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

Oh, no, just a statement of perceived fact. I, too, prefer to be paid for my efforts in some way. Often monetarily, but in the case of this forum, personal satisfaction that often I’m able to help others. Which is still a form of payment to me. 

@amun said

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

and indeed it is not, which is why I am still perplexed by the decision to restrict the music to a single channel which most of the world’s music loving population will not be able to access.

That is unless of course they fork out money for SONOS 2 equipment before then paying for the music subscription.

In spite of my frustration at not being able to get to hear Eno’s Lighthouse, I chose not to throw my toys out of the pram and invested in a set of his Oblique Strategies cards, even though the PDF is (legally) freely available on the internet.

I will be sending an email to Eno one way or another (i.e. there might be layers to pass through in order to actually get to him) and I am hoping for a response. I’ll keep you posted.

You’re assuming that Mr. Eno’s paycheck is dependent on the volume of people who listen to this channel.  It’s entirely possible that Sonos is paying him a flat fee for HD, or a higher rate on the HD channel vs add driven channel.  That’s entirely possible if Sonos is using the channel as a means of providing exclusive content to encourage people to sign up for HD.  It may also be that the channel is only exclusive for a period of time, and will be available to all.  Not sure, but seems as reasonable for Sonos and Eno to produce content that is limited and 

I believe the majority of Sonos customers are on S2 already.  Of those that are not, I doubt that there is a strong interest in Sonos Radio subscription.

While you’re at it, send emails to  Apple, Amazon, Disney, Hulu, Netflix, HBO, and any of the many companies that provide content that can only be heard or watched via a subscription service or by buying content, rather than ad-based free service.

Maybe Mr. Eno will make his work ‘free to all’ later on down the line, after he has received payment for his artistic effort. It might be those who want it for free will have to wait a while for it, perhaps🤔?

This debate is becoming quite interesting. I wonder how this might be substantiated:

“I believe the majority of Sonos customers are on S2 already”

Not a hard conclusion to draw. With very rare exceptions, only people who purchased legacy devices many years ago would be S1 (I don’t recall the exact cutoff date), and only those who have not taken the discount options to upgrade to S2. All new Sonos products are S2 only.  The number of people on S1 will always decrease while S2 will increase.  That’s not even mentioning the fact that Sonos would be completely killing their business if they setup a program where over 50% of existing customers would no longer be able generate any revenue for Sonos whatsoever.  The fact that Sonos sales have only increased since the S1/S2 split reinforces that they are still able to generate revenue quite well

No, I don’t have any actual numbers, but it seems extremely likely to that the majority of Sonos customers are on S2.  I’d actually guess that less than 5% are on S1, so 50% seems like a really comfortable number.

Via growth of the company.  The vast majority of Sonos’ sales came in the last decade, and that decade is dominated by S2 devices (the only S1 devices sold in the 10’s were discontinued in 2015). 

That data is from use of your app? I would expect, if so, for it to be slightly skewed towards S1 folks, just due to the nature of the need for your app….but likely not more than a point or two. 

I don’t have the desire or need to go look, but I wonder if some of the shareholder discussions given yearly have some of that data, which would be directional, not current.

Ok the sales data would be a good indicator of S1 vs S2 ownership.

My own system comprises 4xPlay1, 2xPlay5, 1xSub, !xSoundbar (large), 1xSoundbar (smaller), so I guess that represents over £3K in hardware. I first setup SONOS in a hotel (which is how I came to realise the products were so amazing) with 5xPlay3 and a couple of bridges.

That equipment is all in great working condition, which still makes it difficult if not impossible to consider changing to S2.

I’ll live in hope that the Lighthouse project eventually has another outlet.