Sonos only gets aac256 like Chromecast. Unless using connect has a different result than the Sonos Spotify app? Seems doubtful, and either way, that’s on Spotify. Granted, Apple remains the poster child for how not to build a Sonos app. At least it gets music to the hifi.
I’m just using my roon player windows machine for roon, tidal native, deezer, itunes/Apple music and Spotify, so it doesn’t all matter to me now, but I learned hard lessons after purchasing Sonos and CCA.
The data market is probably the biggest market in town. It’s of course the core business of big data, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and only slightly less for MS and Apple. Plus companies most have never heard of. Ultimately with all the collected data, they can build pretty good profiles for a particular consumer, or segment of consumers, and if it’s personally identifying (and just because the data provided isn’t always identified, it can be easy to link with other data to identify it) can build a psychological profile and behavioral profile from it. That information is valuable to marketers, employers, healthcare, finance/credit, insurance, etc. The key is, the more concise and complete the profile, even if narrow focus, the more valuable, especially for bulk sale. Spotify has very comprehensive profile data for a huge number of people. They know what you listen to, they know when you listen to it, and they know where you are when you listen to it. They know your general routines, place to place and generally the mood you’re in at any given time. They know generally the schedule you keep and they know when you go somewhere different. Your ip is the giveaway. They know how you feel or if your mood is affected by a certain place. They know who else you know. Not a comprehensive and Facebook does, but they know who’s sharing playlists, and they know where they are (if they’re listening to Spotify.). The networking data with friends makes spotifys and apples data more saleable than, say, tidal, that doesn’t have that social aspect.
Plenty of marketers, risk managers, etc will pay good money for that level of awareness of getting inside your head and knowing what you feel about where you are and what kind of schedule you keep.
And that’s just a music service. Google, Amazon, and Facebook are that level of creepy, squared. They have more ways to extrapolate even more valuable data.
It’s not a specific spotify probablem. No doubt every music service, probably even roon is making some money off user data. But spotifys is by far the most valuable. Maybe except Google now that it’s attaching to YouTube.
