Spotify for Sonos review

We’re massive fans of Spotify at Expert Reviews. Of all the music streaming services we’ve seen, it’s the easiest to use, has the best quality and the best selection of music. However, we’ve had one minor problem with it: it’s designed for personal listening, rather than having music everywhere in your house.

With the latest update of Sonos, due at the end of September, this minor niggle is a thing of the past, as you’ll be able to play Spotify music anywhere in your home. Provided you have a Spotify Premium account (£10 a month), you just configure your Sonos system to add the music service, which appears in the main Music menu of your controller.

Spotify will work on every single ZonePlayer, including the original models and the fantastic new ZonePlayer S5. Music can be controlled from every controller, including the old CR100 click-wheel device, the iPhone and new iPad apps, and Sonos’s own CR200 touchscreen controller.

Accessing the Spotify service through Sonos gives you access to any Spotify playlists you’ve created, plus your starred tracks. You can also search for music by Artist, Album or Track, just as you can with any of the Spotify apps. However, the Sonos search interface is arguably better, as it updates in real-time, as you type. It’s incredibly fast and makes finding your music really quick.

It has to be said that the touchscreen controllers are the best option, as they give you an on-screen keyboard, which makes it easier to search for tracks. Using the CR100, it’s a real pain to have to use the keyboard with the click-wheel, although it’s still a decent device for using pre-created playlists.

Once you’ve found music that you like, you simply add them to the Queue in the same way as for music stored on your home network. Queues of Spotify music can be saved as a Sonos playlist, plus you can mix and match streaming music with tracks that you’ve got on your local network. It’s brilliantly flexible and means you don’t have to decide whether you want to listen to something from Spotify or from your own music collection.

Spotify music is streamed at the full 320Kbit/s, so audio quality is fantastic and really shows of Sonos’ hardware to the full. As you’d expect from a multi-room system, you can play a single track in multiple rooms, or stream up to 32 different tracks at once to different ZonePlayers. However, you’ll need a fast unlimited broadband connection at this extreme. Album artwork and track information is displayed on your controller, with the only difference that a small Spotify logo appears over the image.

There are some minor differences between the way that Spotify works on Sonos and on the desktop. For starters, using Sonos you can’t create Spotify playlists or add starred tracks. While you can view all albums by a particular artist, Sonos doesn’t give you access to Related Artists. This means that you’re limited, in a way, to only searching for music that you’re aware of, rather than discovering new music or tracks you’d forgotten about. As such, it’s still worth using the desktop client for creating some playlists and discovering new music.

The fact that there’s no way to browse through the Spotify music library, and no easy way to do so given that the service has 10 million tracks, it means that it’s still worth buying your favourite tracks and albums and adding them to your home library. This way, you can simply browse through your favourite music when you’re searching for something to play.

With Spotify access Sonos has managed to do the incredible: improve the best multi-room audio system. The combination of being able to browse and play your home music collection, plus search and stream the entire Spotify library is absolutely incredible. The fact that you can mix the two together seamlessly is almost unbelievable. If you’ve got a Sonos system, subscribe to Spotify; if you don’t have Sonos, seriously think about buying it over any other streaming music player or iPod dock, you will not regret it.