Sonos at CES 2021: What does music streaming look like in 2021
Sonos at CES 2021: What does music streaming look like in 2021
Video Transcript
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NATHAN INGRAHAM: Hello. Welcome back to Engadget's live, ongoing coverage of the virtual CES 2021. I'm joined today by Ryan Taylor, who is the general manager, over at Sonos, of Sonos Radio, the company's first streaming music service. Thanks for joining us, Ryan.
RYAN TAYLOR: Thanks for having me, Nate.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: Where are you calling in from today?
RYAN TAYLOR: I'm calling in from sunny Santa Barbara. It's pretty nice to be out here on the West Coast sometimes, even though things are a little bit crazy.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: Yeah well thanks again for joining us and we've got a lot to talk about, as I feel like Sonos has had a really busy year and a half or so. Specifically, there's the new radio product but you launched a couple of new speakers in the last year, the Arc and the Move. Can you maybe just talk about overall how these products fit together, where you see radio sort of complementing the hardware that you guys are better known for making.
RYAN TAYLOR: Yeah totally. I mean 2020 was a big year. It was an odd year for all of us, but the things we put in place take a couple of years to come to fruition in some cases, and so we had some great product launches last year. We launched our Arc in June of last year, an amazing Dolby Atmos enabled soundbar, which we're really proud of, and if you haven't heard it, it's fantastic.
And we launched Sonos Radio in April last year, too, which is our first obviously service, that consumer service direct and so it's been a really interesting year for us as we kind of learn how to evolve the Sonos business and continue to deliver amazing sound experiences for our owners.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: Yeah and you guys are, like I said, mostly known for hardware. It's the first software product that you're getting into. Can you talk a little bit, I guess like where did the germ from this idea come from, and what did you have to do over the-- I think it took-- you said it took a couple of years to get it up and running. What was that process like for you?
RYAN TAYLOR: Yeah I mean so ultimately it all starts with trying to create an amazing sound experience for our users, right? So at the end of the day, one of the things that we recognized was that just a ton of time is spent listening to radio on Sonos, right? We have an awesome platform with more than 100 partners around the world that bring their services to the Sonos ecosystem, which we continue to invest in and grow from a platform perspective.
But we noticed just a ton of usage and listening happening on radio, and we were thinking to ourselves, how could we really kind of elevate this experience, bring the right content to our users, in a quick and easy way, and also bring a bit of the Sonos point of view, in content to our users alongside that.
And so we saw an opportunity to-- it's interesting, we had been doing a lot of work in the kind of music curation artist relation space for years. And one of the things we would hear was hey I want to do a collaboration with you Sonos, and we'd have to say, I'm sorry, go talk to one of our partners, because we don't do that, right?
And so ultimately, it started as a way to help tell artist stories and help participate with the artist partners we work with from marketing, or just from a cultural perspective. And really bring those stories to life. And so Sonos Radio is a platform for us to be able to do that, kind of bring the Sonos brand to life through content itself, and do some original content as well. But then also, build a platform where we can bring partner content directly to our users through Sonos Radio as well.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: Yeah that's a good-- that's a good way to sum it up and just to give our viewers a quick overview if they haven't used it, Sonos Radio has kind of three main components, right? You can stream basically any FM station that you can access on a regular radio regardless of where you live. There's custom curated Sonos stations for different genres and kind of moods, that sort of thing. And then you've got the Sound System, right, that's your sort of flagship channel.
RYAN TAYLOR: Yeah. Thanks for doing my job for me. I probably should have started there.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: That's all right.
RYAN TAYLOR: But yeah ultimately, yeah ultimately it's-- it's Sonos stations that we create and we bring to our users, but it's also an ability to listen to FM broadcast, and even kind of homegrown stations from around the world through a single, easy to use interface on the Sonos app.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: So it's a global FM, really?
RYAN TAYLOR: That's correct.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: So from anywhere around the world?
