Sonos Redesigned Its App and Made a Subscription Model Possible

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It’s been a rough six months for Sonos. After the disastrous roll out of its new control app, the multiroom giant has spent much of the past few months on a reputation-saving mission—saying sorry (a bit too late), putting products on hold (briefly, at least), and plowing money into an app fix that still isn’t entirely finished.

A couple of weeks ago, it announced its fiscal 2024 earnings, and they were—perhaps predictably—not too pretty. Overall revenue was down 8 percent year-on-year (YOY), with Q4 particularly bad, down 16 percent YOY. Sonos tried to downplay the impact of its own mistakes, blaming “softer demand due to challenging market conditions” before, in a mea culpa, admitting that “challenges resulting from our recent app rollout” had also played their part.

However, it could be right—there could be bigger things at play here. This is the second year in a row that Sonos has posted a YOY decline in revenue—down 5.5 percent in 2023, despite two rounds of layoffs. “Challenging” was the word CEO Patrick Spence used to describe that year too, and while keeping the momentum following two bumper years during Covid was never going to be easy, there may be something of a pattern emerging.

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