merry band

We at PopSci are unabashedly Sonos fans. We gave its wireless music-streaming system a Best of What's New award in 2004 when it came out, and I personally have recommended it so many times that almost every serious digital-music fan I know has one (well, all of them with an extra G to drop, at least). The system has remained more or less the same over the past couple years, and, though it never really needed an update, I kept wondering what the company's crunchy, music-lovin' CEO and his merry band of nerds were going to do next.

Turns out that they have been working on enhancing awesomeness, and by this I mean subscription music content. Starting today, Sonos will be able to access the Rhapsody subscription-based music service, which lets you borrow songs from a two-million-track database for $10 a month. Now any Sonos user has the option to access this service through his remote control with no additional setup required—all the software is built into a software update that the company is pushing out over the Web as we speak. It's kind of like every radio station in the world, and you get to fast-forward. —Joe Brown