In a blog post announcing the new partnership, Sonos said that it decided to open its app and speaker up to SoundCloud because the platform is extremely popular with listeners and content creators. In fact, the sound-collecting app is so successful that 12 hours of audio are uploaded onto the service every minute. Even though not every track is musical, there’s still a whole lots of music funneling into SoundCloud.
New and emerging artists typically use the service to promote new tracks and albums, while more established artists add special extras to the service. Listeners look to SoundCloud for more unique and offbeat music that you can’t find on any of the other music streaming platforms.
Sonos already has partnerships with most of the big-name brands, including Spotify, Pandora, iHeart, and Songza. It’s adding SoundCloud to diversify its offerings and satisfy the app’s very large user base.
“By bringing SoundCloud’s ever-expanding library of new and established publishers on to Sonos, you can easily discover music and audio that is not available anywhere else,” Sonos said in a statement. “And with Universal Search on the new Sonos controller app, stumble upon music from your favorite artists on SoundCloud that you never knew existed.”
Now that the two companies are working together, all you have to do to play SoundCloud tracks on your Sonos speaker is go to “add music services” on your iOS or Android Sonos app. After that, the choices are almost limitless.