Sonos Shows Love for Integrator Channel, Eyes Future of Whole-Home Music

Sonos is shoring up its support for the installer channel with a new amplifier engineered to address integrators’ needs, an architectural speaker partnership and a plan to make its application programming interfaces (APIs) available to third-party developers, the company said at its 170,000-square-foot East Coast office Thursday.

The daylong event, unusual for Sonos because it customarily keeps plans close to the vest, featured the preannouncement of its first amplifier upgrade in a decade, the opening of its platform to enable dealers to create integrations with Sonos speakers and a partnership with architectural speaker company Sonance for co-branded speakers. Chief Commercial Officer Matthew Siegel said Sonos and Sonance are making architectural audio “smarter” through Sonos software, and the joint speaker lineup will address “all of the solutions that the professional installer community would need” for residential architectural speaker installations.

Early next year, the Sonos Amp will replace the 10-year-old Connect Amp and is the product of a two-year effort between a team of 100 installers and Sonos engineers to build a product that meets needs of custom integrators for residential and commercial installations. After a dealer survey, a Sonos team went to dealers’ showrooms and job sites to learn more about what installers want, part of its ramped-up dealer outreach, said Benjamin Rappoport, hardware product manager.

Sonos showed prototypes of the Amp to dealers, who said they were constrained by power, so the company doubled the power in the new Amp to 125 watts per channel. It added connections for two additional speakers and designed in “ears” and “tabs” to make the downsized amplifier fit neatly two across in a standard AV rack. That was a nod to the AV rack as an “outward representation of the craftsmanship of the integrator,” said Rappoport. The Amp also will be available at retail to do-it-yourself customers and was designed to look attractive in a living space or an AV rack, he said.

“Times are changing and things are evolving,” said Rappoport, promoting the concept of “architectural sound” that fits a person’s “aesthetic,” whether that’s displayed in a living room or hidden in walls. Layered on top of that is smart home technology and the “new paradigm of ask and listen” made possible by voice engines including Alexa and Google Assistant, he said. Sonos maintains it’s still on track to deliver Google Assistant voice control by year-end.

Sonos used the hardware and software announcements to “reinvent and reinvigorate” its business with dealers, said Zach Kramer, global head-retail and Commercial Installed Solutions, saying the custom channel is where the company launched 13 years ago and remains “a huge channel for us.”

Music Through Security Dealers

The company now refers to its integrator business as Installed Solutions, and it wraps in security dealers who increasingly want to include music in their portfolios, said Andrew Vloyanetes, head of sales, U.S. Installed Solutions. With the advent of companies like Alarm.com and other “integrator-friendly” security systems, integrators are doing more in security, he said. Selling through professional security installers is another way to bring music to consumers, through integrations, he said.

The Installed Solutions unit added positions for the integrator channel: a strategy position for how the company goes to market globally to pro installers; a product marketing position that oversees the architectural portfolio, and account managers, inside sales and tech support to serve the channel, Vloyanetes said.

The company added a freight program for dealers last year, and a co-op funding program to shape programs to dealers including product giveaways, volume rebates and promotions that parallel those going on at mass-market retailers such as Amazon or Best Buy. “Our install professionals are able to capture that promo also and not have to eat the cost out of their own pocket,” said Vloyanetes, saying smaller dealers can benefit from promotions driven by volume retailers’ marketing.

Vloyanetes said Sonos is building out infrastructure changes to support custom dealers, including disclosing upcoming products so they can design it into projects under development. It did that this summer, visiting 700 dealers to preview the Amp five months ahead of the product release. “We need to respect the sales cycle in the custom installer world,” said Vloyanetes, noting installers typically have a 45-60-day sales cycle from buying commitment to install. The $599 Amp will be available in February, Sonos said.

Early next year, the company is launching a new portal for wholesale purchasing that will incentivize “our better dealers,” said Vloyanetes. It will also offer bundles with Sonos and third-party partners, Vloyanetes said, and is launching a dedicated tech support unit for installers this fall. “Historically, we haven’t been good at communicating with our dealers on a good cadence,” said Patrick Gall, Installed Solutions marketing lead, noting there’s now a monthly newsletter for dealers and webinars for product launches.

At year's end, Sonos will unveil a revamped dealer locator service on its website, said Vloyanetes, and it will pad that with information describing the benefits of hiring a professional installer. “Customers may not realize what’s possible inside their home,” he said. “That’s the value prop of what a custom installer does.” Sonos will qualify customers on the website and connect customers to installers, he said. Details about qualification are being worked out, he said.

Sonos created an in-house advisory board with custom dealers and will announce members at CEDIA, said Vloyanetes, saying the company will show up “massively” at CEDIA Expo “in ways we’ve never done before.”

Responding to our question on why Sonos is making such a strong effort now with the custom channel after 13 years, Vloyanetes cited “resources and time,” saying the company was focused on bringing one product to market that would launch “across the most amount of people at a time.” It’s now time “to make some big investments for the channel,” he said.

'Very Confusing' for Consumers

Kramer said Installed Solutions addresses the major trends Sonos sees emerging: paid streaming, the rise of voice and smart home. “That’s very confusing for a lot of consumers, and it’s actually the channel where they get the best explanation of how all this stuff works together and the simplest solutions,” Kramer said. The “rise of technology makes the channel more important than it’s ever been.”

Responding to an integrator question on how Sonos will build trust from dealers who felt the company moved away from the custom channel -- including not exhibiting at CEDIA Expo -- Vloyanetes referred to a company strategy on "trust, credibility and advocacy." National promotions custom dealers can benefit from are part of the trust component, he said, and Sonos expanded distribution to make product more available to small integrators.

