Tidal and Pandora Get In-App Controls for Sonos Speakers

Tidal and Pandora both announced deeper integration with Sonos this week. Both services now allow their users to launch music playback on Sonos speakers without ever leaving the Tidal or Pandora apps, doing away with the need to use the Sonos mobile app for playback control.

Pandora announced its partnership with Sonos on Tuesday, with Tidal following Thursday morning. The two services join Spotify and Google Play Music, which also support this kind of in-app control functionality.

Allowing direct control has been a long time coming for Sonos, which spent the last couple of months rolling out a number of new features to catch up to competitors. This also included the addition of voice control, which allows Sonos owners to play songs and playlists with simple voice commands.

Sonos launched its own voice-controlled speaker in October, and also partnered with Amazon to allow owners of existing Sonos speakers to control them with the help of an Amazon Echo. Music services that respond to voice commands on Sonos include Amazon Music, Pandora and TuneIn, with support for Spotify being promised for December 21.

Tidal is not yet among that list, but Jay Z’s music service did unveil a different kind of partnership with Sonos on Thursday as well: Both companies teamed up for a new interview series called “Sound Tracks.” Filmed in the Sonos store in New York, each episode features one-on-one interviews with music record label execs, managers, engineers and others who usually work behind the scenes of the industry.

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