A Sonos Price Hike Is About to Make a Bad Situation Even Worse

As a company, there are lots of things you can do when people are upset with your product. You could offer concessions (discounts in an effort to drive demand), swap your CEO (that’s a statement and a vibe shift), or you could pledge to do better and actually fix issues making people upset (imagine that!). One thing I would not recommend doing when times are tough, however, is raising prices, but Sonos seems to have been forced into this exact scenario.

According to Sonos’ newish CEO, Tom Conrad, tariffs for the Trump administration are—as they are for many companies—creeping in, and naturally, that’s going to result in higher prices for its already expensive audio gear. Per Bloomberg, Conrad said in the latest quarterly earnings report that “it has become clear that we’ll need to raise prices on certain products later this year.” Which products? We don’t know for sure, but that’s not great considering how things have been going for Sonos lately.

First, there was an app disaster that actually ended up delaying product launches in 2024 and led to Sonos swapping CEOs from Patrick Spence to Conrad. As if that wasn’t bad enough, this week Sonos also admitted that a “very low” number of speakers were overheating. By overheating, I mean they were getting so hot that USB-C ports melted. I’m no expert, but I’m going to go ahead and say that it looks like a bit of a fire hazard.

There’s also the fact, as I mentioned, that Sonos-branded products are also already fairly expensive to begin with. Its Ace headphones, for example, are $400, which is still cheaper than AirPods Max but more than competitors like Nothing and its Headphone 1, which sells for $300. Also, you need a Sonos soundbar to get the most out of those headphones and its TV audio swap feature. Similarly, Sonos’ Move 2 speakers—a portable Bluetooth speaker—cost $450, which eclipses even the premium of Bose’s newest SoundLink Plus. What wiggle room Sonos has for those products is unclear, but it seems to me that raising prices on those gadgets might be a risky maneuver.

Sonos, for its part, seems to recognize that, and according to Bloomberg, Conrad says that price hikes will vary across different categories. Listen, I don’t mean to single Sonos out here because tariffs are having wide-reaching effects across lots of different categories, tech and non-tech alike, but I’d be lying if I said this squeeze doesn’t feel particularly ill-timed. One thing is for sure: if prices balloon further, Sonos will put its brand loyalty to the test in a way it’s never done before.