Sonos has just unveiled its first new music speakers since the Sonos Roam 2 in May 2024, and the first since its infamous app change that shook the whole company and led to the replacement of then-CEO Patrick Spence with current CEO Tom Conrad in January 2025.
For the launch of Sonos Play and Sonos Era 100 SL, I spoke to Conrad about his big structural changes to the company and how they impacted the development of these speakers. So my next questions are about what else Sonos was actually doing during its quiet 2025.
We just changed too much too fast, and made a bunch of tactical errors along the way.
Tom Conrad, Sonos CEO
What’s the inside story on the app’s changes, and how does the company plan to win back the trust it used to have?
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“For my first year at the company, we had to pour so much of our energy into righting the ship with respect to the software platform that underpins all of the system experiences, that we purposefully paused our new hardware introductions to get back to par on that front,” he explains.
“We were in the middle of trying to recover from our missteps in the spring of 2024 with the launch of the new app and software platform. Candidly, the real story there is that we just changed too much too fast, and made a bunch of tactical errors along the way of rolling it out to our customers, and then paid a very dear price. As did our customers.”
Taking stock of history
Conrad is generally in a pretty candid mood for our conversation about the problems with the app, and why people were so frustrated with it — but he’s also clearly incredibly proud to be at Sonos, even if he’s trying to be clear-eyed about it.
“If you think about the history of the company, we had a decade under the stewardship of John McFarlane, the company’s founder. His vision was really all driven by the idea of filling every home with music on the backs of this emergent streaming moment, that he predicted so accurately. But if you were to critique his decade, it might only be that we didn’t ship that much hardware — a couple of amplifiers, a controller, you know, the initial Play:5,” Conrad says.
“It wasn’t until Patrick became CEO, in our second decade, that the company really found its footing with respect to reliably shipping a couple of new products every single year. In fact, his stated goal for the company was to turn it into kind of a new product introduction machine. And, I mean, I’m the incredible beneficiary of that work!
In the aftermath of that, you just have to show up in people’s life with some humility and do the hard work of earning their trust back.
Tom Conrad, Sonos CEO
“But if you were to critique his chapter, I think the unintended consequence of that laser-like focus on new products was the company lost some of its connection to the idea that the product is actually Sonos. That the individual product launches are meant to extend the idea of what the system can be in a home and in the world.”
Digging into that topic with Conrad, it seems like he’s identified a disconnect between how the company treated the software, and how the users treat it.
“In the aftermath of that, you just have to show up in people’s life with some humility and do the hard work of earning their trust back through great execution, great product, great software, great experiences, and never forget what you put people through,” he says.
I mention that any changes the company makes to the app in the future will automatically become a big deal, whether the changes really deserve to be or not.
“I think that when you make software that people use every day, and it’s a big part of their life, it’s always a big deal when you make changes. It’s certainly true that there’s additional scrutiny on Sonos, but as a software creator, I’ve always felt a keen responsibility to move my audience along with the changes and updates that we’re making, in a really thoughtful and methodical way.”
How are things looking now?
I obviously want to get into the work that Sonos has been doing, and how happy Conrad is with it now, and he’s pleasingly open and unsparing with his assessment.
“I’d say there were kind of three things that we had to improve upon after the disastrous launch in 2024. We had to fix performance and reliability — we had to restore baseline functionality that had been dropped from the product in its initial release. And we had to improve the user experience of the offering as well.
We’re now at the place where we can update the app to return it to more conventional choices.
Tom Conrad, Sonos CEO
“And it’s really the third thing that we’re only just now able to tackle 1773148832. If I’m candid about my assessment of the app, I think it’s peculiar. I think the company made a range of decisions about the user interface that are just not consistent with what you see in any other music streaming app, for example. I mean: all kinds of strange swipe behaviors and a search affordance that floats above the screen in a kind of weirdly invisible way — cards upon cards upon cards as you navigate through the app, none of which is conventional.
“So when we sit with our customers in their homes and observe them using the app, they get lost, they don’t know where they are. It’s not clear to them how to get to just basic functionality. There’s a funny kind of search blindness — the interface that we chose for search actually takes up more pixels on the screen than a typical search interface, but people don’t even see it. They’re like, ‘I can’t find search’ because it’s presented in such an unconventional way.
“And so, we’re now at the place where we can update the app to return it to more conventional choices. But it is, as you point out, another set of changes for our customers.”
The ill-fated set-top box, and the leaky ship
At the end of 2024, while unhappiness with the app was still strong among the Sonos community, information leaked that Sonos was preparing a streaming box, which would be high-priced and yet supposedly developed using ad-based tech from a software partner called The Trade Desk. Sonos later confirmed this partnership, adding that it was “excited to explore” integration with The Trade Desk’s Ventura OS.
And then, after previous CEO Spence left and Conrad took over, reports said that the project had been quietly dropped. I asked Conrad about this, and how it factored into the rethinking and restructuring at Sonos over the last year.
