YouTube Music - not amused

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.