By the spring of 2018, Sonos owners had registered more than 19 million speakers in about 6.9 million homes. The Santa Barbara company started in 2002 as Rincon Audio, with a plan to fill every room with music over home Wi-Fi. It spent years teaching people that speakers could talk to each other. When it filed to go public, smart speakers from Amazon and Google were flooding the market at a fraction of its prices.

Rincon Audio's Big Idea

John MacFarlane and three co-founders started the company in August 2002 and renamed it Sonos in 2004. Their bet was that people wanted music all over the house without running wires through the walls. Sonos built speakers that joined into one system and played from many streaming services. It sold premium hardware and kept owners buying more rooms. Its customers, the filing said, listened to about 80 percent more music after buying their first Sonos.

Speakers on Nasdaq

Sonos priced its IPO at $15 a share in August 2018 and listed on Nasdaq as SONO. The shares jumped more than 30 percent on the first day. Sonos later sued Google over its speaker patents. In 2024 a redesign of its app broke features owners relied on, and chief executive Patrick Spence left in January 2025. Sonos remains a public company on Nasdaq.

Cover: The Flute (Hichiriki), from the series "Fashionable Musical Amusements of Children (Furyu kodomo asobi ongaku)", Isoda Koryusai. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a child playing a flute (sound filling the room).