Sonos Radio - mixed bag of curated music

Audio Gear Talk Sonos
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Sonos launched a radio service. I have only just launched it. Link and some excerpts of the article below.

It includes more than 60,000 radio stations, according to the company, but again, the streams will be repackaged from deals with existing content partners such as iHeartRadio, Radio.com, and TuneIn, among others. Clicking on the Browse icon within the Sonos app will bring up to a list of the services you’ve already connected to your Sonos account; now Sonos Radio will show up there as well. (You can opt out of this listing, the company says, if you’d rather not use the new ad-supported radio service.)

The first is curated music and original programming, including something called Sonos Soundsystem. This is a channel hosted by Sonos-hired DJs (who were recording out of New York City until the pandemic hit) and will include guest radio hours hosted by artists like Thom Yorke and Jamila Woods. It’s a little confusing—again, I haven’t used the updated app yet—but Sonos Presents also seems to include entire ad-free stations that are created and inspired by people like David Byrne, Brittany Howard, and Yorke.

Sonos Stations is a roundup of more than 30 genre-based music listening stations—think Cocktail Hour, Indie Gold, Workout Remix. And finally, the Local Radio category will point users to the thousands of streaming radio options Sonos users already have, whether those are dedicated to music, news and talk radio, or sports.

At launch, the music streamed through Sonos Presents and Sonos Stations is being served by Napster.com.

Part of Sonos’ reasoning behind launching this new service is that it is trying to solve a problem that’s not unique in this era of massive streaming media libraries and never-ending scrolls: discovery. Sonos believes a certain portion of its customer base just doesn’t know the best way to find good stuff to listen to in the current version of the app.

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Cheers just added the service.
It does seem strange that Roon requires people to request basic streaming stations…

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I’m not sure what you mean… they already had multiple Radio services like TuneIn. I think they are doing a few things here (1) trying to make an “easier” Radio experience, (2) having known musician and DJ tie ins (for marketing appeal) (3) some of the stations are ad supported so a revenue stream. I wonder if they don’t have some other deals that are not totally clear yet.

But you could do different radio things in the past, this is just a more structured and curated experience.

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Read the privacy information on Sonos Radio. They do a massive amount of data mining and sell it to advertisers.

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In bold they say the opposite. But it was also recently updated, so maybe they took out some bits about selling data.

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Read the entire several pages long policy…multiple references to selling your data. They are doing the Google trick where they claim that don’t sell your data because its anonymized. They also have a new policy out just for Sonos radio.

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i dont plan on using it but opted in… is there a way to opt out of my agreeing?