April 8, 2021

Good morning, and welcome to Protocol Next Up. I am taking a few days off this week, so I've been writing this slightly abbreviated version of Next Up a few days in advance, and am crossing my fingers that Quibi won't rise from the dead by Thursday. Still, stay around for my take on the Sonos Roam and what it tells us about the company's business, as well as a story about lizard DJs.
Sonos will start selling its new compact and ultra-portable Sonos Roam speaker later this month. I have been playing with one for a week or two, but I'll spare you my musings about sound quality (the review embargo was lifted on Tuesday, so you'll find plenty of other good reviews out there).
Instead, I'm going to tell you a bit about what using the Roam has taught me about the challenges and opportunities Sonos faces as it prepares to go beyond the home, partner with automakers and perhaps even build its own headphones.
Sonos is having a bit of a moment right now. The company's executives have long said that they want to go beyond the home. In 2021, that's finally happening.
And Sonos is also continuing to build out its services business, with CEO Patrick Spence telling me last month that the goal was to attract 500,000 paying customers to its Sonos Radio HD tier; the free, ad-supported Sonos radio is already the third most-listened-to music service on Sonos speakers, according to Spence.
However, there's a catch. As Sonos expands into new areas, it has to tread carefully to not leave existing customers behind.
Case in point: The new Sonos Roam offers a handover feature. Walk up to your living room speaker with it, press a button, and the song you were playing on the Roam gets passed on to the other speaker. It's a neat trick, but it doesn't work with the Play:3, Play:1, Port, Connect and Connect:Amp products. That may not matter as much for the Roam — how often are you really going to hold up a speaker to another speaker? — but it could be a big deal for the still-unannounced Sonos headphones, which will rely on easy music swapping as a major selling point.
Services are just as much of a minefield for Sonos. I took the Roam on the road this week. As soon as I was out of reach of my home Wi-Fi network, the Sonos app stopped working. I could still use the speaker via Bluetooth, but without the app, there was no way for me to access Sonos Radio — not an ideal situation if you are trying to get people to pay for your services.
But Sonos has a reason for why Sonos Radio is (for now) reliant on Wi-Fi: The company doesn't want to stream to non-Sonos devices, and Spence told me that this may not change anytime soon.
There are some possible work-arounds that could help Sonos make its hardware and services work better together. The Roam, for instance, already uses NFC during setup. Tap the speaker with your phone, and it automatically gets your Wi-Fi credentials. One could imagine the same procedure to unlock the Sonos app on the go. However, the fact that I have to speculate on ways Sonos could solve some of these hiccups shows how challenging it can be for a company to embrace new devices, use cases and revenue streams without abandoning its existing business and customer base.
Business leaders who understand that success rests on superior customer experience are always seeking better ways to unite their teams in order to best serve the customer. That means weaving support and service teams throughout the entire organization rather than pushing customer care into its own silo.
The internet's next breakout star may be part iguana. DJ Dragoon, as the up-and-coming artist with lizard DNA is called, did a few gigs on Twitch late last year. Now, he is getting ready to turn up the volume and go live again, accompanied by a gang of equally surreal friends that include a female DJ with a cyborg eye and a pint-sized bunny who likes to spin trap beats.
This crew of unlikely characters was conceived by Authentic Artists, a startup that came out of stealth Wednesday with an intriguing proposition: Authentic Artists develops virtual beings that can perform live and interactive music sets online. In the coming weeks, the company wants to unleash Dragoon and his friends onto audiences on Twitch, with plans to eventually bring them to metaverse platforms like Roblox and Fortnite as well.
"Virtual entertainment is the new cultural center of gravity," Authentic Artists founder and CEO Chris McGarry told Protocol.
Authentic Artists has developed a dozen such virtual DJs thus far, and is powering their performances with a custom-built AI music engine that uses a catalog of 130,000 MIDI files to generate performances in real time. The resulting music is being fed into the company's animation pipeline, and there's a feedback mechanism for Twitch audiences to change the course of a set. "Our AI-driven artists have musical superpowers," McGarry said.
"They see the power of music in those environments," McGarry said. And to audiences who are already comfortable with esports and metaverse environments, it may not matter all that much whether those artists are real or AI-powered.
And who is to say a half-lizard isn't as compelling as any other public persona? Authentic Artists is already planning to launch Instagram and SoundCloud profiles for Dragoon and his friends. "They do have backstories, origin stories," McGarry said. "We are creating fully three-dimensional artists."
A version of this story was first published on Protocol.com.
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