RYAN TAYLOR: That's correct. There's radio stations from all around the world from our-- powered by our partners. So we work-- today we work with TuneIn, iHeart Radio in the US, Radio.com in the US, Global out of the UK, and quite a few more partners that we're working with to go forward.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: Yeah and what's kind of unique about Sonos Radio compared to other sort of streaming platforms is that this is only available on Sonos products, which means it's only really available in your home. How did you guys get to the place where you felt confident that you could launch a product like this, without it being available on your smartphone for when you're on the go or in the car, and does that change how you think about the programming that you curate for it.
RYAN TAYLOR: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's important to kind of state that like ultimately this is complementary to the Sonos platform, right? Our goal was to deliver an awesome out-of-the-box experience where we can get people into listening to something that's relevant for them, sounds great, is a great experience for them to kind of get started on the Sonos experience with, so kind of you know contributing to that out-of-the-box experience is really important for us.
And ultimately, Sonos as a platform today is a home-based product. It only works in your home. We have some-- a product called Sonos Move, which we, as you mentioned, we launched last year, which starts to take the Sonos experience outside of the home, but ultimately we wanted to make sure that we had that really great out-of-the-box experience, to get people listening to content they love and really hearing the sound quality that Sonos can bring to the table, right out-of-the-box.
In terms of how that influences programming, it's a really interesting question because, you know, Sonos is a product that is always listened to out loud, right? It's always listened to in a shared context, and so when we think about creating radio stations for Sonos Radio, it's really about creating a consistent atmosphere and vibe for each station to really keep people in the right mood.
It's designed to deliver longer listening sessions for users so they can just put something on, just press play, and listen to it for a long period of time. So it actually does quite regularly influence how we think about new stations that we want to curate or new content we want to program, because it's really all about setting the right atmosphere for the home environment and the shared context.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: And you have a bunch of stations that I believe are specifically just music like should I say genres or moods. There's holiday stations. There's different genres, that sort of thing. Then you have ones that are curated by artists, like Thom Yorke's station, right? Those are kind of a mix of maybe interviews and spoken content along with the music. Is that right?
RYAN TAYLOR: Yeah it's really up to the artist, in terms of how they want to present their ideas, right? So ultimately, our goal is to create a platform for them to be able to tell stories, or just share music. In some cases artists don't really want you to hear their voice. They want you to hear the music they're selecting, to kind of push their audience in any direction.
I think, for example one of my favorite stations is from Third Man Records, which is Third Man Public Address System and it's really the stories behind the music. It's-- provides a lot more context for a lot of music you probably don't know and have never heard. In order to absorb that kind of music, you have to have some context around it, right? It's one thing to hear a great song for the first time and it's a hit, as they say, and you get it right away.
But it's also really important to set context for what an artist is trying to communicate. And I think what we're trying to create with Sonos Radio is a platform for artists and collaborators to be able to tell those stories and set the right context for what they're about to hear, both in our artists stations, but as well on our genre stations.
We have a station called a Concert Hall, which is our classical station and there's tons of information about what orchestra is playing and who's the conductor, and it really helps set context for listening experience that's much different than just hitting shuffle on a classical station. It's really about helping to educate users, giving them some information they might not know about a certain piece of music, and how those things relate to each other.
And so we think we can do that across different genres and really help to provide an interesting and new listening experience for folks, and we're experimenting more and more with how to play that out as we go through the new stations and concepts that we create.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: Yes so you mentioned behind that classical station, I haven't got to that one yet. I've used Sonos Radio a bit. I haven't heard that particular one. But yeah being able to educate and bring in more info, as people listen seems like a really smart move, especially given how hot podcasts are getting right now.
I know it sounds a little bit trite to say that, but I mean, clearly, you see the business Spotify is doing and other companies are on buying up podcasts, creative networks, that sort of thing. So there's clearly a demand for something that marries like music with informative content. Did that sort of influence the basis of Sonos Radio in some of these channels at all?
