Reports: wireless speakers

Digital music pushed music out of the home speaker and into the earphone. Over recent years this has created a booming market for headphones but speakers are fighting back, driven in large part by tech majors using smart speakers as a Trojan horse for expanding into the home.

This is part of MIDiA’s data snapshot series in which we spotlight curated consumer datasets. Figure 1: The Digital Home is Becoming Increasingly Sophisticated Household Ownership of Digital Technology, Q1 2018 The ‘digital home’ was a term that rose to prominence in the mid 2000s as the first generation of home router centred devices started to come to market at scale.

While the home hi-fi market was fading into irrelevance Sonos quietly set about reimagining the whole concept of in-home audio. Now connected home audio is coming of age, with Sonos the dominant player in the multi-room audio segment. Consequently incumbents of all shapes and sizes are rising themselves from their slumbers and entering the market in force.