Tag: smart speakers

Last year, Spotify debuted its Google Home Mini smart-speaker giveaway, offering the device to its Spotify Premium for Family subscribers. Now the deal has returned in the US, but considerably expanded: now it’s any...

We’ve written about this before: the music industry may be excited about the growth in sales of smart speakers, but privacy campaigners have their concerns about this device category. Those concerns are relevant to...

Lead: Lil Nas X might have broken on TikTok but it was his deft use of multiple remixes (and collaborations) that kept ‘Old Town Road’ in the air throughout most of 2019. He claims he has 25 remixes of follow-up track...

Fancy a Sonos speaker but aren’t sure about buying one? If you’re Dutch, you may be in luck. Well, if you’re one of 500 Dutch households chosen for the test of a new subscription plan called ‘Sonos...

Music Ally has been posing the question ‘What can labels and artists do to capitalise on the emergence of smart speakers?’ for a while, and often the answer from the industry has been ‘We’re not sure… yet’. Other...

In September, Amazon launched its Prime membership program in Brazil, including its music-streaming services. Less than a month later, that launch has been followed by the debut of Amazon’s Echo smart speakers in Brazil,...

Apple’s HomePod smart speaker didn’t get much of a look-in at the company’s press event earlier this week, which focused more on iPhones, iPads, watches and the company’s new video-streaming and games subscription...

Samsung still hasn’t released its first smart speaker, the Galaxy Home, having announced it in August 2018. Earlier this month, Samsung told journalists that it was “continuing to refine and enhance” the device. However,...

If you’ve been following the smart-speakers market with interest, you’ll have seen this coming a few months ago: Chinese tech firm Baidu is now selling more of these devices than Google is. Well, that’s what research...

Hey Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, DuerOS and other voice assistants: how popular ARE you in 2019? Research firm eMarketer has published some new numbers for use of this technology in the US. “We estimate that 111.8 million...

Sonos is feeling chipper about its latest financial results: the speaker-maker’s revenues grew by 25% year-on-year to $260m in the second quarter of 2019, including a 61% bump for sales (in dollar terms) of its Sonos One...

The latest report on smart-speaker sales and ownership is out, from Consumer Intelligence Report Partners (CIRP), and focused on the US market. The big number: a claimed install base of 76m units in the US, which is up from...