What streaming services are available in the UK

[Badkube]

Hi all,

Currently on Napster which sucks now that Rhapsody have taken it over - for some reasons tracks that are available on Rhapsody aren't available on Napster. So I'm looking elsewhere.

The reports on Spotify with Sonos are very mixed - I'm not sure if the Mods on here are Sonos employees or not but it appears they aren't accepting any responsibility for poor service and are choosing instead to blame the ISP solely.

So my question is this - given that these two services have their failings are there any other options available on Sonos that provides a comprehensive streaming library?

Cheers

BK.

[ratty]

Originally Posted by Badkube

The reports on Spotify with Sonos are very mixed - I'm not sure if the Mods on here are Sonos employees or not but it appears they aren't accepting any responsibility for poor service and are choosing instead to blame the ISP solely.

Moderators are not Sonos employees (the latter are clearly identified by the "- Sonos" in their usernames), and we're quite free to express a view as to who might be responsible for what.

From time to time the finger of suspicion points to general problems with Spotify (their own status pages may verify this), sometimes it's a bit grey where a special Sonos-Spotify gateway server appears to be flaky, and yes it's quite conceivable that Sonos software could have the odd problem.

In the case of recent Spotify problems on Virgin Media there was ample evidence that it was a problem related to that specific ISP.

So my question is this - given that these two services have their failings are there any other options available on Sonos that provides a comprehensive streaming library?

Check out the services FAQ: https://sonos.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1050

[Badkube]

That's good to know. I take it that also means you have no firm evidence that Sonos aren't in some way responsible for the poor performance of Spotify?

Anyway, I'm hoping some people might be able to provide some first hand experience of the other streaming options and confirm if they are available in the UK (they are no use to me if not).

BK.

[ratty]

Originally Posted by Badkube

I take it that also means you have no firm evidence that Sonos aren't in some way responsible for the poor performance of Spotify?

I would be the first to say that the Spotify service on Sonos has not been without its teething troubles, and I know for certain that Sonos has made a number of software modifications along the way. I'm not aware of any major issues with the v3.8 software.

Spotify has in the past shown distinct signs of a shortage of server capacity at peak times but from earlier this year they appear to have made substantial improvements in that area, to judge from both the number of server IP addresses in use and the observed performance on Sonos.

That doesn't mean that Spotify, like any other service, doesn't have its bad days.

[NoBoB]

Originally Posted by Badkube

I take it that also means you have no firm evidence that Sonos aren't in some way responsible for the poor performance of Spotify?

If Sonos was responsible, wouldn't it affect every Spotify-on-Sonos user? There's an entire section of this forum dedicated to disseminating music service outage announcements, where outages that affect everyone -- whether caused by Sonos or not -- appear. Seems odd they'd admit to some but not be upfront about Spotify, no?