RYAN TAYLOR: Yeah, I mean, look, there's a million places you can listen to music, right? And ultimately what we're trying to do is create something different, a little bit more valuable for those that choose to listen to the stuff that we're making. And I think, to your point Nate, what we think of is how do you-- it's really all about how do you-- I say this so much, it just sounds like I'm saying the same thing over, but how do you set the right context for what you're about to hear, right?
Like music, how do you make sure that the music matters? And how do you actually help the listening audience understand what or why they're hearing a certain thing, because without that things can get lost. You might not be introduced to new artists. You might not resonate with something just the first time you hear it. But if you know why the artist is talking about a thing, or if you understand where that artist came from, it will kind of open your ears and help you listen.
We talk a lot, on our side, about listening with big ears. It helps you listen with big ears and be receptive to something new or something different that you might not expect. And we're not trying to be the everything store for music, right? We're trying to create a really curated and kind of interesting experience for our listeners that really they can't have anywhere else. And so that's I think the special sauce that we're trying to bring to the table.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: Yeah that description you just gave reminds me of the notion between like lean back music which is like the Pandora style stations, which some of the Sonos Radio things are similar to, versus lean forward where you're in control. You're picking your playlists, your albums that sort of thing. It sounds like Sonos Radio kind of bridges those two worlds a bit.
RYAN TAYLOR: Yeah I would say it's definitely, it's interesting. We think about that in terms of like what are the properties and stations we're trying to make for those different use cases. So some stations are designed to be much more challenging like you mentioned Sound System. Sonos Sound System is our flagship kind of brand forward station, where we do original shows.
We work with quite a few collaborators on a series we make called Radio Hour, which is a weekly show, interview format where an artist will walk us through something they're listening to now, or what's really interesting to them. That's hosted by Elia Einhorn, and it's a really fantastic listen. You can listen to all the archives of those shows on our mixcloud archive, which I can give the url for a little later.
But Sound System is a place where we're really challenging the listener, right? There's lots of different genres all in one station. It's not designed to be put on and listened to for hours at a time, right, versus the station that we make, one of my personal favorites called Cruise Control, which is effectively a soft rock station. It mixes kind of yacht rock with modern soft rock and it's like [INAUDIBLE] into Michael McDonald, right? It's kind of an interesting mix that actually is kind of unique. But you can listen to station for four or five hours at a time and kind of have a consistent vibe.
And so those are very different use cases for what would really just be a radio station, but some of them are kind of more challenging and inviting and kind of have a like a museum type point of view, and others are really meant to be push play and listen for four or five hours at a time. We're trying to figure out what is the right balance there. How do we optimize that and think about that as we go forward.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: I think right now we could all use four or five hours of yacht rock just to sort of mellow out.
RYAN TAYLOR: It is so relaxing. Yeah.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: Yeah. That's awesome. So this launched last April, I believe so coming up on a year soon. Just broadly speaking, how's it going. What's engagement like? How-- can you talk about how you've expanded in terms of adding new artist stations, but what have you learned about what people are looking for in this sort of thing over the last eight, nine months?
RYAN TAYLOR: Yeah, reception's been fantastic. We-- we're the fastest growing service on our own platform and we've become the number four most listened to service on Sonos so far. So people are responding well. People are using the service. That's incremental like ultimately to the overall listener platform, so we talked a little bit about what we're all experiencing, being on stay at home orders and so forth.
Listening on Sonos in general is up 33% plus year over year, and just growth in home listening is accelerating as you would imagine. But again our goal is to get people to listen kind of more, listen out loud more often in their home and so that seems to be working. People are enjoying. We've got great feedback. We got lots of negative feedback in terms of how we want to improve product experience over time as well. And so really we're just kind of learning through this process.
I think one of the other interesting things is in November we launched Sonos Radio HD, which is our first kind of subscription offering. And really that's an ad-free skippable Sonos Radio stations all delivered in flac format, in HD format. But as well we have many more stations that you get when you become an HD subscriber.
