Spotify today announced Spotify Connect, which will be a series of hardware from well-known hardware to seamlessly integrate spotify onto devices where the control is from the regular Spotify application on your phone or similar.
Streaming is still done directly through internet, so the phone isn't in charge of it, just controls it.
I really do hope that Sonos will follow this approach as well, I believe there are a lot more like me that primarily uses Sonos for Spotify, and being able to use the same app as always would be awesome.
Seems like there is already a feature request over at ask.sonos.com https://ask.sonos.com/sonos/topics/support_spotify_connect_to_allow_users_to_use_the_spotify_app_as_the_controller
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What about mobile devices ? e.g. Phones & Tablets. I cannot see apple adding a Spotify chip to hardware, yet a lot of people use these very devices to listen to their Spotify play lists.
I cannot see Spotify killing off this revenue stream. It would be a suicide for them, especially in the US.
If Spotify continue to allow mobile devices to stream their music, then surely SONOS would be able to use that functionality at the very least
There are no chip requirements, it's just a mix-up amongst tech journalists (they aren't known for their tedious research before posting stuff 🙂 ). There is a chip option though (info I gathered from Spotify employees). Believe me or choose not to.
Apps are different than third party hardware. Right now, Apple requires a chip for Airplay on licensed receivers, boom boxes, etc., but iDevices need no chip. It is all built into the API, and the API for apps is different than the API for third party hardware.
Yeah, I seriously doubt there are chip requirements. I'm sure they WANT you to use it, but it can be done via software. They can license either with the chip or software... either way it does not prevent them from making money on licensing. I guess what really matters if it Sonos hardware can support the software they're making.
I would be be ecstatic if I knew that the upcoming Collection was coming to Sonos through the Sonos Controller (or obviously for them to allow for Spotify Connect too). That's my biggest complaint... I could live without the radio function, but of course that would be nice. Oh... and higher-res album art.
I would be be ecstatic if I knew that the upcoming Collection was coming to Sonos through the Sonos Controller (or obviously for them to allow for Spotify Connect too). That's my biggest complaint... I could live without the radio function, but of course that would be nice. Oh... and higher-res album art.
There is a big difference between how Spotify and Apple profit from hardware. Apple want to profit from the sales of hardware, since usage is free. Spotify want to profit from the subscribers. For me it makes sense to not try and profit from the hardware in that case, and simplify the possible integrations, since more devices == more customers == more subscribers. Simple as that. I don't see why they need to be compared, since they have different business models.
There are many more ways a content company can profit than just subscribers. One is advertising. Another is licensing. Still another is requiring a hardware manufacturer to buy your licensed chip. So far, every tech article I have searched says Spotify requires a chip. You have countered that with "insider" hearsay. I imagine we'll learn what the truth is when/if Sonos rolls out Spotify Connect.
My advice (which is similar to those who claimed Airplay could be integrated): Don't get your hopes up.
I'm not saying that "Sonos will get Connect support", the rumor is more that it won't get it. Even if the technical barrier is smaller (software implementation only) there are a lot of other factors that might become a problem. The multiroom support, for one.
However, if Spotify will be open with how to implement Connect support, and allow software implementations as well, then there is a good chance that it might be possible to make a 3rd party solution, for instance, some sort of proxy control point which would trigger the native Spotify support in Sonos, but expose it as a Connect device and be in control of whats playing.
In that regard, I think Spotify is a lot more community-friendly than for instance, Apple 🙂
However, if Spotify will be open with how to implement Connect support, and allow software implementations as well, then there is a good chance that it might be possible to make a 3rd party solution, for instance, some sort of proxy control point which would trigger the native Spotify support in Sonos, but expose it as a Connect device and be in control of whats playing.
