Sonos Wants Boomers to Have Music in Every Room

Love your digital music, but a bit dismayed because you can only listen in one room of your home? Sonos is a multi-room wireless music system designed to let you listen and control the digital music in any room in your home by using a handheld tablet controller. A Sonos system consists of a ZonePlayer placed in each room and a controller to control the music that gets played on each ZonePlayer. Becky Worley installed a Sonos solution on Hook Me Up as the perfect answer for someone who wants all of their music on their PC, tied to their stereo, and accessible from anywhere in the home.

The folks at Sonos, recognizing that people who could afford a system like this were not necessarily people who liked to spend their days ripping CDs or buying digital music, today announced a partnership with Rhapsody, a music streaming service. Rhapsody offers access to millions of music titles as well as Internet radio stations for a single monthly fee of $10.

With Rhapsody, Sonos users have the equivalent of a music rental service throughout their entire house. For the monthly fee, they can access songs, organize them into playlists, and control what gets played in every room in the home using the Sonos handheld controller tablet.

The partnership eliminates the need for the Sonos user to ever have to boot up their PC to access music. A typical system sells for $999 and includes the Sonos controller and two ZonePlayers. The ZonePlayers come in two flavors, the ZP80 that uses your current amplifier or home stereo system and the ZP100 with a built in amplifier.

While the thought of installing a multi-room music system might be a bit daunting, Sonos makes it about as easy as can be to set up, and the addition of Rhapsody will appeal to anyone who'd rather listen to music than play with downloading and ripping it. I'm not sure that all boomers will be flocking to Sonos, nor am I sure Rhapsody is the type of place a boomer will feel at home (see my thoughts are on the pros and cons of renting music by the month versus buying on iTunes), but then again, who else has that kind of dough?