Anyone else cheesed off at Sonos & Eno restricting his Lighthouse project to HD only?

Who’s Brian Eno?

I’d assume, since it’s on Sonos HD radio, that Eno wants it to be in HD, and it would have been his choice not to have it available in standard def. 

I suppose the other side of the coin is he wanted to be paid for his work, and making it “free” wouldn’t achieve that goal.

As to those who can’t “afford Sonos”, they’d have the same difficulty not being able to “afford” a receiver and CD player if that was the release method, or a monthly subscription to a streaming service, much less a phone to play it on, if that’s how he wanted to release his work.

Technology moves on. You can’t expect a ‘386 to continue to run with Windows 10’s version of Microsoft office. There’s got to be some sort of upgrade. Sonos doesn’t make old style speakers, they make network connected computers/speakers. With all the associated issues around that, which has been hashed over in many, many, many threads already. 

I’m sorry you’re so unhappy about this. It must be quite frustrating. 

He’s the guy who got kicked out of Roxy Music.

It could have possibly been ad supported, but I personally have no idea how that would effect Mr. Eno’s paycheck.   I get why someone would want a company to provide products and services for cheap or free, but it’s ultimately about the company making a profit and staying in business.  In some ways, the big companies who offer free/cheap services in order to win customer loyalty and gain revenue through other services, has someone made reasonable customer expectations a little cloudy.

I am little surprised though that Sonos has not started offering Sonos radio (HD and/or free) in app form to play on non Sonos devices.  Seems like the incremental support and development (and servers) would be well worth the additional revenue, and help advertise the Sonos brand.  Don’t know if that phase is still planned, or I’m missing some details.

I wasn’t objecting to paying for the music. On the contrary I still buy physical media and well as digital music online and in store as well as subscribing to music streaming services.

I simply wanted the music to be accessible and I know not everyone can afford the £7.99pm to listen to it. Making it HD only is something of con in my view and just makes for exclusivity. We had all that with Neil Young and Dave Grohl but there music is still available in many formats and hi/lo-fi editions.

Most people simply do not have the ears/brain for HD over SD (mine included). Similar my eyes have difficulty seeing the difference between SD and HD TV but I do have a choice on which to pay for.

That’s all. Nice to have a debate though.

Oh, I certainly understand your position, was just offering up potential reasons why Eno and Sonos went a different way than what you (and I) wanted. Unfortunately, in this world, the desire to make money often ends up supreme.

Surely it’s not unreasonable for an artist to try and maximise their income, is it?

Someone like Eno can’t have many fans, so is likely to get very few streams, I’d have thought.

No it is not unreasonable, in my opinion. Either for the artist, or for Sonos. Which is why I mentioned all of the various potential reasons. Just because I want something doesn’t mean that it’s supposed to be that way, that would be fairly selfish. And if you note the OP’s post directly before mine, you’d see that they feel the same way. They appeared to want an open discussion, which hopefully I provided some insight to. 

My apologies - I was confused by your “Unfortunately, in this world, the desire to make money often ends up supreme.”, which I read as  disapproval...