In that regard, I think Spotify is a lot more community-friendly than for instance, Apple 🙂
Looks like the "chip" is the WiFi chip, which must be made by SMSC or Frontier Silicon. The Spotify support appears to be a firmware update to the WiFi chips.
http://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Announcements/Spotify-Connect-The-new-way-to-play-at-home/td-p/520918/page/2
Spotify is just adding their stream to the existing Pandora, Sirius, etc. already on the chip, not requiring a new chip.
http://www.smsc.com/Products/Wireless_Audio/JukeBlox_Wi-Fi_Technology
http://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Announcements/Spotify-Connect-The-new-way-to-play-at-home/td-p/520918/page/2
Spotify is just adding their stream to the existing Pandora, Sirius, etc. already on the chip, not requiring a new chip.
http://www.smsc.com/Products/Wireless_Audio/JukeBlox_Wi-Fi_Technology
Frontier Silicon's press release about adding Spotify to its existing WiFi chip.
http://www.frontier-silicon.com/spotify-chooses-frontier-silicon-support-launch-spotify-connect#.Uk9y0_tlB-E
http://www.frontier-silicon.com/spotify-chooses-frontier-silicon-support-launch-spotify-connect#.Uk9y0_tlB-E
Thanks to chicks for the interesting links! I know for sure that my Yamaha RX-A1010 will not be Spotify Connect compatible, but it will be good to see how Sonos reacts to this further step in the evolution of streamed music.
Revo have announced Spotify Connect support
revo.co.uk/shop/superconnect
revo.co.uk/shop/superconnect
http://gigaom.com/2013/10/14/sonos-releases-new-200-speaker-ceo-dismisses-spotifys-connect-speaker-partnerships/
I do agree with that sentiment. Maybe Spotify is expecting in return for having something be "Spotify Connect enabled" to have it be shown prominently? Who knows.
Although I like this bit:
Then there are all those consumer electronics manufacturers from Bang & Olufsen to Pioneer to Yamaha that recently teamed up with Spotify to announce a new initiative called Spotify Connect that will bring Spotify playback capabilities directly to speakers of participating hardware vendors.
Asked about the Spotify initiative, MacFarlane told me: “They asked us to participate, and we didn’t.” He went on to argue that it made little sense to tie speaker systems to the brand of a single music service, joking that stores like Best Buy shouldn’t have separate aisles for Pandora speakers and Spotify speakers.
I do agree with that sentiment. Maybe Spotify is expecting in return for having something be "Spotify Connect enabled" to have it be shown prominently? Who knows.
Although I like this bit:
So what’s next for Sonos? MacFarlane was vague when asked about new products, but he told me a bit about how the company plans to make its existing products better. Music services will soon be able to add functionality to their apps that will let users beam music directly to Sonos speakers. This means that users won’t need to fire up the Sonos app anymore to launch their favorite radio station or playlist from the cloud. Instead, they will be able to simply press a “play on Sonos” button within the app of their favorite service, and launch music playback on their Sonos system. Think of it like Chromecast, but for your music.
MacFarlane told me that Sonos intends to make this functionality available on both iOS and Android. He wasn’t quite ready to share a timeline for the full launch of “play on Sonos,” but he revealed that Sonos quietly launched the feature in China earlier this year, where users of QQ’s audio streams can already make use of it. This means it’s only a question of time before it will also be available to users of western music services.
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it seems a bit strange - one one hand he criticizes Spotify for teaming up with a multitude of manufacturers to tie themselves to a single music service but then on the other says they (Sonos) are going to be asking a multitude of music services to tie themselves to a single hardware manufacturer from within their apps ! somewhat hypocritical no ?
anyway, it certainly sounds interesting, I just doubt Spotify will be doing them any favours which is disappointing !
anyway, it certainly sounds interesting, I just doubt Spotify will be doing them any favours which is disappointing !
anyway, it certainly sounds interesting, I just doubt Spotify will be doing them any favours which is disappointing !
I didn't read it as "asking a multitude of music services to tie themselves to a single hardware manufacturer from within their apps", I read it as Sonos hardware is going to be one choice of many for output from the app. I highly doubt that requires the app/device makers to lock out all other hardware. In fact, I know for certain Apple devices are not going to lock out Airplay devices in favor of Sonos, that would be crazy. I believe what he means is the Sonos devices will be one of many (i.e. Airplay, Bluetooth, Miracast, Samsung Share, Spotify Connect, etc.) choices for output from an app.
It is a lot of work to develop a user interface. Since SONOS would like to support multiple services and not be forced to dedicate a programming team for each of a growing number of services, SONOS has defined an API that services can support if they want to be available to SONOS users. This minimizes the work for SONOS as new services become available.
The music services are in a similar boat. Initially, the services use a web browser for their user interface, but there are a growing number of hardware devices and web browsers don't run on hardware devices. The services don't want to support a growing number of hardware players. Therefore, the services will want to specify the interface that must be supported by hardware devices.
In the end, the company with the stronger market position dictates the terms.
A prime example of this is APPLE. There are countless companies following the iShadow -- earning a good living by doing so. But these companies don't innovate much because they spend their development dollars following the shadow of new connectors, new versions, and intellectual property licensing.
SONOS has always been a leader and, as their market position strengthens, more 3rd parties will be coming to SONOS.
The music services are in a similar boat. Initially, the services use a web browser for their user interface, but there are a growing number of hardware devices and web browsers don't run on hardware devices. The services don't want to support a growing number of hardware players. Therefore, the services will want to specify the interface that must be supported by hardware devices.
In the end, the company with the stronger market position dictates the terms.
A prime example of this is APPLE. There are countless companies following the iShadow -- earning a good living by doing so. But these companies don't innovate much because they spend their development dollars following the shadow of new connectors, new versions, and intellectual property licensing.
SONOS has always been a leader and, as their market position strengthens, more 3rd parties will be coming to SONOS.
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Wow, that article scares me. The CEO does not represent Sonos well, comes across as very pompous and seems to be very confused about both their place in the market and even what Spotify Connect is.
His argument about why music services would add Sonos connections but they won't add Spotify Connect makes no sense at all. And what good is Sonos connections if you leave out the biggest service out there?
The choices they've made have turned out to be good in the past but this feels like a terrible one to me.
His argument about why music services would add Sonos connections but they won't add Spotify Connect makes no sense at all. And what good is Sonos connections if you leave out the biggest service out there?
The choices they've made have turned out to be good in the past but this feels like a terrible one to me.
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His argument about why music services would add Sonos connections but they won't add Spotify Connect makes no sense at all. And what good is Sonos connections if you leave out the biggest service out there?
The choices they've made have turned out to be good in the past but this feels like a terrible one to me.
Just saw there was a video and watched that. None of these quotes are from the video but the video sounds much better, and certainly not at all pompous.
I still think this is a big mistake Sonos needs Spotify a lot more than vice versa and they should not be thumbing their noses at Spotify Connect or playing chicken on who will implement which system to play from the Spotify app to a Sonos.
Not sure about that. Sonos actually makes a profit, something Spotify has yet to do. Streaming services are the the 2010's version of the .COM bubble of the 90's. Until one finds a way to turn a real profit, ala Amazon and others, I'm afraid we cannot assign any more market power to them than we did Pets.com, Kozmo, or Flooz.
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Well that's just silly. Profit has nothing to do with this. A significant percentage of Sonos users are Spotify subscribers. Some may be indifferent to Spotify amongst streaming services, some may care deeply about Spotify but regardless, having Spotify work on Sonos matters to a significant percentage of Sonos customers.
Sonos customers are an insignificant percentage of Spotify customers. Won't impact their success significantly if they were to lose some of those, especially when they are replacing them with customers of all these other hardware products which are embracing Spotify Connect. Can't see any way this impact Spotify's customer base.
Beyond that, Sonos needs independent streaming services to succeed and Spotify is currently the best chance. If Spotify fails, it will likely be because some giant like Apple filled the void with a better product. There is certainly no guarantee in that scenario that Sonos even gets access to the service to stream.
There didn't have to be one or the other here. You can adopt Spotify Connect and do Sonos Connect or whatever they call it. Still seems very short sighted to refuse to participate.
No it is not just silly. If Sonos is in the process of deciding that the investment required to partner with Spotify is not worth it, the viability of Spotify as a long term provider is definitely something they need to take into account when making that decision. The fact that Spotify is mimicking the "get lots of users but never make a profit" business plan of the late 90's dot.coms is certainly something that can't be ignored when evaluating their commitment to that service. I have no inside info, but it appears Sonos have decided that the volatility of the provider market means something like the Music Partners program, which puts the onus on the provider to link up with Sonos, makes more sense than to waste valuable develoment on custom tailoring their app to a dozen or more services who may or may not be around in the future. You may or may not agree with that approach, but it is based on some pretty good logic, and to say it is "silly" is . . . well . . . just silly.
I just wanted to share the information that I have collected from conversations with employees over at Spotify, and based on the demo I got of the system in action.
The implementation will be software based, but it seems like they will provide precompiled binaries for the streaming part (think, libspotify). They couldn't share details on what kind of API it ran, or how proprietary it will be. They could however say that they intend for it to become publicly available, either with some sort of SDK, or if they will use some common type of standard (REST or similar).
The whole idea behind it is that when you switch over the music from your client to a speaker, it actually moves the whole queue into a cloud service, which the speaker interacts with. The players will be tightly coupled with your spotify account, and will work "over the internet" as well, meaning that you don't need to be on the same LAN.
It will at least be possible to utilize Spotify Connect in the same manner as AirPlay today, meaning a separate device connected to the line-in. This is of course not optimal, and depending on how flexible the API will be, there might be possible to use a separate device as a "bridge" that will just control the Spotify playback directly on Sonos (which would mean that you would see currently playing item and stuff like that).
Hopefully this will settle a few discussions in this thread :)
Oh, and regarding that last interview with Sonos regarding this. Seems like there has become a battle of "who will integrate with who", where Sonos feels like music partners should integrate support for Sonos in their apps, whereas Spotify thinks that speaker-producers should implement support for their music service into their speakers. They both want the same thing, they just seem to think that the other part should to the work.
As an example, Sonos has implemented support for QQ in China, which shows in the UPnP service descriptors. Basically, they expose new UPnP services for interaction with QQ service, and QQ implement support for this exposed API that Sonos provide.
With Spotify, they have already created an API, which probably is miles away from the UPnP standard that Sonos uses. This becomes a problem for both parties, since Sonos probably doesn't want to develop a proprietary API for a single music service that goes way outside the UPnP stack. Hopefully they will resolve their **** and find some sort of common ground to work on, because I think they will both profit from it in the long run. In the meantime, 3rd party support will probably be possible.
The implementation will be software based, but it seems like they will provide precompiled binaries for the streaming part (think, libspotify). They couldn't share details on what kind of API it ran, or how proprietary it will be. They could however say that they intend for it to become publicly available, either with some sort of SDK, or if they will use some common type of standard (REST or similar).
The whole idea behind it is that when you switch over the music from your client to a speaker, it actually moves the whole queue into a cloud service, which the speaker interacts with. The players will be tightly coupled with your spotify account, and will work "over the internet" as well, meaning that you don't need to be on the same LAN.
It will at least be possible to utilize Spotify Connect in the same manner as AirPlay today, meaning a separate device connected to the line-in. This is of course not optimal, and depending on how flexible the API will be, there might be possible to use a separate device as a "bridge" that will just control the Spotify playback directly on Sonos (which would mean that you would see currently playing item and stuff like that).
Hopefully this will settle a few discussions in this thread :)
Oh, and regarding that last interview with Sonos regarding this. Seems like there has become a battle of "who will integrate with who", where Sonos feels like music partners should integrate support for Sonos in their apps, whereas Spotify thinks that speaker-producers should implement support for their music service into their speakers. They both want the same thing, they just seem to think that the other part should to the work.
As an example, Sonos has implemented support for QQ in China, which shows in the UPnP service descriptors. Basically, they expose new UPnP services for interaction with QQ service, and QQ implement support for this exposed API that Sonos provide.
With Spotify, they have already created an API, which probably is miles away from the UPnP standard that Sonos uses. This becomes a problem for both parties, since Sonos probably doesn't want to develop a proprietary API for a single music service that goes way outside the UPnP stack. Hopefully they will resolve their **** and find some sort of common ground to work on, because I think they will both profit from it in the long run. In the meantime, 3rd party support will probably be possible.
