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Wanted - The Sonos Social Net
I have slowly but surely turned on a bunch of my friends to Sonos and Rhapsody. Hopefully for Sonos and Rhapsody, I've turned on a few of you all too.
Every single one my friends loves the combo. From anywhere in their home or apartment, with the Sonos wireless controller, they can play almost any song, artist, or album they want over their home stereo. It is the killer app for Rhapsody and all "music dial tone" services.
Several months ago I had lunch with a person who works on Rhapsody. He told me that the churn on Rhapsody subscriptions is pretty large when the user is listening on their computer. But when they listen on a device like Sonos, Slim, or Sansa, the churn is non existent. That's because Rhapsody is only part of the killer solution. The other part is the listening device/environment. When your entire home is hooked up to a complete library of music in the sky, you have reached nirvana.
But there's so much more potential that Rhapsody and Sonos haven't tapped. Sonos needs a social net for its users. And we need it NOW!!
I enjoy finding new music and turning on others to it. I would like to "push" my music finds to all my friends who have Rhapsody and Sonos. I can do that with Rhapsody, but it's clunky and not integrated into the Sonos controller. The Sonos controller needs a top menu item called "Friends" and one called "Recommendations".
I also want to record all my Sonos listens (like last.fm and yottamusic) and have them be there for my friends to look at and listen on their Sonos.
We are going to dinner at our friend's house tonight. I've built a playlist in Rhapsody and we'll play it on Rhapsody via his Sonos system.
Dedicated Follower of Fashion
But it took more work than it should to do this. It could be so much simpler.
None of this is that hard to build. There are a bunch of white label social net platforms out there and several of them are mentioned in Brad Stone's piece in the NY Times today. Either build your own social net or hook up with one of these companies, but Sonos has to do this for me and my friends. ASAP.
As I said in my earlier post, software that isn't natively social doesn't work for me anymore.
Comments (8) | Posted March 3, 2007 in My Music , Venture Capital and Technology
Comments
Fred – Great observations… Think about this in the context of Brad’s post on “What’s Next”. As per my comments there, there is a good argument why value is shifting back to hardware and integrated solutions (combining hardware, software and the network). This doesn’t mean that we should go out and buy DELL stock. But it is consistent with the success of ipod and apple in general. It also explains cisco’s forays into social networking. In the same way that (as per your previous post), all software is becoming social, all hardware products may soon have a social networking element too.
Posted by: Salman FF | Mar 3, 2007 2:14:49 PM
Latest royalty proposals look like a death knell for non-subscription Internet radio...
http://www.kurthanson.com/archive/news/030207/index.shtml
Posted by: druce | Mar 3, 2007 3:35:46 PM
Sounds to me like Tunefeed.com could be your best solution Fred. Sonos could fairly easily use our API and build the features you want in a few days.
http://www.faces.com/Edit/API/GettingStarted.aspx
In any case, we'll have a fully functional friends sharing and recommendation system operational for MS Media Center in a few weeks where you can do all of the things you mention above...
There have been a few changes with Tunefeed lately and many more on the way, drop me a line if you have any suggestions.
Posted by: jonathan | Mar 3, 2007 6:15:15 PM
u can stream the new wilco now. pretty cool promo.
http://smartley3.wilcoworld.net/sbs/
Posted by: josef | Mar 4, 2007 12:04:48 AM
Still with the Rhapsody thing huh? I've been using Napster for a long time, the reviews always seem to be higher than Rhapsody...
I am currently testing out MTV's "Urge" subscription service. It integrates nicely with Media Player 11. I might convert to it. I tried Rhapsody in the early days, it's not in the same league from a pure subscription service perspective but perhaps there is incremental value with the hardware you're mentioning...
Posted by: Dan Buell | Mar 4, 2007 4:49:51 AM
Can't you just tune into Pandora via Sonos?
Won't that get you some of the social stuff?
Posted by: john | Mar 4, 2007 9:03:17 PM
Fred - GREAT idea.
Another way to do it is via dedicated PCs with shoutcast servers, although there's clearly a bandwidth issue. But it would be cool to be able to check out each others' playlists.
Love Sonos. Love Rhapsody. Love Reese's Peanut Butter Cups...
Posted by: Jeremy Toeman | Mar 5, 2007 8:16:11 PM
Sonos + Rhapsody is great but also not an entry level solution. I'm using the Roku Soundbridge M1001 + Rhapsody and for $200 it is really a fantastic solution. Definitely limitations (the remote control on the Sonos blows it away) and I will upgrade to the Sonos at some point so that I don't have to keep my computer on to take advantage of my collection of music. However, my biggest issue with the Roku (and I'm curious if this affects the Sonos) is that music suggestion services, like Pandora (which I love) don't work on because it is not a streaming service. Roku would have to do development work to support it and I can't seem to get them to tell me if this is in the works or not. Anyone have any ideas/info about this?
Posted by: J Garv | Mar 8, 2007 9:36:50 AM
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