As Google continues to evolve its Play Music service into YouTube Music, a few features are playing catch-up along the way. Today, we strike one off the list – Sonos integration.
One of my favourite Sonos features is the integration with Google Play Music, a feature that arrived in the early days of the service and has been well-used in my house for parties, work music and everything in between. It’s been missing from YouTube music up to now. It makes sense that if Google’s got a partnership with Sonos going with Play Music, it would seek to continue it as YouTube Music takes over.
Sonos’ YouTube Music integration isn’t as deep as that seen in the Play Music app for the past few years – the speakers don’t show up as Cast targets. Rather, it’s a more standard Sonos integration where you’ll find an interface to YouTube music exposed within the Sonos app.
Once connected, the YouTube Music area in Sonos offers access to recommendations, new releases, your mixtape, charts and your full library.
One other point of difference is that you’ll need YouTube Premium for the Sonos integration to work. This isn’t out of line with other Sonos music services though.
What about SonosTube?
Now, here’s the information people really should know:
Sonos still has no Google Assistant support.
When the Assistant finally arrives (“sometime in 2019”) you will not be able to cast content to the speaker (like Google Home can). Instead, you have to use an app to select your songs – not the YouTube Music app but the Sonos app.
That does not sound like a very good experience to me.