Sonos Radio is the company's first foray into original content
Thom Yorke is curating his own station and Sonos has its answer to Beats 1, as well.
Sonos has been making speakers for years now, but it’s always been up to their owners to find audio to play on them. That hasn’t exactly been a problem -- Sonos supports more than a hundred streaming services right now, and you could always play music from your personal library, as well. But today, the company is making its first foray into content with the launch of Sonos Radio. As the name implies, you’ll be able to listen to a ton of terrestrial radio stations, but Sonos is also jumping into original content for the first time by curating its own genre-based stations and artist-created channels.
The biggest source of content provided by Sonos Radio is 60,000-plus radio stations from around the world. Those stations are powered by a deal with providers TuneIn and IHeartRadio, and Sonos says it’ll add more stations soon thanks to additional partnerships with Radio.com in the US and UK-based service Global. Sonos has offered TuneIn and IHeartRadio as streaming options for a while now, but it seems like this new service will make that experience more robust by aggregating stations from across the multiple services it has deals with.
While a new way to listen to terrestrial radio isn’t terribly exciting, Sonos says that radio makes up close to half of all streaming hours it sees across its products. But more interesting to those of us who swore off FM radio years ago will be the original content and curated stations Sonos is putting together. The “flagship” property is called Sonos Sound System, and it sounds like it’ll be similar to Apple’s Beats 1 -- a singular entry point to the experience. Sound System is ad-free, and one thing Sonos is doing to set it apart is guest-hosted radio hours. The first few participants include Angel Olsen, JPEGMAFIA, Phoebe Bridgers, Jeff Parker of Tortoise and Vagabon. Those hour-long programs are released every Wednesday, and the first thing you hear when tuning in to Sound System will be the most recent artist hour. After that, you’ll “catch up” to the live, ongoing stream.
Sonos is also partnering with big-name musicians with its ad-free “artist” stations, the first of which is named In the absence thereof… and curated by Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. He described the station as a rolling set of music “that fascinates or moves me, what obsesses me, challenges me, opens new doors, reminds me of what I might have forgotten, is insanely complex or elegantly simple, violent, funny, messy, heavy or light. Whatever has hit me over the head basically.” It’s not a “live” station but an ongoing and regularly updated stream that contains “hundreds” of songs. In addition to Yorke’s station, Sonos says it’ll launch offerings from Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes, David Byrne and Third Man Records over the next few weeks.
The last component of Sonos Radio is pretty standard fare for most streaming services these days: a selection of 30 genre-based stations, with names like Indie Gold, Hip-hop Archive, Kids Rock, Concert Hall and so on. These stations are also ad-supported, and Sonos sees them as a way to get people to broader, perhaps more familiar music quickly. By comparison, it looks at Sound System and artist-curated stations as more of a discovery vehicle. But in all cases, the company stressed that it wants its original content and stations to sound a little different than what you might be expecting. Ryan Taylor, who is the GM for Sonos Radio, told me that the company wants its listeners to come to the service with “big ears,” looking for something new rather than the traditional. And for people who aren’t into the “big ears” mentality, there are plenty of traditional radio stations on the service, too.
Whether or not Sonos’ original content can differentiate itself from the wealth of similar content found across so many other services remains to be seen, but as of today you can give it a shot in the Sonos app. There is one notable catch: Sonos Radio can only be listened to on Sonos hardware, which means there is no way to take the service away from your home, and the company didn’t have any plans yet for a way to get it elsewhere. So just know before you get hooked on Thom Yorke’s stylings, you’ll only be able to hear it on your Sonos setup.
