Looking to turn the corner after a rough year, Sonos swapped out its leadership this week: Patrick Spence, who took the company public in 2018, has been replaced by longtime board member Tom Conrad, who previously held product and tech leadership roles at Pandora, Snap and Quibi. Conrad is serving as a temporary CEO for the time being while the company settles on a permanent replacement for Spence.
The move comes as Sonos is still struggling to recover from a botched app relaunch tied to the introduction of its first pair of headphones. In an email to staff, Conrad did indeed say a lot of the right things, and his tech and product background could help Sonos get back on track. Plus, Conrad does have a long history with audio hardware – to the point where he almost helped launch some major competition to Sonos a little over a decade ago.
Back in 2014, Conrad was serving as Pandora’s CTO, and in that role, he was fielding countless inbound requests from would-be Sonos competitors looking to integrate with the music service. At the time, Sonos was still forcing almost every music service to exclusively go through its app – even Spotify wasn’t able to directly integrate with Sonos until late 2016 – and a bunch of the speaker maker’s would-be competitors wanted to go down the same route. Others were open to integrating with Pandora’s app, but each of them had their own API, complicating things for the music service.
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That’s why Conrad and his team came up with an alternative: Instead of juggling a bunch of one-off integrations, Pandora proposed that speaker makers should adopt a Chromecast-like model, and effectively run web apps on their devices, capable of rendering streams from Pandora and others without proprietary APIs.
The whole proposal was more than a thought exercise for Pandora: The service teamed up with a small music hardware startup called Beep Devices to implement the approach on Beep’s music streaming adapter. Conrad showed me a first demo of this on Beep’s device at the 2014 CES, and was quoted in Beep’s launch press release two months later, saying:
“Since Beep leverages our HTML5 code on the device, we are able to ensure listeners always have access to the most up-to-date Pandora experience and we’re pleased to partner with them to help shape the future of in-home listening.”
That future did indeed arrive, albeit under slightly different circumstances: Beep struggled to get support from other streaming services, and ultimately had to throw the towel. However, in early 2015, Google announced that it was bringing its casting technology to audio devices; later that year, the company released its own $35 Chromecast Audio streaming adapter.
All of that ultimately forced Sonos to accelerate the build-out of its own platform, which included the ability for third-party music services to bypass the Sonos app for playback capabilities. So in a way, Conrad helped Sonos get better at what it does once before. Let’s see if he can do it again.
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