Engaging 200 Million Listeners With Premium Audio Content
Audacy, a leading American audio content company that operates over-the-air broadcasts, digital audio platforms, and podcasts, faced an urgent need: transforming its data infrastructure to fuel next-generation experiences for its 200 million listeners. For Audacy, this was no small undertaking; the company services over 2,000 radio stations—ranging from Audacy-owned to affiliate partners and exclusive stations—and provides access to more than 150 million podcast episodes.
With such a large audience across multiple platforms, Audacy recognized the importance of optimizing its data operations to deliver seamless content and real-time engagement. To achieve this, they turned to Confluent’s cloud-native, fully managed data streaming platform.
“We needed a real-time data solution that could give us the scalability required to better engage our listeners and experiment with delivering new features and capabilities faster,” said Vitaly Shoykhet, Senior VP of Engineering at Audacy.
The Challenge: Transforming Legacy Systems for the Digital Age
Audacy, like many audio media companies, found itself at a critical juncture. It had accumulated a wealth of listener data from hundreds of thousands of hours of premium content, but accessing and making real-time use of this data was increasingly difficult. With large-scale audio streaming a core part of the business, legacy systems and the unwieldy data architecture they had been using were no longer able to keep up with growing demand for personalized content, dynamic advertising, and data-driven insights.
“Before adopting Confluent’s data streaming platform, our architecture was mostly point-to-point integrations with multiple data sources and schemas, which created a bit of a mess,” said Shoykhet. “It made scaling our offerings difficult, since all updates required complex changes across many microservices and data stores.”
Audacy’s cumbersome architecture required large teams of developers to manage complex systems, leaving little time to focus on delivering new features. With so much effort spent on maintaining the infrastructure, there was little room for innovation. The company knew it needed to establish itself as a leader in a highly competitive media landscape, where audiences now expect seamless, on-demand experiences and constant updates. To stay ahead, Audacy had to make a significant transformation.
The Solution: Scaling Innovation with Confluent’s Data Streaming Platform
Audacy chose Confluent’s cloud-native data streaming platform to build a real-time, scalable data infrastructure that could meet the company’s needs today and in the future. By partnering with Confluent, Audacy eliminated the headaches associated with managing complex, legacy systems, freeing up developer resources to focus on building innovative new features.
A key part of this transformation was Confluent’s Schema Registry, which helped Audacy enforce data consistency across their streaming data. With a unified approach to managing data formats and schemas, the company ensured smooth integration across different systems and applications, speeding up development cycles.
Additionally, Audacy utilized Confluent’s fully managed connectors to easily integrate with their existing tools and systems, allowing them to connect various data sources and destinations effortlessly. This flexibility enabled Audacy to create a more connected, real-time infrastructure without the need to develop costly, custom integrations.
“Confluent Connectors allow us to innovate faster,” said Shoykhet. “We can actually invest our development resources into building new capabilities instead of custom integrations to common data sources.”
The Results: Elevating Listener Experiences and Driving Revenue
With Confluent, Audacy has not only unlocked the potential of real-time data but also transformed the way they interact with their audiences. The company has seen dramatic improvements in key performance areas, including streamlined development cycles, faster time-to-market for new features, and increased audience engagement.
“With a data backplane fueled by Confluent, we’ve observed a significant increase in development velocity, which has accelerated the development of new features and improvements to our services by 40%, if not more.”
One of those features is an interactive tool called “Tap to Record,” which Audacy was able to deliver ahead of schedule. This feature allows audiences to record a message and submit it to a radio station in near real time, thanks to a simplified data architecture and improved flexibility. It leverages Confluent’s near real-time streaming capabilities and fault tolerance to ensure accurate and timely message delivery, resulting in an enhanced customer experience, deeper listener engagement, and a reduced workload for radio stations.
By leveraging Confluent’s cloud-native, fully managed data streaming platform, Audacy was also able to reduce the burden of maintaining their data systems. As a result, the company’s developers no longer need to manage and scale complex infrastructure, which has allowed them to focus on delivering fresh content experiences that delight listeners and keep them coming back for more. And, because Audacy’s listeners are so engaged, this has opened the door to new revenue streams through data-driven advertising and partnerships.
“Since adopting Confluent, we’ve been able to provide a more seamless customer experience. Now, in near real time, we’re able to make screen layout adjustments, update page metadata, and provide listeners with new show alerts and details so they can access the latest content instantly. We’ve also been able to reduce latency of live streaming audio from 90 seconds to 30 seconds. These improvements have driven our listeners to consume more content across our platforms, which creates monetization opportunities for us,” said Shoykhet.
What’s Next? Faster, Cost-Effective Data Processing and a Unified Data Architecture
Audacy’s journey with Confluent is far from over. As they look toward the future, the company plans to leverage Confluent’s Apache Flink® service to shift the processing of operational data left, closer to the source of their data streams. This will allow them to access critical insights faster, while significantly cutting costs associated with processing data in Snowflake.
“With Flink, we now have the opportunity to shift left and do a lot of early data transformations and computation on our data before it reaches Snowflake. This will optimize our data processing costs to increase the amount of data we have available,” said Shoykhet.
As Audacy moves forward, its teams are committed to migrating all their systems to a single, unified data streaming platform with the help of Confluent. It’s safe to say the company is set to face the future of audio content delivery with a best-in-class data strategy—and that’s music to our ears.
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