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After reading Spence’s comments on reddit (why isn’t he on here?) I have to say I no longer understand what Sonos sees as its core audience or function. 

I get that local libraries are a bit passé for many on here, but are also strongly loved by those still using them, but, even if you get your music from Spotify, Tidal, Qobuz etc. surely a key part of that experience is the ability to queue music and edit that queue? The whole ability to queue up music at a party with friends by passing round the iPad for example was alway a big part of any music service, and I’m sure still is, along with the ability to save said queue into a playlist. 

Sonos clearly don’t have the queue thing in the front of their mind anymore and seem to think people want to be able to control Sonos outside the home, but I can’t hear my speakers outside the home? The key thing with speakers that you can’t easily change is that you generally need to be within earshot of the damn things for them to be of any use… 

So does that mean Sonos now see themselves as a TV speaker company? But again what use is control outside of the home? Is that what they sell most of now? In this scenario music queue’s don’t matter… but you still need to be there…

And then headphones. the one thing Sonos headphones could have done that would make them a bit more interesting would have been to play music from Sonos like another speaker… which at home with WiFi *could* be possible if WiFi didn’t drain the battery in an hour, but out of the home would either require a SIM card and a mobile phone built in, or connection to your phone which would be well, just like any other BT headphones really… The only unique feature appears to be targeted at people who watch movies on their own all the time… you can’t even link two headphones to the one TV to enjoy a film up loud when a more conventional speaker setup might be anti-social. 

It feels like Sonos have no idea what segment they are targeting even if the new app actually worked… it’s half hearted everywhere. 

And am I alone in thinking it’s a brave (stupid) move to disenfranchise the core users you built your brand and reputation on, even if it’s not a growth segment? 

Is the only thing allowing them to stumble around in the dark looking for a new light switch the fact that no-one else seems to have been able to offer something similar that works? 

I know where you are coming from, I’d love to have my old pair of Gen 1 Play 5s and Play 3s and the ability to use my CR-100 to play my music library or stream Rhapsody with a near zero frustration level.

All the new stuff is well and good but my core Sonos experience is way down from what it was back then.

Maybe this is the “kick in the butt” Sonos management needed to get back to what Sonos used to be, and what built their reputation.

After reading Spence’s comments on reddit (why isn’t he on here?)

If these are for real, these should have been comments from ex CEO Spence.

 

And am I alone in thinking it’s a brave (stupid) move to disenfranchise the core users you built your brand and reputation on, even if it’s not a growth segment? 

 

They have done much more; they have disenfranchised the universally used S2, to an extent they cannot bring it back even as a stop gap measure.

They made the Sonos brand about selling the Sonos brand, and completely forgot it was about removing the barriers to playing music anywhere in your house.

Everything in the new UI makes it harder to simply enjoy music. Extra drawers, inconvenient settings, more clicks, more ads, more getting in the way of user access to music sources.

Its gross.

Sonos thinks it’s about Sonos.  This is a big reason reliable customers and their wallets begin to quietly leave a brand.

 

Remember this little beauty?

 

 

 even if you get your music from Spotify, Tidal, Qobuz etc. surely a key part of that experience is the ability to queue music and edit that queue?

This and more on these lines can be done on the Spotify native app and more than one user can direct music to play from common speakers visible on that app on their phone, including on Sonos speakers. Obviously for that, the common speakers have to be visible to the native app, as my Sonos speakers, running S1 are. And such presumably are not, if using the brave new app?

What Sonos can still do when it all works, is allow such interaction with local libraries, via phones allowed to connect to the Sonos system. Using two decades old tech because when Sonos was invented two decades ago, there were no streaming services, just local libraries and internet radio. So for Sonos to get a hold in the market then, it had to do this much better than whatever little competition was there then. Squeezebox comes to mind for that.

The present competition came along much later, when most users, via streaming services aplenty to choose from, no longer needed local libraries, so this competition to Sonos decided to ignore that remaining small part of the market as irrelevant and not a target market, and focused on just being the preferred solution to bring streaming services inside the home. And many now do this better than what Sonos does, seen from many facets of that solution.

In trying to make a lateral move around such competition to get ahead of it, Sonos seems to have fallen on its face.

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