Sonos pioneers music-on-demand market

Sonos is now shipping its new ZonePlayer S5, the first "affordable" device by the company that has rewritten the book on how to enjoy music in your home. Mine is somewhere around City of Industry CA, arriving next week. After years of considering Sonos too expensive, I've fallen and hard. I now have two ZonePlayers and their new spiffy touch-screen remote controller.

The S5 is a self contained unit that includes speakers and all the Sonos magic electronics that allow it to receive music from the Internet and your personal iTunes collection and distribute it wirelessly anywhere in the house. I can anticipate using this outside and when I'm working on a project in the house where I don't want to put in a permanent ZonePlayer.

The rise of Sonos (and newer competitors from Logitech and others) is a testament to how pervasive the Internet has become in our lives and how we're now depending on online access much as we have other utilities in the past. The Internet now powers by computer, music system, telephone and TV. It is my link to the outside world much as the telephone once was. It is saving me oodles of time and money. This is a brand new market and while others are now interested because it's expanding, Sonos owns this territory and it's value has to be skyrocketing. There are even rumors that Apple is interesting in acquiring Sonos.

We are close to the tipping point when this thing just takes off with new players entering and innovating. Expect content to be the next major accelerator which will in turn fuel more adoption of the technology. Current content providers like Sirius and Rhapsody should benefit.

This is another great example of how technology is changing our lives for the better. Sonos has made it easy and even fun to access an almost unlimited library of music easily and quickly. And, it works amazingly well -- easily passing the sniff test for useful consumer electronics.

Expect the content providers also to start cranking up their offerings as they realize this lucrative new market opportunity. Rhapsody, a partnership between Real Networks and MTV, is already on the bandwagon with a pay music service. Pandora is free, but now limits the amount you can listen to before paying a modest fee. You can find and listen to podcasts on Sonos. The potential, however, is virtually unlimited.