I love my Sonos. If it was a woman, I'd seduce it relentlessly until it agreed to marry me. My morning routine would be nothing without it, and it gently whispers sweet nothings into my ear as I wind down for the night.
Some of you may have seen me post an article a few months ago that described my joy at now being able to play my Soundcloud playlists through Sonos. Well, apparently the team at Sonos read that article also, and offered EDMSauce a challenge – to not just use Sonos to play your existing music, but to use it as a discovery tool and find new, funky, hip-jiggling tracks to twerk away to.
Challenge accepted, Sonos.
The premise of the game is simple. We were sent a map of the world and 2 darts. Competing against a friend, you take turns to throw your dart at the map, and then use Sonos' vast array of streaming services to play a track from the country that the dart lands in. If you succeed you receive 1 point. If you fail to locate a track to play, your fellow competitor receives 1. The first to 10 points wins, can bask in their glory of being crowned awesome music guru, and has an pretty interesting playlist selection to listen to afterwards . Easy!
So last week, I received the map in a cylindrical tube through the mail. With excitement, I opened the tube up, titling it up to peer inside – frozen in horror as a dart slid out and hurtled toward my face. Im fine… I quite like my new forehead piercing actually….
Hanging the map might be an issue if you care about the plaster of your walls. Take a top tip from us and flatten out a cardboard box to use as backing so you don't leave any holes in your kitchen wall. Stick the map to the cardboard and then hang the cardboard on the wall. I decided to challenge EDM's very own Elle to be my playing buddy.
Our spread was far and wide across all genres and years of music. We dropped some forgotten about classics such as Kanye West's “Stronger”, and even some crazy Chinese Jazz and Blues sung in Mandarin. We ranged from the smooth melodic sounds of Canada's Dallas Green, to India's Jai Ho “Slumdog Millionaire“.
For the trickier countries such as Iceland or Sudan, we used Sonos' TuneIn search feature which allows you to search across thousands of radio stations and find a song that matches your criteria. For Sudan, I used Sudanese radio to hunt down African Youth – “Adhima” (think Reggae Lauren Hill) which took me back to my time in Johannesburg a few weeks back. And who knew Sigor Ros was from Iceland?
Want to give it a try? Let us know, and we can send you a map and darts.
Check out Steve Jones and Carlos Niño playing musical darts here:
