Sonos has today introduced its free, ad-supported streaming radio service, Sonos Radio.
Available via the Sonos app from today, the new service brings together more than 60,000 stations from multiple streaming partners alongside original programming from Sonos.
According to the company, nearly half of all listening time on Sonos is dedicated to customers’ favourite stations and DJs.
“Sonos has always made it easy for customers to discover the riches of streaming music services by building premium products that sound great and by giving customers the freedom to use the services of their choice,” commented Patrick Spence, Sonos’ CEO.
“Sonos Radio brings together streaming radio services and a select set of curated radio stations in a simple, elegant way. This is just a beginning as we work to deliver services that provide our customers a better experience and provide our music streaming service partners an opportunity to highlight their best content.”
A global service, Sonos Radio integrates multiple internet radio services from around the world, including TuneIn and iHeartRadio with more to come, allowing customers to listen to music, sports, news, and more from local stations based on their postcodes, as well as accessing any station globally.
The platform will be continually updated with new stations powered by partners, including integrations with UK-based radio service, Global and US-based, Radio.com, which are both coming soon.
Original radio programming from Sonos is also be introduced, featuring a range of music handpicked by DJs and artists. Its ad-free station, Sonos Sound System, is curated and hosted by the Sonos team, recorded in a newly built radio studio in its flagship store in New York City.
Listeners will enjoy a stream of new, well-known or rediscovered music, behind the scene stories, as well as guest artist radio hours, to be released every Wednesday.
In addition, ad-free artist curated stations feature a regularly updated stream of hundreds of songs from artists inspired by their own influences and obsessions, starting today with Thom Yorke’s station, ‘In the absence thereof…’. New artist stations will be launched regularly.
Sonos Stations, inspired by Sonos owner’s favourite genres, feature more than 30 curated ad-supported stations.
In order to provide a regularly refreshed mix of new hand curated music, Sonos designed and developed custom programming and curation tools for Sonos Stations. It has also partnered with Super Hi-Fi, a company delivering AI for digital music, across all Sonos Radio streams for volume levelling across songs and ads, song blending, and seamlessly mixing in voice commentary.
Powering the catalogue for Sonos Stations is Rhapsody’s “Powered by Napster”, a complete music and audio platform service and the first-ever streaming service on Sonos.
A software update that has gone out today means that Sonos Radio will be pre-loaded in the browse menu of the app.
Global internet radio stations will be available for all customers worldwide. Sonos’ original programming will only be available in the UK, Ireland, US, Canada and Australia to start, with support for additional countries coming soon.