SoundStack

SoundStack is an audio technology company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that provides the infrastructure behind a large slice of independent digital audio. Describing itself as an audio-as-a-service company, it supplies hosting, streaming, podcast delivery, advertising technology, monetisation and measurement to publishers and platforms. The company says its technology serves more than 14,000 audio partners. SoundStack is also the parent of Live365, the long-running internet radio platform, which continues to operate under its own brand.

SoundStack itself is a young name for an older collection of businesses. It was created in 2022 through the combination of Media Creek, EmpireStreaming, Abovecast, Audio Catapult and Live365 — companies that between them had spent years building streaming servers, podcast delivery tools and services for small webcasters. Its flagship product, SoundStack Engine, was launched at the same time to unify those capabilities in a single platform for live streaming, podcasting and monetisation.

Origins in Media Creek

The company's direct predecessor, Media Creek, was founded in February 2018. Jon Stephenson, who was chief executive of both Live365 and the online audio platform Empire Streaming, partnered with Rockie Thomas and Sean Lozensky to create Media Creek as the parent company of Live365 and Empire Streaming. The venture brought together two complementary assets: a consumer-facing internet radio platform with a famous name, and a business-facing streaming infrastructure operation.

That combination reflected a conviction Stephenson has repeated since: that audio publishers, from the smallest hobbyist webcaster to large enterprises, were ill served by fragmented, proprietary technology built by major audio companies for their own purposes, and needed an independent, platform-agnostic provider that could work across boundaries.

The Live365 Inheritance

Live365, the best-known brand SoundStack inherited, was founded in 1999 in Foster City, California, and is described as the world's longest-operating internet radio platform. It pioneered bundled music licensing for webcasters — allowing small stations to operate under blanket licences rather than negotiating their own — and developed early technologies for server-side ad insertion, scalable streaming infrastructure and connected-device playback. At its height it hosted tens of thousands of internet radio stations created by individuals, schools and media organisations.

Live365's history also explains why Media Creek existed. When new, higher streaming royalty rates were announced for the 2016–2020 period, the then-independent Live365 shut down in January 2016, appearing to signal the end of amateur and semi-professional webcasting. It was revived under new ownership, relaunching on 1 May 2017, and a year later became part of Media Creek. The episode left the combined company with a stated friendliness toward the long tail of audio — small creators whom larger platforms often overlook.

The 2022 SoundStack Launch

In April 2022, Media Creek reorganised and rebranded as SoundStack, unifying its collective brands under one name and one mission, with Live365 the only brand to retain its separate public-facing identity. The combined companies had serviced more than 12,000 global publishers at the time of the launch. The new company exhibited at the 2022 NAB Show in Las Vegas days after its announcement.

Leadership carried over from the predecessor businesses. Stephenson became SoundStack's chief executive and founder figurehead. Rockie Thomas, a publisher-side digital audio expert whose background included AdsWizz, served as chief revenue officer at launch and later became chief strategy officer; she has said she started with the company in 2018 and has worked in streaming since 1998. Mike Reznick, a programmatic and podcasting specialist who had worked at Triton Digital, led as chief operating officer.

Thomas's own career illustrates the depth of that inherited experience. In interviews she has recalled being one of the first employees at AdsWizz, the audio advertising technology company, and working in streaming since 1998, including early work streaming local radio stations in the Broadcast.com era and client-side ad insertion from 2000, interrupted only by a four-year stint in television during the recession before returning to audio. Stephenson, for his part, had run both a publisher-facing streaming business and a consumer platform before combining them. SoundStack's founding pitch — that decades of connecting the dots across streaming, advertising and publishing could be turned into a single, intuitive service — rested on precisely that accumulated, cross-disciplinary background, which the company contrasted with newer entrants building audio tools from scratch.

SoundStack Engine

The launch product, SoundStack Engine, was described as the audio industry's first platform to fully automate and support streaming, podcasting and monetisation in one system, accessible through an intuitive user interface or a developer-friendly RESTful API. Publishers could create live streams and deliver podcasts within minutes across a global network built to scale, the company said, with reporting, analytics and measurement built in.

Stephenson described Engine as audio infrastructure for the internet, built for dynamic audio distribution from the start rather than patched together from third-party software, and questioned why programmatic podcasts should be delivered over content delivery networks built for static files. The monetisation element was central to the pitch: in 2021, before the rebrand, the company said it paid publishers 50 percent more than in 2020, and Engine was presented as a way for publishers to optimise their technical setup and maximise advertising revenue at the same time.

Partners and Publishers

Engine launched with a roster of partners spanning publishing and advertising technology. Publisher partners included Oregon Public Broadcasting, Dramafy, PodcastOne and Townsquare Media. Advertising technology partners included AdsWizz and Triton Digital, while monetisation partners included DAX, Katz Digital, TargetSpot and MediaMath. The breadth of that list illustrated the company's platform-agnostic positioning: SoundStack supplies infrastructure that can connect to multiple advertising ecosystems rather than locking publishers into one.

The company's own description of its full service, given by Thomas in later interviews, covers the end-to-end spectrum for linear streaming and podcast creators alike: hosting, analytics, advertising technology, distribution and a content management solution for podcasters. Its customer base is deliberately broad, from individual webcasters operating through Live365 to enterprise publishers running their own platforms on SoundStack infrastructure.

Live365 Under SoundStack

Within SoundStack, Live365 continues as a distinct service for small and independent broadcasters, providing tools, music licensing and distribution in a single package, and promoting itself with the line that every station is made by a real human rather than an algorithm. SoundStack has been recognised on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies, according to Live365's profile.

In February 2024, Live365's reach expanded through a content distribution agreement with Audacy, one of the largest audio companies in the United States. Under the partnership, content from hundreds of Live365 stations across multiple genres became available on the Audacy platform. Audacy's senior vice president of digital audio content, Tim Clarke, said Live365 empowers creators of all styles, while Live365's president Jason Stoddard said the deal brought wider distribution to its content creators. The agreement showed the two sides of the SoundStack business working together: infrastructure and licensing that let small stations exist, and distribution deals that put them in front of larger audiences.

How the Business Makes Money

SoundStack's model is that of a service provider rather than a content owner. Publishers and platforms pay for, or share revenue through, the delivery, hosting and advertising services it operates; its monetisation tools insert and manage advertising in streams and podcasts, and its measurement products give publishers and advertisers the reporting they need to value that inventory. The company's repeated emphasis on publisher payouts — including the reported 50 percent increase in 2021 — is aimed at the constituency it depends on: independent publishers deciding whose technology stack to build on.

Place in Pittsburgh and the Industry

Although Live365 began in California, the combined company is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Live365 also lists Pittsburgh as its home. In an industry whose technology suppliers are often subsidiaries of the broadcast or advertising giants they serve, SoundStack markets its independence as its core asset: a perfectly independent, platform-agnostic technology company, in Stephenson's words, with a responsibility to innovate for partners regardless of size and to support the audio industry as a whole. Its official website is soundstack.com.