since there is no payment occurring between Sonos and any of the providers, they’ve got no particular leverage in how that company decides to monetize their user base. 

At most, I assume they go to the company and say “hey, we represent X number of streams to your service annually, and a small percentage of people in our forums are complaining about the fact that you’re getting rid of free access’. To which the management at Google probably says ‘reduced costs for free stuff is good, more revenue for subscriptions is better’. But Sonos has zero control over that process. And generally speaking, individual users feedback carries more weight than the more random and not verifiable feedback from a company like Sonos.

I would love it if I believed Sonos had any input into these decisions, but I don’t. Much like when I worked for a game company who provided Facebook games. Other than following the API provided by Facebook for account interaction, they had zero input in to gameplay. 

But, this is merely my perspective, from years of business experience in related industries. I don’t work for Sonos, nor am I in their corporate decision making process. But I do think your complaints will be more effective when made to YouTube/Google, than it ever will being filtered through the lens of Sonos. 

I don’t expect Sonos to have any clout with Google, ive never said I expected them to somehow make any difference to what Google does.

Thanks amun and others. I’ve had my moan, now I’ll just have to get on with finding a solution. Cheers.

I hate You Tube Music.

First, it’s nowhere as easy to use as Google Play Music and the only way to play my music on Sonos is to pay for it.

Here’s where it gets worse:

While all of my music is in the YouTube app on my phone, only artists A-C are showing up in You Tube Music in my Sonos app, which means I have only a small portion of my music!

I called Sonos and they are contacting You Tube. They said they have had similar complaints.

You Tube does not take customer service calls and has yet to respond by email after I contacted them more than a week ago.

What a cluster %#}}% !!!

You may want to send that feedback to Google, I don’t think they have reps in the Sonos forum. 

I did send feedback to You Tube Music, which is owned by Google.

Youtube music on sonos is absolutly horrible. Its a mess. Your uploaded tracks are all in alphabetical order in the artist section. You can’t listen to any particular album by an artists if you have multiple albums by that artist.  The best music app for sonos is Amazon. EVERYTHING is in alphabetical order, All my music ithat I own is on my hard drive so I’ll just use the sonos app for that. I hate YOUTUBE MUSIC. I cancelled my subscription. Spotify only shows albums and not artist on Sonos. 

YTM is a complete rip off … does anyone here know how to download music out of you tube music? .. google music manager appears defunct

thanks

@P Shipton, Your own uploaded music files (YTM Free) or tracks from the streaming catalogue?

My own music uploaded from google play.

thanks

paul s

do you know if you can cast from Amazon app (on android) to Sonos players .. thats my main requirement, any local device on the network can cast to a Sonos with its own music players account, not trigger music from the Sonos app itself (which is a bad experience)

just terminated TY music family account as its just soo fail.  GPM was generally ok 

You can solve this problem one of two ways:

1. Use the iBroadcast solution. Works in the same way as GPM you upload your music, it indexes and you have Android apps etc to play your music on. The file handling and cover/track manipluation is very good, plus it is free.

But the big plus is that it is supported by Sonos, you might need to search in the development section to pick this up in the Sonos desktop app but it is all documented if you search.

If you use Google Home it does not support direct play, iBroadcast tell me they are not being offered the SDK by Google to develop this, no surprise there (Bad Google).

2. The other way round it is to use a router that supports a USB memory stick so you can share files on the network. I’m doing this for my father to keep it simple. Again the Sonos library can be pointed to this USB and you can copy all your music to the USB from your PC etc. Done this as well all working great, listening to router/USB stored music on sonos as I type this.