And so we're really, again, kind of learning and growing around how we think about that. What are the right types of stations people are interested in from us and how do we continue to evolve that. But ultimately it's been super exciting to bring a new experience to our owners and the reception's been quite fantastic so far.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: Well I'm glad you brought up HD, because I meant to talk about that as well. So that came about six months after the initial Sonos Radio launch. Like you mentioned, it's an $8 a month add-on to Sonos Radio, which is free and ad supported. That gets rid of ads on most, if not all the stations.
RYAN TAYLOR: You have some ads, some stations, yeah.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: Right.
RYAN TAYLOR: Yeah so we did have-- on the free tier, we do have some ad-free stations, for instance Sound System is an ad-free station and our artist stations are ad-free there. But for all of our genre stations like Cruise Control, I mentioned and many others, those are ad supported. And for Sonos Radio HD, obviously the entire experience is ad-free there.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: OK great. So like I said, it came pretty quickly on the heels of the initial Sonos Radio launch. I was actually a little surprised. Like I said, six months in, you decided to go into the extremely competitive paid space, so can you talk at all about how that launch is going. Have you seen much uptick and I'm also curious if that was always part of the roadmap or was it more about we're going to launch the free product, let it be out there for a bit, see if there's a need for this upgraded product.
RYAN TAYLOR: Yeah it's a great question. So obviously, we just got started November 12th, so we're like a month and a half in to Sonos Radio HD. I mean we're super happy with the results so far, but I can't really share more than that. I think in terms of how we got started, like as we, believe it or not, when we launched on April, we didn't actually have the subscription service fully ironed out at that point, right? So it was really about how do we respond to our audience and kind of what they're asking for.
Is this something folks would be willing to pay for, or is that not something that's worth pursuing? So we really took those first six, eight weeks to listen, and kind of learn, and make some adjustments along the way. I really just started plugging away at delivering what we think was the right first step for the audience that was asking us for some of these things. So we're kind of in this mode where we're learning to-- like any service, right? Or any service out there, you listen to your consumers, and your audience and you kind of make adjustments as quickly as you can, to kind of satisfy what they're asking for.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: Yeah so at the beginning you mentioned how part of what led to Sonos Radio was the fact that you see on your platform, that standard radio listening, which I believe includes FM, and then other like lean back stuff like Pandora Radio makes up about half the play time. Is that accurate?
RYAN TAYLOR: Yeah, roughly 50% of listening on Sonos as has been traditional radio. Yeah.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: So what does that tell you about what people like to do with their speakers? I found that a little surprising in a world we've got Spotify, Apple Music and so many other audio sources that Sonos supports that still standard radio, terrestrial radio is still this huge, huge driver.
RYAN TAYLOR: Yeah, I mean there's so many reasons for that, right? I mean, like, ultimately-- I joke a lot. I say, people are lonely and they want to have friends around them, right? And the people they listen to in the morning getting ready are their friends, and that's their community, and they're actually listening to the community that lives around them, whether it's their local radio stations or whatnot. I think what we're finding is and what we're trying to deliver is making sure that users and our owners can find the stations that resonate most with them. So Sonos is global and Sonos Radio is available globally.
We see quite different listening patterns in different countries around the world. So you have a place like the Netherlands, where you know overall terrestrial radio listening is super high, and people like listening for hours and hours and hours at a time, which is different than the way people listen to in the US, or in Australia, or Canada. So kind of seeing those nuances in terms of how people connect with the host that they like and the news shows that they enjoy, and how they interact with talk versus music is a really interesting dynamic to understand why people are listening to radio in that sense.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: Great, and you said that people do like to feel like they've got a friend. Obviously you come to know your local DJs very well, that sort of thing. And from the same perspective, you've got guest hosts, and recurring radio segments, stations curated by artists so you can come back every week, or every couple of weeks and get updates from them. Can you talk a little bit about how you got these hosts on board, what you're looking for, how these people ended up sort of leading the initial Sonos Radio push.