“Without getting into specifics of that project, if it exists,” he says, smiling, “I will say that part of what I had to do when I came in the door was to make some hard decisions about where we were going to focus. The company was, demonstrably, spread too thin, was trying to do too many things, and was struggling to execute with excellence across all of them.
“So I tried to focus our energies on the programs that I thought that were most aligned with our differentiating power in the market. I remain really confident that the things that we chose to focus on are the things that are going to have the most impact on Sonos, in the near term.”
The people inside the company are feeling excited and proud of their work.
Tom Conrad, Sonos CEO
I pointed out that Sonos has been a very leaky ship in the past, with upcoming product info regularly splashed across the tech press — the Sonos Era 300 leaked in detail nearly a year before its introduction. I asked Conrad if that’s something he actually wants to change, because I personally with we could go back a few decades to when tech companies talked openly about products months and months in advance so we could get a feel for them.
“You know, the funny thing about the period where Sonos was sort of a leaky ship is that it was a period where the company, I think, was trying to be at its most secretive. In some ways, I think that Sonos culturally, internally, fashioned itself like a mini Apple, and really tried to hold its cards close to its vest.
“As much as I’ve been a little evasive about some of the things you’ve asked about our roadmap, I’m conscious that we’re not Apple, and that I think we can talk a little bit more about where we’re going and the future that we see without being so concerned about the secrecy of it all.
“I sort of love that since I’ve gotten here, the leaks have dried up from that standpoint, and I think it suggests that the people inside the company are feeling excited and proud of their work, and not wanting to see it out in the world in advance of when the company decides to reveal it. Where my head is, is somewhere between where Apple sits and, and what you would like for us to do. So stay tuned, we should keep talking!”
Working better with the users
Speaking of keeping talking, I also asked if Sonos’ experience with the app update has led it to think differently about communicating with its users, and Conrad says that’s something he’s tried to change.
“We’re handling this opportunity in a really different way. I’ve been on Reddit, for example, describing the changes and asking our customers there to give us feedback back about their own experience learning to use Sonos and living with it every day. We will roll changes out to our beta channel and even there, our users will be able to opt into the experience.
“And then when we take it to production, we’ll similarly have opt-in experiences and a gradual roll out and iteration. We’ve already learned a lot from the perspective of our customers on Reddit after my invitation to them [recently] to share their thoughts.”
He’s quick to point out that he know this isn’t a revolutionary approach, though: “None of this is a surprising way to operate a large-scale consumer software product, but it’s certainly the set of best practices and, frankly, it’s one of the, the missteps of the company in 2024 is that we didn’t more closely adhere to these norms.”
I point out to Conrad that its competitors really sensed blood in the water after the app update, and pushed hard to win people over to their own platforms — with WiiM, for example, launching a direct competitor to the Era 100 with a very similar audio setup — so I asked if he felt that they could win back any ‘switchers’.
We’re launching new products again, and we’ll have more in the back half of the year.
Tom Conrad, Sonos CEO
“Certainly, anyone that was frustrated with Sonos in the last couple of years, I hope will consider us again. When I wear my business hat, there was a cost of goodwill with our customers from this chapter, I think it really most impacted advocacy and repurchases. I don’t think it was a huge driver of people fully leaving Sonos and going to other platforms.
“So my my hope is that all of the people who had a bad experience in 2024 are having good experiences today, and are starting to feel better about Sonos, and can be excited about a product like Sonos Play or Era 100 SL to extend their experience in their own home, or to evangelize it to their friends and family as something that they have to have in their homes.
“I think that was the real cost, it was sort of a cost of advocacy and evangelism more than it was people switching to one of the the smaller players who purports to do the same kinds of things we do.”
There’s more to come
Something that really comes across speaking to Conrad is that he feels a deep affinity for Sonos and the things it actually makes, in a more genuine way than a lot of tech CEOs.
“I’ve been a customer for nearly 20 years. I’ve been a partner to the company for 15 or something, going back to the integrations we did between Pandora and Sonos in my days building Pandora. I’ve been on the board for 8 years. I love this company,” says Conrad.
“And Sonos in my own home is a huge part of, you know, the daily delight and satisfaction and ambiance I enjoy when I’m at home. As much as anything, I took the job to fix the product and, and get the company back to a place where we’re just reliably delighting tens of millions of customers around the world again.
“A lot of that was on the back getting the software right. And so I wanted the company to be just laser focused on that return.”
As Conrad mentioned above, there are things he wants to change further about the app, but he’s clearly happy with the changes so far, and says Sonos absolutely isn’t done with hardware yet in 2026:
“We’re back, and we’re launching new products again, and we’ll have more in the back half of the year, because, you know, I like to say that Sonos is a company that’s 100% software and 100% hardware, and so it’s nice to get the 100% back that’s hardware. “
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