Why isn't Sony Spotify? The company that sold every format and missed the listening

In 1979 Sony put a cassette player in a pocket and called it the Walkman. In 1982 it launched the compact disc with Philips, in 1988 it bought CBS Records, which became Sony Music, and in 1992 it introduced the MiniDisc. For two decades Sony held more pieces of recorded music than anyone: the devices, the formats, a catalogue and a brand people trusted with their ears. Then Apple shipped the iPod in 2001 and opened the iTunes Store in 2003. Sony answered in 2004 with Connect, a download store tied to its own ATRAC format and SonicStage software, and in 2007 announced it would close it and open its new Walkmans to MP3 and AAC. Spotify launched in 2008. When Spotify listed in New York in 2018, Sony Music held a stake of around 5.7% and sold roughly half of it within weeks.

Over the same years another division of the group ran almost the opposite story. PlayStation has released a new home console roughly every six or seven years since 1994 (1994, 2000, 2006, 2013, 2020), and since the PS3 in 2006 it has built a network on top of each one: PlayStation Network first, then PS Plus from 2010. By June 2026 Sony had sold more than 95 million PS5s and counted 125 million monthly active users.

Better drills for the same hole

The question Hoang Huynh asks in the first book is short: why isn’t Sony Spotify? It had the music, the devices, the brand and the technical lead. The answer sits in the job to be done. People were hiring something to listen to their music, anywhere, with little effort. The cassette, the CD and the MiniDisc were each a better tool for that job, and each was still an object you had to buy and carry. Sony kept improving the object. Apple and then Spotify took the job itself, first by moving the library into software and then by removing the need to own a library at all.

Connect shows the habit clearly. Sony arrived at downloads with a proprietary format and a mandatory management program, which is how a hardware company protects its devices. Customers judged it against the job, where every extra step counts as friction. Owning the catalogue and the hardware did not give Sony the job, because the job sat one level above both. The irony of the 2018 listing is that Sony ended up profiting from Spotify as a supplier and a shareholder, a seat at the table of the business it could have run.

Two notes, played on time

PlayStation reads very differently when you score it on the staff we use for rhyming, where every launch is a note on one of five lines, from commodity to transformation. Sony plays a clean two-note cadence: a product (the console), then a service deepened on its installed base, repeated each generation. Each beat lands roughly when players expect it, which lets developers, retailers and households plan around it. The network keeps a generation’s players together between consoles, and the library they build makes the next console an easier purchase.

Here Sony read the job correctly. Players buy a PlayStation to play the games their friends play, and the console, the network and the subscription all serve that job. The hardware is replaced every few years while the account, the friends list and the habit carry over.

The weak spot of a regular rhythm

A linear cadence has a soft side. Little of it sits on the experience line, so what holds players is mostly the library and the network, which makes exclusive games a structural asset. In 2026 Bloomberg reported that Sony would keep its narrative single-player games on PS5 instead of porting them to PC, as it had done for several years. Sony declined to comment, and the policy may still change. Read through the cadence, the move protects the reason to buy the next console. Read through the music story, it carries a familiar temptation: defending the device while the job may be drifting towards other screens.

Where a company puts the job

One group, one engineering culture, two outcomes, and the variable was where Sony located the job. In music it placed the job inside the format and defended the format. In games it placed the job in the player’s social life and built every layer around that. Any company with a strong product is doing one of the two today, and sales rarely reveal which until a rival serves the job better.

If your roadmap is a list of better objects, train your team to write down the job those objects are hired for, and to check that it is still yours.