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+17
jishi - thanks for the detailed insight !
From what Ive gleaned on the Spotify forums: Although Spotify Connect is now officially released it is only available for a small number of Spotify premium users (about 10% so far). Basically if you have a 'spotify connect' enabled hardware device such as amp or speaker then once you connect it to your IOS device (android not yet supported) then your premium account will be 'activated' for spotify connect and other IOS devices using the same account will also be able to act as receivers too.
If you dont have such a piece of hardware then they are slowly activating premium accounts to allow them to use Spotify Connect between IOS devices without an amp/speaker. I guess its a bit more 'beta' than they are letting on.
Once its working for me (Im still waiting) then I am hoping to use the line-in on my Play 5 (or buy a Sonos iphone dock) with an ipod touch then use my Ipad/Iphone to send music from the Spotify app to the rest of the Sonos components via the Ipod touch.
Its not an ideal solution, and the sound quality will suffer compared to streaming direct, but the functionality of the Spotify app is so far ahead of the Sonos/Spotify integration that its a price Im willing to pay. Maybe someone will have the sense to bring out a 'digital only' Spotify Connect box (like the Sonos Connect but cheaper!) that I can feed straight into my playbar (or other hifi setup for those without Sonos) so minimise the amount of d-a-d-a... conversions.
As you say, hopefully they can sort out their differences because in the meantime its us, the consumer, that loses. Id love to be able to 'send' music direct from Spotify to Sonos without a half baked intermediate solution.
From what Ive gleaned on the Spotify forums: Although Spotify Connect is now officially released it is only available for a small number of Spotify premium users (about 10% so far). Basically if you have a 'spotify connect' enabled hardware device such as amp or speaker then once you connect it to your IOS device (android not yet supported) then your premium account will be 'activated' for spotify connect and other IOS devices using the same account will also be able to act as receivers too.
If you dont have such a piece of hardware then they are slowly activating premium accounts to allow them to use Spotify Connect between IOS devices without an amp/speaker. I guess its a bit more 'beta' than they are letting on.
Once its working for me (Im still waiting) then I am hoping to use the line-in on my Play 5 (or buy a Sonos iphone dock) with an ipod touch then use my Ipad/Iphone to send music from the Spotify app to the rest of the Sonos components via the Ipod touch.
Its not an ideal solution, and the sound quality will suffer compared to streaming direct, but the functionality of the Spotify app is so far ahead of the Sonos/Spotify integration that its a price Im willing to pay. Maybe someone will have the sense to bring out a 'digital only' Spotify Connect box (like the Sonos Connect but cheaper!) that I can feed straight into my playbar (or other hifi setup for those without Sonos) so minimise the amount of d-a-d-a... conversions.
As you say, hopefully they can sort out their differences because in the meantime its us, the consumer, that loses. Id love to be able to 'send' music direct from Spotify to Sonos without a half baked intermediate solution.
You are thinking in the concept that "Other clients" will act as Spotify Connect players. I'm not 100% sure that that will be the case? At least, that wasn't mentioned, and I didn't ask about it.
My best bet would be that you could use something like a raspberry pi and connect it to the line-in of your Sonos. That would also be a much lower investment.
My best bet would be that you could use something like a raspberry pi and connect it to the line-in of your Sonos. That would also be a much lower investment.
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My best bet would be that you could use something like a raspberry pi and connect it to the line-in of your Sonos. That would also be a much lower investment.
in the video Spotify released it showed not just sending to a spotify connect enabled speaker/amp but also another IOS device. They switched between listening on an iphone then sending that same music instead to the ipad. So one device acts as the receiver and the other just a remote. Im going to use my ipad as the remote and the ipod touch hooked up to the play5/sonos dock as the receiver. Spotify also confirmed to me in the forum that it will work this way - thats once my account is activated that is !
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Wasn't aware of that, good info. As a side note, most of the devs also used Nexus devices, which means that the Android release shouldn't be far away.
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