Audacy Tunes into Future with Confluent

Audacy, a leading American audio content company, faced the challenge of modernizing its data infrastructure to meet the growing demands of its 200 million listeners. With a vast network of over 2,000 radio stations and access to more than 150 million podcast episodes, Audacy recognized the need for a real-time data solution that could deliver personalized content and seamless engagement across multiple platforms. Their legacy systems struggled to scale, hindering innovation and placing a heavy burden on development teams.

To overcome these challenges, Audacy partnered with Confluent to leverage its cloud-native data streaming platform. By adopting Confluent's solution, Audacy gained a scalable, real-time infrastructure that streamlined development cycles and accelerated feature delivery. Confluent's Schema Registry ensured data consistency across platforms, while the fully managed connectors simplified integration with existing tools and systems. This enabled Audacy to focus on building innovative new features instead of managing complex integrations.

The results of this transformation have been significant. Audacy has experienced a substantial increase in development velocity, accelerating the development of new features and improvements by 40% or more. One notable feature, "Tap to Record," allows listeners to submit messages to radio stations in near real-time, enhancing customer engagement and reducing workload for radio stations. Furthermore, Audacy has reduced latency of live streaming audio from 90 seconds to 30 seconds, providing a more seamless customer experience and driving increased content consumption.

Looking ahead, Audacy plans to leverage Confluent's Apache Flink® service to further optimize data processing costs and gain faster insights. By shifting data transformations and computations closer to the source, Audacy aims to increase the amount of data available for analysis. Ultimately, Audacy is committed to migrating all its systems to a single, unified data streaming platform with Confluent, ensuring a best-in-class data strategy for the future of audio content delivery.

Value Results:

• Reduced time-to-implementation for new data backplane features by ~50%.

• Reduced latency of live streaming audio by 66%.

• Increased development velocity by 40% or more.

• Enhanced customer engagement with near real-time updates and features.

• Unlocked new revenue streams through data-driven advertising and partnerships.