RYAN TAYLOR: Yeah I mean I talked about that a little bit at the beginning but for years we have done lots of different and interesting kind of artist or collaborations, whether it's-- and we would do that with partners as well and we still continue to do that. For example, we launched a product a couple of years ago, we did an awesome activation with the Gorillas, and kind of brought an experience to life to help them promote one of their new albums a few years ago.
And so really, we wanted to kind of create a space where we can bring those types of things to life on our platform, as opposed to only like in activation experiences and things like that. And so over the years, we've developed lots of relationships with not only artists, but also with folks that did make awesome radio shows and content and so forth too, so you'll see a lot more from us. Like you said before, we're just getting started here.
Right now, we have one weekly format show called Radio Hour. We just launched the second one with "Craft Magazine" out of the UK called Unsung, and the concept of that show is really to talk with artists that you may know about music that's heavily influenced and that probably never got their-- never got their due, hence the name Unsung.
And so like last week's episode was with the lead singer of Future Islands, and just really highlighting an artist that-- that he loves, but maybe no one ever has heard of and really telling a story about artists. And so it's really, you just again, a way to help our audience connect with artists that they might enjoy or love and really learn the stories and kind of influence of those artists. And we're going to experiment with lots of different shows and types of content to really continue that mission.
In terms of how we kind of got folks on board it's really been, we're quite lucky in that we've spent 18 years at this point building the best products we can make from a speaker and sound perspective, right? So we work with lots of artists to help tune our speakers. We have a sound board that helps us develop products and help get the right sound profile for Arc or for Sonos Five or Sonos Move. And so really it's about working with those partners to kind of expand the network and kind of bring folks in that really care about sound quality that want to bring a great sound experience to life.
And actually-- I have Dolly Parton's book behind me. When we launched Sonos Radio HD, one of the stations that-- are marquee stations for the launch was called Songteller Radio, which is a station hosted by Dolly Parton. And it's not, there's obviously some Dolly Parton music on there, but she plays Beyonce records and she plays a lot of things on that station and talks about it in the way that you might not expect Dolly Parton to talk about Beyonce, right?
And you know, what we're really trying to do is kind of create a safe space for artists to tell a story that they want to tell. It's a radio station format, not just a show, right? So it's not a one-off one hour listen. It's about creating something that can be listened to for months or more at a time and always be fresh and always be changing. And so I think it's just a little bit unique and some artists are attracted to helping us do that.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: How often do these stations update, like the Dolly Parton one you just mentioned, how often does she push out sort of new, I know episodes isn't quite the right word, but there's like new content on a rotating schedule, right?
RYAN TAYLOR: Yeah I mean everything we do is, everything is hand curated, right? So it's not, this is not an algorithm picking every song. This is every station on Sonos Radio is hand curated by our team, or a partner, or an artist themself. And ultimately they're always changing, and so there's new ads and takedowns on a weekly and certainly on a monthly basis. But usually every couple of weeks, we're constantly refreshing and rotating that content. Some artists obviously do it more often than others.
But the idea is that these are effectively permanent and always evolving experiences. So they're not-- it's not a playlist on loop over and over. It's an ever-evolving, ever-growing catalog with more stories over time as well. So it's a constant process right, and we're doing that every single day.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: Yeah, so to zoom out a little bit from specifically Sonos Radio, has working on this given you any insights or do you have any thoughts on the sort of world of audio streaming, what's coming up next in terms of trends, or how people listen, both from a programming or software side of things, as well as a hardware situation, based on you guys obviously have a long history of making hardware, so is there anything you've learned over the last year from this experience that makes you think about how people's listening patterns might be changing.
RYAN TAYLOR: Yeah I mean, I think you mentioned, you mentioned kind of, obviously, the rise of podcasts and how that's kind of really been super dynamic over the past few years. I mean it's a lot happening around this idea of building context around music, right? Ultimately what is exciting to me to see is that a lot of other folks or a lot of other companies and platforms and services are doing an increasingly better job of this. Traditional radio has done this forever, and they do a really good job at it.
