In a Wednesday blog post on his company’s website, Sonos CEO John MacFarlane announced the Santa Barbara-based wireless speaker company has begun laying off an undisclosed number of employees and shifting its focus to voice controls and music streaming.
In 2002, MacFarlane cofounded the wireless stereo company with Craig Shelburne, Tom Cullen, and Trung Mai. Out of its downtown headquarters (spread between five properties), Sonos employs more than 400 people. Worldwide — at its offices in Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, and London — that number hovers around 1,200. Sonos announced in 2014 its revenue for the past year was $535 million. Last month, the company launched a partnership with paid streaming service Apple Music.
Citing Amazon’s Echo and Alexa voice-controlled speaker system, MacFarlane’s post looked to voice-activated speakers and streaming platforms like Spotify and Google Play Music as the future of the music industry. He expressed the necessity of “short term — and very difficult — consequence[s]” to the company’s redirection.