Apple Music Available on Sonos Devices Starting December 15

[DakotaGuy]

As someone who worked in the audio industry let me say this.

Sonos absolutely kills this. They have 90% market share.

Why? Bose is bigger, Denton is bigger, Samsung and Lg are much bigger brands with more money?

It's the app and services. There isn't a single other product that does multi room easier or better. Simple as that. The customer sat ratings for sonos are insanely high and people buy multiple units! Unlike the competition sonos in retail sells in bundles, 2 X play 1s or multiple units at a time.

The retailers hate this as they have little margin from sonos and have been pushing the competition hard. Yet the customers don't want it.

Take Bose, their soundtouch app is terrible. Clunky and has limited services. Denons app sucks Samsung and LG can't get it to work properly in store let alone at home and only sell as they give retailers $$$ to move the units.

Yes there are better sounding speakers but none of them do what sonos does - great app, all the services and great hardware.

I own 3 Bose SoundTouch systems. A Bose Lifestyle 525 Series II with the SoundTouch adapter, a Bose Wave SoundTouch, and a SoundTouch Portable. It's a solid set-up that works very well and sounds great, but you're right, Bose could use some work on their app. It works fine, but it's not real pretty and not the most intuitive. They are improving a lot on their service offerings and now have full Spotify integration, Deezer (even for US listeners), iHeart Radio, Pandora, SiriusXM, Internet Radio, and of course iTunes and DLNA capability. The Series III seems to have dropped Airplay for Bluetooth support, but you can re-broadcast Bluetooth so that is a nice feature. I also think the 6 presets is a neat feature.

Bose runs a nice forum for their customers and I think they are listening to us since they are always replying to questions and taking suggestions. The most requested feature is to add Apple Music followed by other services like Google Play and Amazon. I know that Bose and Apple are sort of on shaky ground after some patent battles, but it's a win-win for both of them so I could see it happening.

I understand that many feel Sonos is the gold standard when it comes to this, but it is nice to see that Bose is finally serious about building a true competitor. Competition only makes all products better because when a company has 90% of a market there isn't a whole lot of motivation to really innovate.

I just wanted to give my 2 cents on all of this since I own the SoundTouch products and they are good products for being several years behind Sonos to this market.