But I think the nuance of, like, how do you, not have super annoying ads throughout the entire experience all the time. How do you do that in a really considered way. How do you create a platform that might be, it's not only designed to optimize peak time spent listening from a radio perspective, to really be able to kind of know give people more information, and kind of tell more stories about the music itself.
Other folks are starting to do this. I mean, some of the stuff that's happening in the podcasting space is super exciting with Anchor's new tools for adding music to podcasts, and things like that that are I think really, really interesting. And you're going to start to see a lot more experimentation around putting the curation tools in the hands of the people, as opposed to only the gatekeepers. That's a huge trend that I see happening over the next year or so.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: Yeah when you consider the fact that we, the internet, one of the best things about it is that you're not limited by radio bans or bandwidth or anything. You can just have as many stations as you want, to reach as many different sort of subsets of listeners as you want. You can just keep on going down that road as long as someone's interested enough to curate it, there's probably going to be people who are interested in listening to it, too.
RYAN TAYLOR: Totally I mean, I think like, look in the 2000s or kind of even in the late 90s and early 2000s, we talked about hey someday in the future, you're going to have the ability to use any kind of music you want, and then there's going to be a layer of experiences built on top of that. I finally think that we're at the place where that's starting to happen, right?
Whether it's concerts in "Fortnite" or what's happening around kind of bringing music experience to life in different mediums, like that's-- we're right on the cusp of that starting to happen, to become real, in fact whatever some company is developing out there in the lab, like those experiences are real now. And they're on their way to the mainstream over the next year and a half, I think.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: I think you could say that's one of the few good things that have come from, you know live music not being a thing unfortunately over the last better part of a year is that artists and technology companies alike are getting really creative about how to bring these experiences into people's homes. And I'm glad to see that myself for sure.
RYAN TAYLOR: Yeah I've watched a lot of concerts out in my living room over the past year and it's-- like I think that's going to-- that space is going to evolve quite rapidly as well, so it is, it actually is a super exciting time because I feel like for the last 10 years music technology and kind of what's happening around music services has been pretty well, you could kind of forecast where it was heading pretty clearly.
And I think over the next few years, you're going to start to see a lot more divergence. I guess what I was trying to say is there's been a lot of convergence over the past three, four, five years in terms of what a music service or a music experience looks like, and I think you're going to start to see a lot more experimentation and divergence over the next couple. And that's super exciting.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: Right. Now all these companies have their catalogs with 70 billion songs or whatever set. They've got to figure out ways to differentiate from there and it's going to be experiences like you're offering with Sonos Radio. It's going to be Spotify merging podcasts and music. It's going to be Apple kind of merging video stuff with their music service. All those sort of things and from here, it's a good point. I don't know where it's going to go. It's going to be really interesting to see. Well I think that's about--
RYAN TAYLOR: Things are more fun when you don't know what's about to happen, right?
NATHAN INGRAHAM: Yeah exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I think that is our time here. Again I want to say thanks very much for coming on and joining us today. And can you, you mentioned at top that you're keeping an archive of the Sound System interviews, is that accurate? On a mixcloud, I think you said.
RYAN TAYLOR: Yeah, so we work very closely with mixcloud, and all of the radio hours and kind of special shows we make are available on our mixcloud archive. It's mixcloud.com/sonos, and you can find us on Instagram at @SonosRadio where we're telling interesting stories on Instagram as well around the content we're making. So that's where you can find us.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: Great well thanks for the update. And do you have any internet platforms that want to share or do you prefer to kind of stay off the grid?
RYAN TAYLOR: I'm kind of off the grid there, so I'll stick to the Sonos at this point.
NATHAN INGRAHAM: Sounds good. Ryan, thanks again for joining us. It's great to catch up with you. And coming up next, we're going to be talking with Sony about what's next for the future of Sony. So again thanks and keep it tuned to Engadget.com for more.