Contributor I

Sonos Corporation's True Agenda

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With the disastrous roll out of latest Sonos controller app, I began to wonder why would they force an upgrade that was so dysfunctional and lacking so many features that customers liked. Also it seemed strange that users were no longer able to see and modify music folders, or playlists, or update the music library. At first, I thought, wow they really screwed this up. How could they leave all this out? Why are they so reluctant to offer a roll back to a working version? When I read Sonos executive’s Maxime Bouvat-Merlin’s phoney response and explanation, that’s when I realized, it was on purpose.

Then I thought, what is the long term agenda of Sonos? What is the long term agenda of any greedy corporation? To maximize revenue and profits, of course. I then realized that Sonos is about to follow the plan of Apple management, which was to slowly and not so subtly force people off of iTunes and onto their Apple Music subscription service. That’s where the long term money is. I mean, why sell someone a house, when you can force them to be renters forever. And raise the “rent” whenever and to whatever you want. And they must stick with your subscription service, because they don’t own any of the content/music.

And that’s where I think Sonos is heading. By removing features and controls from the user, they are moving into a subscription based service, where users/customers/owners will have to pay a monthly fee to Sonos for online services. They may offer bundles with streaming services, like 10.99 per month for Sonos, Pandora, Apple Music, and Radio stations. Or they may be trying to start their own music subscription service. They may even go as far as charging owners of their speaker systems to pay a monthly fee just to run their systems and listen to their own music. Why just have your customers buy highly over-priced speaker systems when you can also have them pay a monthly fee to use them…?

Though, I’m not sure they would implement that last item, because they would face a huge Class Action lawsuit. But they could make the app so useless for music owners to play their own music that they would force many people to pay for their subscription service just to be able to listen to music. That would probably cause another Class Action lawsuit. But being greedy and stupid has never been an obstacle to any corporate management.

So, I/you/we may want to hold off on that planned new speaker purchase until this all shakes out. Or we may decide to bail on Sonos now while we can still get a good price for our equipment on the secondary market.

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G

Greenland

Prodigy I

There are now many choices for whole house audio that don’t involve a single point of failure. Technical folks can build an excellent system using raspberry Pi’s and other micro boards, an option that wasn’t available back when Sonos made their initial devices.

For my part, I replaced all five of my sonos connects with Acrylic up2Stream boxes and haven’t missed a beat. If Acrylic goes out of business tomorrow, my music will continue to stream.

Enough is enough already.

When Sonos were starting out slimserver and squeezeboxes were the open alternative that you could diy. I know because I used it for a couple of years both in-home and across vpns, before buying into Sonos zone players.

If Arylic/Linkplay go out of business your up2Stream boxes will continue streaming until the online services update endpoints, APIs or protocols. Without anyone to keep the firmware for the embedded services or the app for app services up to date there will be no bug fixing, updating services and the boxes will still eventually end up bricks as they become incompatible with everything they used to work with.

The other scenario is what happens if Arylic get bought. When Google bought SageTV, they closed sourced everything and immediately stopped the sale of devices because they wanted the company IP for internal use in other Google products. While the community tried to battle on, the sale basically made the devices useless.

Unless you are building everything, hardware and software, yourself then everything has a single point of failure, it’s just a case of deciding what your acceptable risk level is and the cost/effort/personal time you want to put into reducing the risk.

Your individualistic solution of DIY ignores open source solutions or alternatives which are much more risk tolerant. They do exist.

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🎵 First We Take Manhattan Then Berlin 🎵

sigh

Prodigy II

There are now many choices for whole house audio that don’t involve a single point of failure. Technical folks can build an excellent system using raspberry Pi’s and other micro boards, an option that wasn’t available back when Sonos made their initial devices.

For my part, I replaced all five of my sonos connects with Acrylic up2Stream boxes and haven’t missed a beat. If Acrylic goes out of business tomorrow, my music will continue to stream.

Enough is enough already.

When Sonos were starting out slimserver and squeezeboxes were the open alternative that you could diy. I know because I used it for a couple of years both in-home and across vpns, before buying into Sonos zone players.

….

Your individualistic solution of DIY ignores open source solutions or alternatives which are much more risk tolerant. They do exist.

I wasn’t ignoring them so much as hadn’t called them out specifically.

They sit on the risk/personal time investment assessment between the two extremes of full individual diy —> to pay someone else for everything and hope they stay aligned with what you want.

For what I want and need I am moving to a mix of open and closed source backend and controller components to exit the Sonos+Ikea smarthome integrated ecosystem I currently have.

I have been a user/contributor to open source both personally and at every company I’ve worked for over the past, checks calendar, 30 years 😳. It can be a very good option, especially if it aligns with what you want, has a healthy number of active developers and even better if you are able to contribute back in some way.

There isn’t a perfect solution that will never stop working, it’s just a case of figuring out what you need and selecting suitable parts that can be easily replaced when they no longer work the way you want.

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A

Audio-nut

Lyricist II

I totally agree with your assessment. If you own music Sonos will charge a monthly fee for the version of the app that has the features we used to get for free. I want to own my music because you have no guarantee that the streaming service won’t remove the version I prefer.

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J

Jim Koo

Lyricist III

….and let’s not forget about all the usage data of their install base (terms & conditions people). There’s a revenue stream in that. Very depressing.

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R

Rhonny

Prodigy III

….and let’s not forget about all the usage data of their install base (terms & conditions people). There’s a revenue stream in that. Very depressing.

Utter nonsense. Sonos does not sell its customer data. It would be in breach of its Ts & Cs if it did. You warn people of Terms and Conditions without actually reading what Sonos says about use of data. (It sells advertising on Sonos Radio by identifying interests and usage but does not sell its data... if that’s what you meant...)

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J

Jim Koo

Lyricist III

your name/account does not have to be attached to your usage info. But millions of users listening habits are worth something in this data harvesting world we live in.

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