On how dealers can be sure Sonos won’t “break integrations” through platform changes that can cause a Sonos system not to work with a control system -- a glitch that occurred several years ago when Sonos transitioned to its API program from the ubiquitous UPnP -- Vloyanetes said that’s the point of the Sonos platform. Companies like Crestron, Control4 and Savant “appreciate that because they know a software update on their side or our side isn’t going to ultimately break their systems,” he said.

Sonos has been an open platform for a lot of partners, “but open in quotes,” said Lidiane Jones, vice president-software product management, saying the company worked with select partners to enable joint experiences. In September, the company is opening its developer program to address the rise of the smart home and voice interfaces, Jones said. “Hopefully, in a year we’re going to be discussing all of these interesting and innovative integrations that are coming out that we can’t even predict today.” Initially, the open platform will be about controlling a set of cloud-based control APIs for basic play, pause, and skip-type functions and making playlists available, she said.

Sonos will launch in October a feature called Audio Clip, the core of what it calls Notifications, so integrators or users can replace a doorbell chime with a clip. Jones quipped about her husband developing a geo-fence-based “Daddy’s coming home” announcement that could play through speakers when he approaches the house. Such an announcement could pause and resume sound automatically, she said. Sonos will provide the interface and documentation to developers on how its speakers manage sound along with guidelines for expected behavior around listening, she said.

Sonos dealer Matt Scott, president of Omega Audio Video, London, Ontario, sees the opening of the Sonos platform as an essential move in the connected world. Noting snafus in the past couple of years with established control systems losing their ability to talk to Sonos systems, Scott said it's “a big deal for installers” to know that the “major control manufacturers can develop systems that allow us to work with Sonos, allow us to get to playlists, allow us to auto duck” volume levels when necessary.

“If the API is as open as they say it is, that should allow us to interface with the entire Sonos environment, and you no longer, in theory, will have as many issues trying to create an event with a geofence from your control system to, say, turn on music every Friday night when you get home,” Scott said of a possible scenario.

Making Sonos, “one of the best-known multiroom audio systems, available to every kid coding in their bedroom" with developer tools opens the door to "some pretty cool stuff to come,” Scott said. On whether that openness could be used to nefarious ends, Scott said the integrator industry is generally good about “not using our clients as test subjects for products,” and he believes Sonos will be good about monitoring any activity that could reflect negatively on the brand. “Even if we build something that’s clunky, the end user’s going to blame Sonos for that,” so it will make recommendations to ensure the best experience, he said.

The open API has the ability to add some “neat control,” Heather Sidorowicz, owner of Southtown AV, Hamburg, New York, a Crestron control system dealer, told us. Sonos integrates with Crestron now, “but you can’t make any changes to it,” Sidorowicz said. A Crestron dealer can make a touch screen do anything she wants but in the past couldn’t make changes to font sizes on a Sonos system, “so you might not be able to read album art or a playlist to pick out a favorite song,” she said. With open APIs, she said, dealers could make those changes easily.

Sonos Notebook

During introductory remarks, CEO Patrick Spence extended the company’s mantra to “help people listen better” beyond music, echoing trends from content providers including Pandora and Spotify that have recently targeted podcasts as a next frontier for streaming audio. “Customers need to be able to get access to podcast, audio books, all of these things because it helps us fill more homes with music,” Spence said. Some 176 million people are listening to streaming music, with that number expected to jump to 300 million by 2021, he said. Growth, combined with the rise in voice control and smart home, are powering what Sonos calls “the sonic internet,” he said. With consumers being able to “ask and listen,” the internet is becoming “audio-enabled,” he said. Spence addressed criticism that’s been targeted at Sonos for not appearing to listen to what installers or end users want in products. Sonos products are designed to last five to 10 years, he told journalists, and because of that, he said “sometimes customers and even our channel partners don’t think that we’re listening to the feedback we get. We are.” The company is “thoughtful about what we add to the platform and when,” he said. He addressed dealer complaints that when Sonos sells through a different channel, then its installed solutions business loses. “I don’t think that’s the case at all,” he said. As the company has built its multiroom business over 16 years by being in different retail channels, “customers understand the Sonos value proposition,” Spence said. The audio industry has been conditioned to updating an audio lineup through hardware, he said, but Sonos products are built to last and to improve over time through software updates. Recent software updates -- the addition of Apple AirPlay 2 and voice control -- led to customers using their Sonos systems more, he said.

Sonos isn’t looking to partner with other custom-channel buying groups beyond its relationship with Azione Unlimited, sales head Vloyanetes told us. “We went in [to Azione] to inform some of our go-to-market and product decisions,” and the company is getting immediate feedback from Azione’s Slack communications channel, he said. Getting a quick answer to how many dealers are using a 35-foot HDMI cable, for example, is something that would have been time-consuming via phone calls in the past, he said. “Now I just pop it into Azione, and dealers give us the response pretty quick,” cutting down on product development time, he said. Sonos also runs a weekly poll with Azione dealers via Slack to help "inform decisions," he said.

Despite the delay in the rollout of Google Assistant in Sonos One and Beam speakers, Jones, vice president-software product management, said Sonos has a great partnership with Google and has a shared goal of delivering a great user experience. On whether political issues between Google and Amazon are behind the slow rollout of Assistant on the Alexa-enabled Sonos One and Beam, Jones called Google a “phenomenal engineering company” and said Sonos is “happy with the way things are progressing.” On challenges of integrating voice control from different providers, Jones compared that to integrating different music streaming services, which Sonos has done successfully on its platform. "We’ve always been an open ecosystem on the content side” and Sonos has had to wrestle with “how to bring simplicity to a complex world," and that's the approach it's taking with voice control, she said. Voice adds the challenge of “human cognitive behaviors,” Jones said. On whether Sonos will accommodate all digital assistants at some point, she said Sonos takes an open stance on voice control: “We want voice to be an open space for users as well.”