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Sonos’ exciting new product category is... commercial audio

Sonos’ exciting new product category is... commercial audio

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Sonos Pro is targeted at business owners who want to (legally) play music across several locations. It includes perks like a web dashboard that lets you configure speakers from anywhere.

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A photo of a clothing store with a Sonos One speaker on the counter.
Sonos Pro is available to businesses starting today.
Image: Sonos

Maybe the long-rumored Sonos headphones aren’t coming this year after all. A few months ago, CEO Patrick Spence announced that Sonos would enter four new product categories over the next few years — with the first coming in 2023. But the company is throwing a curveball of sorts: while the easy assumption was that these would all be new hardware categories, it turns out that the first one is all about software. Software as a service (SaaS), to be more specific.

Today, Sonos is introducing Sonos Pro, a new service targeted at businesses — restaurants, bars, and retail stores — that makes it easy to play music across numerous locations without breaking any licensing rules. Sonos Pro works with all S2-compatible hardware including the Ikea Symfonisk line and, if you’re into retrofitting existing speakers, the Amp and Port.

Pro customers will gain access to a web portal that lets them remotely control what’s playing in each of their locations (divided into different zones) and perform troubleshooting from afar. If you’re a normal consumer and want to reset your Sonos system at home, you’ve got to unplug the products, but Pro customers will be able to do it with software. They’ll also have the ability to schedule particular genres for different times of the day to lock in the right atmosphere for their business. Want to keep the volume low in the mornings when you’ve got less foot traffic and automatically raise it during peak hours? Sonos Pro can do that.

A screenshot of the Sonos Pro dashboard.
Sonos Pro costs $35 / month per location, which means theoretical business owners would be paying over $200.
Image: Sonos

The monthly Sonos Pro subscription, priced at $35 per business location, will include “Sonos Backgrounds.” This is a commercially licensed music service featuring a range of royalty-free music from independent artists that’s all legally compliant for streaming at business establishments.

If you’re wondering why that’s necessary, businesses technically aren’t allowed to just start playing Spotify, Apple Music, or other mainstream music apps over their speakers. Spotify says so right here. Those services are only licensed for personal use; playing them in a public setting counts as a live performance, and that’s a no-no unless you’ve paid for the necessary licenses from ASCAP, BMI, and other organizations. That can get extremely complicated in and of itself.

A photo of a Sonos Five on the shelving at a bar.
Commercial businesses aren’t allowed to play Spotify, Apple Music, and other mainstream music services — though many do so anyway.
Image: Sonos

To make life easier, numerous services like Soundtrack Your Brand, Mood Harmony / Mood Mix, and Rockbot have emerged as a one-stop solution for businesses. You pay them a monthly fee, and part of that money goes to covering the necessary royalty and performance licenses; business owners have the reassurance that they’re allowed to play whatever tracks are available. These authorized services also mean avoiding random ad interruptions that can pop up if you’re skirting the law and using Pandora or the free tier of Spotify. Sonos wants to fill a similar role. But Sonos Pro will also support these standalone third-party options (if you pay for them) in addition to the included Sonos Backgrounds.

The service will provide deep, granular control over the entire system in a commercial space. You can set maximum volume limits for each speaker or enable / disable features like AirPlay, line-in playback, and more. If you want to give your staff access to Spotify after hours, that’s doable with an “allow direct control” setting. Speaking of which, business owners can grant their employees access to Sonos Pro and set different permission tiers for each person. And again, this can all be done remotely. Try adjusting settings (or even switching your Wi-Fi network) for Sonos devices on a regular account, and it can get messy fast. If you’re away from the devices, forget about it.

A screenshot of Sonos Pro settings for features like AirPlay and line-in playback.
Sonos Pro customers can quickly toggle features like AirPlay and line-in audio.
Image: Sonos

In an interview yesterday, Sonos Professional VP Audra Kinsley told me that the company has conducted “hundreds of interviews over thousands of hours” as it developed Sonos Pro. Over 100 businesses have been testing the service and giving Sonos feedback prior to today’s official debut.

But there are plenty of bars and coffee shops that play whatever they want — licensing be damned. How do you bring those people in? “There’s definitely a gap in awareness right now,” Kinsley said. “For the most part, we find in our user research that the situation that you just described is not so much that that business owner intentionally was trying to not be compliant, but that they did not know at all about the legalities that happen with content and commercial spaces. We really see ourselves as an educator, and we think one of the core parts of our value proposition is to be able to give a business owner the business-grade control, legally-compliant content, and hardware all from one simple vendor.”

One thing Sonos Pro customers won’t be getting is discounts on hardware. Despite Spence recently saying that Sonos plans to put a greater emphasis on selling multi-speaker bundles, Pro subscribers shouldn’t expect exclusive sales or offers for the time being. The focus is delivering a tailored Sonos software experience, personalized support, and remote management capabilities.

Sonos views commercial audio as a significant opportunity and says over 150,000 businesses are already using its products in one form or another. If the company can convert a portion of those into Sonos Pro customers, it’ll be a nice boost to Sonos’ recurring revenue stream.

If you’re a regular consumer like me, your eyes may have glazed over with disinterest by now. But I do hope that some of these Sonos Pro exclusives, like the web-based dashboard and easy system reboots, make their way to residential customers over time. Kinsley mentioned that Sonos’ custom installer network has told the company that a few features would be valuable in that setting as well.

With the first of four new categories now checked off, we might be in for a decently long wait until we see a new device category from Sonos. I’ve previously reported that a second-generation Sonos Move portable speaker is on the docket for later this year. And I expect to see the company refine the performance of its new Era 300 and Era 100 speakers over the coming months. (I’ve heard from more than a few of you who are disappointed that the Era 300’s center channel doesn’t output any sound when two of the speakers are used as surrounds.)

But Sonos Pro goes to show how serious the company is about pursuing new paths that can help cement its long-term business outlook. If nothing else, this is a category that Big Tech isn’t about to step into anytime soon.