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Sonos has number of fans who love the Sonos platform. Whether it’s the speakers, or the ability to pull any music to any speaker or group of speakers in the house, people love them. Sonos is now launching their own Sonos Radio streaming platform to compete with the likes of Amazon and Apple Music.
What is it
- Just for Sonos speakers
- free and ad-supported content
- a radio station hosted by Radiohead’s Tom Yorke
Basically, at launch, it’s got about 60,000 streaming radio stations, across a ton of partners. It acts like an aggregator for their partners, including iHeartRadio and TuneIn.
The goal is to make it easy to personalize radio around the stations you like, including local stations when you provide your zipcode.
Eventually, Sonos will provide global curation, picking stations around the world for you.
What is it, Part 2
Besides just streaming radio from other sources, aggregated, it also has their own shows.
They call this “Sonos Sound System”, and it’s ad-free. ?It’s a 60 minute show, recorded in a studio at the company?s flagship New York City store. It?ll feature new and ?rediscovered? music, with the music the artist is listening to and likes.
There will also be artist-curated stations. These are also going to be ad-free. That Thom Yorke mention before? This is it. He picks the playlists for the station, they run them.
But what if it could be more confusing? It can. With advertisements, there’s going to be Sonos Stations. These are inspired by the sort of music people are listening to in genres (Concert Hall, Country Outlaws, HipHop Archive, Kids Rock, and so on.) They use an AI to level between songs and insert the commentary, things that used to be a traditional DJ or producer’s job.
This with-ads, without-ads is too confusing
I’m here to help you out.
- Sonos Radio streaming from partners: with ads
- Sonos Sound System, a 60 minute show by artists: without ads
- Artist curated stations: without ads
- Sonos Stations, genres: with ads
I like using Alexa to find music
Lots of people do. Lots of people using Sonos with Alexa or Google Assistant do this.
You won’t do it with Sonos Radio, though. They just aren’t doing that at this time.
I like using the Sonos App
I do, too. But you’re going to have to listen through a speaker for now. The Sonos Move Bluetooth speaker won’t do it, either, because that depends on the phone for cellular data when you’re out in the world away from Wi-Fi.
Basically, you need a Wi-Fi Sonos device to listen on.
What’s the advantage?
They aren’t charging you anything for it. Get your speakers, and go for it.
Price: Free, from Sonos.com
