Music Library Vanished

Original idea. MULTI ROOM N MUSIC COLLECTION

NOT HEADPHONE! THATS PERSONAL AUDIO!!!

1 STAR RATING PLEASE

Thank you for reminding Sonos how they built their brand and company by attracting customers who believed in a wireless quality multi-room speaker solution that enabled them to exploit their investment in their personal digital music library. 
 

Let me lower your expectations if you plan to talk to support.  I called today and was on hold for an hour.  I then talked to a very pleasant individual for an hour, who was no help at all.  We tried two diagnostics, reinstalling app, going through the website, etc, nothing worked.  I am now escalated to level 2 support who are supposed to reach out to me to schedule a call.  So I still can’t find any of my playlists, which is how I listen or rather listened to music.  I can see my saved albums but none play.  So basically I now have a very expensive music ecosystem that can’t play any music I want to hear.  And with each passing day i become more hopeless.  Sonos has already moved on, they are 1% fix the app, 99% sell the headphones.  Curious, the add to buy the new headphones is the one thing that works on my new app. 

Wow you were fortunate, I was on hold for two hours spoke to the rep and it too was a waste of time. Sonos is clearly focused on the headphones as revenue continues to decline year to year and this is appears to be the executives’ strategy to grow revenue. It is increasingly hard to read these posts as the frustration grows and their responses are extraordinarily long on words with vague commitments (if you want to even want to call them that) and extraordinarily short on action.  Again they have confused courageous with arrogance.  They lack honesty, integrity, and most of all loyalty to their customers. Unless you stream music, you no longer matter to Sonos. They have diligently been repurchasing large volumes of stock. In November 2023, they announced that its Board of Directors authorized a common stock repurchase program of up to $200 million. This came on the heels of their most recent $100 million stock repurchase program  completed in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023. Again this is clearly an effort to prop up their stock price.

Meanwhile, Sonos just announced their new product and it is fair to say that most would expect the market to react favorably and assume a significant uptick in the stock price over the next 3 to 6 months as the new product ships. Of course if you think it is headed down, then you just might sell it immediately. So follow this:

Maxime Bouvat-Merlin was named Chief Product Officer“ in October 2023, just 7 months ago. After a deluge of customer criticism here is how he responds on May 9th: “Redesigning the Sonos app is an ambitious undertaking that represents just how seriously we are committed to invention and re-invention,” “It takes courage to rebuild a brand’s core product from the ground up, and to do so knowing it may require taking a few steps back to ultimately leap into the future.” (Two comments: First: that is a decision they made, they did not have to take steps back, they could have waited and included existing features. Second: At a minimum, they could have communicated exactly what they eliminated and the schedule to reinstall those features and any possible workarounds.)

Then on Monday, May 20th after growing anger and frustration from an overwhelming number of loyal and committed Sonos customers (just check social media), Maxime Bouvat-Merlin sold 40,222 shares of the firm's stock. The shares were sold at an average price of $16.54, for a total transaction of $665,271.88. Following the completion of the transaction, insider Maxime Bouvat-Merlin now directly owns 24,650 shares of the company's stock, valued at approximately $407,711. He sold 62% of the stock he owns this last week and over the past year, 71% of what he owned. 62% is a very significant sale and many would be concerned that he is concerned.

If that isn’t enough, over the past year, the CEO Patrick Spence, has sold a total of 45,000 shares and purchased 0 shares. According to many financial analysts, his selling without any corresponding buys raises questions about his confidence in the company's future prospects.

These transactions may indicate nothing, but in the context of the long awaited headphones announcement and the subsequent turmoil created due to the new application upgrade on Sonos customers, that clearly surprised the executive team, one could only conclude there are significant challenges in restoring the lost functionality any time soon or possibly not for months, or maybe ever. The trust has been broken and the only thing more difficult than building and maintaining trust, is earning it back.  That may never happen.

I think this is irreparable harm to the company,  Sonos is following the Bed Bath and Beyond playbook when they did away with their coupons and lost their most loyal and dedicated customers.  They were never able to recover and are now in the garbage heap of companies that thought they knew better than their customers.  They have focused in on attracting new customers with the headphones because their sales are down.  But you can’t do that at the expense of losing current customers.  A successful business strategy is to add customers, not replace them.  
 

I believe the only way to restore trust is to replace the CEO.  A dramatic fail requires a dramatic response, but boards are typically CEO friendly and don’t hold CEOs accountable.  Spence is hoping this will all blow over and people will forget as fixes roll out, I think he is wrong.  He is tone deaf, ironic for a music company, and worse he is just doubling down.  Saying 99% of people love the new app is insulting.  Calling rolling out an app you knew wasn’t ready courageous, double insulting.  I was a huge Sonos fan who spent thousands on their products and they have now lost me.  They had to know they would lose people over rolling out an app they knew wasn’t ready and they saw that as acceptable.  A successful company fights to keep every customer, loyalty programs etc.   An unsuccessful company plans to lose customers.  Spence is undoubtedly an intermittent user of the products and does not understand his most loyal base.  He should drive out to an empty Bed Bath and Beyond parking lot, pop a Bud Light and reflect on the consequences of not understanding what your customers expect from the company.  

Ken 324 - Well said! I hadn’t read the 99% favorable comment. Again their arrogance is only exceeded by their ignorance and given they are doubling down on their arrogance, that shows how ignorant they all are. I have also spent thousands on Sonos equipment and other than returning a pair of Roams that just never stayed connected, I replaced them with a pair of Moves. I too will not purchase anymore product unless they show real courage and replace CEO Spence. I spent hours trying to find a way to reach out to the Chairman, Julius Genachowski who is a Managing Director at the Carlyle Global Investment Firm, in the U.S. Buyout team of the global telecommunications, media and technology group, focusing on acquisitions and growth investments in global technology, media and telecom, including internet and mobile.

Reading Julius’s resume, he is very well educated and seems very intelligent. Having never run a company I wonder if he truly understands the value of customer loyalty and retention. I will continue to try figure out how to contact him. But tou captured the value of customers perfectly!

For Apple Mac users, with music library stored on a Mac, there is a fix posted here, it worked well for many folks:

https://en.community.sonos.com/controllers-and-music-services-229131/how-to-solve-the-error-913-music-library-on-a-mac-6894161?tid=6894161&fid=229131

The fix in FredskiSounds post worked for me. All I did was turn on the Guest account in Users and Groups under MacOs System Settings, and allowed guest users access to shared folders. Then I used the “browse” option in the Sonos app to locate my iTunes/iTunes Media folder (might be different for you, but this option didn’t work when I tried to use the Music folder).