Sonos Beam (Gen 2) and Spotify Premium: One Is a Purchase, the Other Is a Bill

A soundbar and a music subscription are not competing purchases. The question worth answering is which of them is more likely to be worse in three years than it was on the day you paid.

A soundbar and a music subscription do not compete for the same money. A Beam plays whatever you already subscribe to; Spotify plays through whatever speaker you already own. Anyone told to pick one over the other has been misled by a headline. There is a real question buried underneath, though, and it is worth more than a fake comparison: when you pay once for hardware and monthly for software, which of the two is likelier to get worse after the money has left your account? On the record of these two, the answer is not the obvious one.

The Beam costs 499 dollars once, and Spotify costs 12.99 dollars until you stop

Sonos’ own US store listed the Beam (Gen 2) at 499 dollars on 1 September 2026. TechRadar’s review of the same speaker records a launch price of 449 dollars in October 2021, so it has gained 50 dollars in five years rather than drifting down the way consumer audio usually does.

Spotify Premium Individual reached 12.99 dollars a month in February 2026, up from 11.99, as Music Business Worldwide reported at the time. At that rate the subscription passes the price of the speaker during its thirty-ninth month. After three years and three months the Beam asks for nothing further; the subscription asks for another 155.88 dollars every twelve months, indefinitely.

The May 2024 update took the alarm and the sleep timer off speakers people already owned

Sonos shipped a rewritten control app in May 2024. The alarm and the sleep timer were removed outright, the visual design drew heavy criticism, and accessibility support was inadequate. None of that was a product anyone chose to buy; it arrived on hardware already installed in people’s homes.

This is the weak point in the argument that hardware is the safer money. A Beam bought in 2022 kept every driver it shipped with and lost function anyway, because the only way to operate it is an application its owner does not select and cannot decline.

It is also the reason the crossover point calculated above is not the whole story. Thirty-nine months of Spotify buys you a service that has gained lossless audio in that time. Thirty-nine months of owning a Beam bought some people a control app missing two of its previous functions.

A rewrite that ended with the chief executive gone

The sequence is unusually well documented. Chief executive Patrick Spence apologised in July 2024. By August the company was considering relaunching the old app after overwhelmingly negative Google Play reviews, and in the same month it laid off 100 employees, following a separate June 2024 cut of 130 people, about 7 percent of staff. Spence announced his resignation in January 2025. Tom Conrad is listed as the current chief executive.

Set that beside the other side of this article. Spotify put its individual plan up by one dollar and told subscribers why. Sonos raised the Beam by 50 dollars across five years and, in the middle of that period, degraded the software required to use it. A price rise is visible and can be answered by cancelling. A software regression on hardware you own has no equivalent exit.

Virtual height channels are not height channels

Sonos publishes the Beam’s makeup plainly: five class-D digital amplifiers, one centre tweeter, four elliptical midwoofers, three passive radiators, HDMI eARC with a 4.9 foot cable, Trueplay tuning, AirPlay 2, and Dolby Atmos produced through what the company calls phantom height channels. There are no up-firing drivers anywhere in the cabinet.

TechRadar’s review is direct about what that costs. Three limits are worth knowing before the 499 dollars leaves your account:

• The virtual Atmos does not convince. The reviewer did not experience the kind of overhead sound the larger Sonos Arc produces.
• Trueplay room calibration works only on iOS devices, so Android owners cannot tune the bar to their room at all.
• It costs more than the soundbar it replaced, which the same review lists among its drawbacks.

Lossless arrived in September 2025 and will not travel over Bluetooth

Spotify launched lossless listening on 10 September 2025, at up to 24-bit and 44.1 kHz FLAC, and included it in Premium at no extra charge rather than selling it as the separate hi-fi tier a decade of speculation had predicted.

The limitation is precisely where these two products touch each other. Spotify’s own announcement states that Bluetooth “doesn’t provide enough bandwidth to transmit lossless audio”, and recommends Wi-Fi with wired headphones or speakers, or Spotify Connect. Sonos devices were added to the supported list the month after launch. So the speaker is not an alternative to the subscription; it is one of the few practical ways to hear what the subscription started delivering last year.

Getting it working is not automatic either. At launch Spotify supported lossless on mobile, desktop and tablet, and on Spotify Connect hardware from Sony, Bose, Samsung and Sennheiser, with Sonos and Amazon following a month later, and the rollout reached more than 50 markets by 6 October 2025. If you already own a Beam and pay for Premium, the format costs nothing extra and is simply switched on. If you were weighing the speaker partly for that reason, it is a genuine argument, and it is worth checking your own listening habits against it first.

What each of these actually protects you from

Neither is safe, and they fail in opposite directions. The subscription protects you from obsolescence and exposes you to price. The hardware protects you from price and exposes you to whatever its manufacturer decides to do with the app next.

If your listening happens on headphones, a Beam solves a problem you do not have, and the honest advice is to keep the 499 dollars. If television sound is the complaint, no subscription will ever fix it, and the Beam is a capable answer whose software history you should read before buying rather than after. Worth weighing either way: the Beam (Gen 2) has been on sale since October 2021 with no successor announced, and Sonos’ soundbar line has moved on only to the larger Arc Ultra of October 2024. That means no obsolescence looming, and no sign of improvement either.

Sources: Sonos · TechRadar · Wikipedia · Spotify Newsroom · Music Business Worldwide