Sonos 11.1 Brings Sonos Radio

While listening to Sonos Stations (Classical), I was annoyed by the announcement stating the station every so often.  It would be great if I can add these stations to my rotation, but would only be if it’s 100% music.  On a positive note, I’m looking forward to using Sonos Radio as an alternative to TuneIn.

I would expect for something like that to happen, you’d either get advertising in between pieces, or need to pay a subscription. I’m certain there are certain costs involved in presenting the content, right now it would, I expect, showing as a marketing cost. 

I’m slightly confused: every Wednesday there’s a curated hour on Sound System. What times are they on? It was just starting when I turned on, but I didn’t look at the time, does it play the first time you tune in, or is it scheduled?

As for the programme itself I enjoyed it. I won’t pretend to know who JPEGMAFIA is, but a nice eclectic playlist at the end. I hope there’s going to be some more regular content. 

A criticism I’d have for the Genre Stations is, if you live in the U.K. you will find stations like Indie Gold and Punk Riot very American centric. Sadly to my ears most of Punk Riot is unlistenable.  

I’d guess that advertising will appear to pay the music royalties, but I assume that Sonos Radio is designed to sell more units and keep customers in the echo system. This would make a subscription unlikely, although a small monthly fee to remove ads could, I suppose, be an option but I’d think uptake would be low as why not pay for a streaming service?

I think Sonos Radio is a great idea but it’s still missing a few features. I appreciate it may not be feasible to show a playlist so you know all the songs coming up on a particular station but it would be good to see the next song at least.

Also can you add the length of each track so it displays while the song is playing?

I can see the ‘sell more units’ angle.  For new customers who don’t have a streaming service (do those still exist?), it’s a free service that you get without effort.  For existing customers, perhaps they get hooked on Sonos radio, and decide to replace other speakers in their home with Sonos just to get Sonos radio.  Maybe?

As far as next steps if I’m Sonos, I would take a wait and see attitude.   They need to get the usage data established in order to get more advertisers and higher rates.  Then perhaps do some customer survey’s to get an idea if people would be willing to pay to avoid commercials...and how that effects ad revenue.  What features do they need to have in order to get paid subscriptions?

I do agree that selling speakers and having music services allows a certain amount of leverage, something Amazon and Google definitely do.  How far Sonos goes with that, not sure even Sonos knows.

Sonos  Radio, what a yawn!

Quite excited when I saw the announcement and added it to my system. Tried every channel and completely unimpressed. Just deleted it alL and will continue as before. 
Very disappointed to see it wouldn’t work with my 2 CR200s - “unable to play music”.

Still think the move to Sonos 2 is a dog’s breakfast and I now have >£1,000 of Sonos kit which I cant use it If I want to stay current. 30% off more kit I don’t need is no solution!!!!!
 

Thanks for sharing bjw10. We’re excited about these early steps with Sonos Radio and what we might be able to build with it over time. To begin with, we’ve got partnerships with content creators and curators with some great first offerings. There will be more to come in the future as the service develops.

We weren’t able to bring Sonos Radio to the CR200, for the same reasons that the upcoming changes to the legacy devices is happening. These older devices simply don’t have the memory or processing power to handle new functionality. Legacy devices will keep on working, and we’ll keep providing fixes and security updates when possible, but the hardware is very limited by today’s standards. We’ve got all this and more on our article about Sonos S2 and what’s coming. f you wanted to switch to S2 on compatible devices, you’ll be able to separate your system into two systems as well. For more details on using S1 and S2 as two systems, see here. 

I don’t like the talking on your new Sonos Radio. Very annoying to be all relaxed and chilling them have some person start talking. Very un cool. Offer a comment free version please

Hi, Sonos Radio is good, however, what about the searching of stations? It doesn’t work well. When I wanna search for station (Czech station, eg Rádio BLANÍK), it doesn’t find (sometimes) what I’ve been searching for. However on the Sonos Website, it find’s the station ok. The station is not even when I browse the stations by region...