Cumulus Media is stepping into a new era of audience measurement through its partnership with Xperi, and the company’s leadership believes the timing couldn’t be better. The deal centers on DTS AutoStage, a connected-car platform that gives broadcasters near real-time insight into how, where, and when listeners are tuning in.
Last week, Cumulus became the first company to subscribe to Xperi’s premium radio audience measurement system. The move comes as the radio broadcaster is in the midst of a lawsuit with Nielsen over its practices.
For a radio industry that’s spent years defending its relevance against digital competitors, the partnership offers something rare: hard data delivered fast, at scale, and with granularity that some other ratings services simply can’t match.
Bob Walker, President of Operations for Cumulus, said the decision came down to a combination of factors that emerged as the company studied Xperi’s roadmap. Chief among them was the sheer size of the sample — with Xperi noting is now north of 16 million vehicles — which he said gives Cumulus more stability in the numbers from week to week.
“The sample size of cars is significantly larger than any previous ratings service we used,” Walker said. “That data tends to give us more stability on a week-over-week basis, and that was intriguing.”
Speed mattered just as much as scale. Because AutoStage draws from a growing fleet of connected vehicles, Cumulus can now see listening behavior almost as it happens, rather than waiting weeks or months for a traditional ratings book. That immediacy, paired with geographic detail showing exactly where listening occurs, reshapes conversations with local advertisers in ways the old measurement model never allowed.
Real-Time Data Changes the Conversation
Walker pointed to sports-heavy markets as an early proof point for the new system, describing shifts in weekend listening that older services wouldn’t have captured.
“In markets like Columbia, South Carolina; Knoxville, Tennessee; or Nashville, where you have pro or college teams playing on Saturdays and Sundays, you would typically see a certain level of listening in the old ratings service,” Walker said. “When you see the real-time data the next day, though, you notice changes.”
He said that nuance builds credibility for the data set while also opening the door to new partnership conversations. The Cumulus executive shared that smaller and mid-sized markets stand to benefit even more than the major ones, since they were often measured with older, less consistent methodologies.
Layering AutoStage data on top of Cumulus’s existing relationship with Triton Digital, which tracks actual streaming and podcast engagement rather than sample-based estimates, gives the company a fuller picture of its audience.
“When you can have a conversation about actual impressions coming from the car and actual impressions coming from our streams, it changes the narrative for us,” Walker said. “It becomes much more reflective of where the media landscape is moving in terms of impressions.”
Building the Infrastructure Behind the Numbers
Joe D’Angelo, Senior Vice President of Commercial Strategy and Partnerships at Xperi, explained that the data now powering these conversations is the product of nearly a decade of platform development.
“DTS AutoStage and our resulting data are the culmination of eight years of effort in developing a global connected car platform focused primarily on enhancing the discovery of and engagement with broadcast radio around the world,” D’Angelo said.
That changed in 2023, when Xperi began extracting network traffic data and shaping it into something resembling audience metrics. The Xperi executive shared that the company spent the first half of 2025 working directly with the radio industry to translate raw engagement data into familiar terms.
“We redesigned the whole system and created what you see now with Cume, Share, TSL, complex heat maps, and Average Quarter Hour,” D’Angelo said. “It’s all anonymized, aggregated audience data representing the real-world listening behavior in our fleet of cars, which globally is about 17 million.”
Scale continues to grow rapidly, and D’Angelo said that growth is what allows new markets to come online. Xperi won’t release market-level analytics until a location reaches at least 1,000 active cars, so as more cars connect, more markets clear that threshold.
“We’re adding more than 10,000 cars a day,” D’Angelo said. “As more cars come online, more markets reach that install base.”
What Sets AutoStage Apart
Two features define the platform’s value proposition, according to D’Angelo, who pointed first to the speed of delivery.
“The timeliness of our data is a major benefit,” D’Angelo said. “Our results are available the next day, usually around 6 AM.”
Location is the second differentiator, and the Xperi executive shared that the heat maps offer something local sales teams have never had access to before.
“No one else tells you where people are when they’re listening to broadcast radio,” said D’Angelo. “There are case studies where local sellers use those maps with clients and say, ‘Look at all the listeners who spend significant time near your dealership every day.'”
D’Angelo also outlined what integration requires from broadcasters, noting that stations need to feed Xperi’s backend with now-playing metadata.
“That flow of information into our system is really the heartbeat of our connection to the car,” D’Angelo said. “Once they’re integrated with us, they get access to the portal.”
Looking ahead, D’Angelo pointed to international expansion as one of the most exciting frontiers for the partnership, given that AutoStage already operates in more than 140 countries.
“One of the things I’m most excited about is taking what we’ve developed from an analytics perspective here in the United States and deploying it globally,” the Xperi executive shared. “I’m very optimistic about what we’re going to do for radio, not only in the U.S., but globally.”
For Cumulus, the partnership represents more than a new data vendor; it’s a chance to reshape how the company tells radio’s story to a skeptical ad market.
“We’re excited because we feel this is a step forward in using technology to change the way people think about radio,” Walker said. “This is really the big data moment for radio, at least as we see it … We can tell a compelling story that addresses many of the misconceptions about radio. People often believe no one listens anymore. Yet the data overwhelmingly shows that’s not the case. Especially when compared to broadcast television and other platforms, radio remains highly relevant and continues to be a meaningful part of people’s daily routines. Helping advertisers connect with those audiences is a story we’re looking forward to telling.
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Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing daily news stories, features, and opinion columns. He joined Barrett Media in 2022 after a decade leading several radio brands in several formats, as well as a 5-year stint working in local television. In addition to his work with Barrett Media, he is a radio and TV play-by-play broadcaster. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.