[ad_1]
Sonos HD Radio
Sonos, the maker of multi-room networked speakers, launched Sonos Radio
The other is Sonos Radio HD’s secret weapon: technology that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to produce programming that sounds as if someone had slaved in a recording studio before it was broadcast. But everything is done automatically and in real time. The technology comes from a startup called SuperHiFi. Sonos Radio HD is the first instantiation of a toolkit called Conductor that SuperHiFi just released, which allows other digital music distributors to create similar types of programming.
Sonos Radio HD programming includes audio elements, such as tight song segmentations and song-to-song progressions that are smooth and non-jarring. DJ banter, commercials, artist interview snippets, and other content between songs overlap with song intros and end just as the vocals start (radio DJs call this “hitting the pole”). Sonic logos and “bumpers” are widely used. All of this would take hours of work with ProTools or another similar recording studio tool, but everything is automated.
SuperHiFi calls on its technologies to unite MagicStitch3 real-time programming and Dynamic Content Curator (DCC). DCC determines which content item to incorporate next; MagicStitch3 analyzes the qualities of the audio signals, such as mood, tempo, volume, pitch, rhythm, and other characteristics, and discovers the best way to transition to the next element. MagicStitch3 can be customized for various styles of transitions, called segue personalities. DCC also uses customer-supplied metadata tags to aid in content selection.
In the case of Sonos Radio HD, Sonos creates playlists for each of its stations and provides SuperHiFi with a library of audio resources including voice-tracked DJ pranks, artist interviews, sonic logos, bumpers, and announcements. SuperHiFi technology takes these elements and brings them together in radio-like programs.
SuperHiFi started four years ago and has been working with various types of audio service providers including iHeartRadio, Napster, and Peloton, as well as PlayNetwork, a music service provider for retail stores such as Uniqlo, Gymboree, Starbucks.
There is a big difference between the kind of lavishly produced audio that comes out of a professional recording studio and an internet radio service like Pandora that plays playlists of songs, one after the other (possibly with ads in between), even if playlists are customizable. It was unthinkable that services like Pandora (and other legacy internet radio services, Slacker, Shoutcast, Clickradio, etc.) would offer such levels of production, especially for services that allow real-time customization of music selection.
SuperHiFi technology enables music services to get closer to what is possible through manual production work. However, it is also a direct extension of the technology that has been available in the radio industry since the 1990s. By using voice tracking, radio station networks could produce one-day programming for multiple stations. of a single studio in a couple of hours by having DJs sit in a booth and continuously record their breaks. This saved station owners like Clear Channel
As for Sonos Radio HD, it’s an interesting experiment for the connected speaker company. For one thing, other music service providers have tried before to launch “internet radio plus” services. These offer features that are not available in free Internet radio services, such as unlimited skips, rewinds (repeat the last song or songs), and no ads; and are priced below the $ 10 / mo standard for full on-demand services like Spotify Premium, Apple
On the other hand, Sonos has some compelling business reasons for launching Sonos Radio HD as a paid service with roughly the same feature set as above, plus CD-quality audio and high production values. First of all, Sonos is a publicly traded company selling consumer electronics and has grown its revenue solidly, but could diversify its sources of income. A paid content service is the natural next step, as it was for another electronics company located in Cupertino, CA, in 2004.
Second, Sonos, unlike Apple, has been selling devices that have effectively been empty containers for other people’s content. Sonos has long touted the ability of its speakers to work with all of your favorite music services; but you have not earned any of the income associated with those services. The same goes for the newer Sonos models, which are compatible with Amazon Alexa and Google.
Sonos’s model of selling internet-enabled speakers without content is now an old model with a shrinking audience. You bought your Sonos speakers, plugged them in, set them up, and then had to rely on other services to provide content. Sonos began to solve this problem in April by offering consumers Sonos Radio immediately. And the service is proving to be quite popular with Sonos shoppers – in just a few months it has become the no. 4 most popular music service used on devices. Sonos has found that 50% of its customers listen to radio services, as opposed to interactive on-demand services like Spotify; It is a much higher percentage than the market in general. It is clear that Sonos users prefer the “lean-back” experience of radio to the “lean-forward” experience of on-demand services.
More generally, Sonos Radio HD represents a solution to the conundrum faced by all digital music services these days: there are many alternatives on the market, but there is not much to distinguish between them. One way out of this situation is commodification and consolidation – lowering subscription prices and thereby taking some services off the market. Apple tried this strategy six years ago; the big labels wouldn’t allow it.
The other way out is to invent new ways to differentiate one service from others. In the mid-2010s, the solution was to use cutting-edge data analytics technologies to improve the quality of recommendations and discovery, such as the Echo Nest technology that emerged from MIT’s Media Lab, which Spotify acquired in 2014. That approach: As summarized by Spotify’s hugely successful Discover Weekly custom playlist feature, it has reached a point of diminishing returns. The next wave may be to go beyond simple music programming in an automated and scalable but also compelling way. What Sonos is doing with SuperHiFi may be the key to this next round of innovation that keeps the market moving forward.
