Introducing SoundStack

One brand; unified mission.

The world of audio is constantly evolving, and so is our company. Welcome to SoundStack – the industry’s first Audio-as-a-Service company.

We’ve been delivering solutions as a company for 12 years, with unprecedented team expertise that dates to Internet 1.0. We’ve worked in the value chain from content creation, distribution, monetization, and music licensing in various roles. Our experience crosses a wide range of customers with diverse objectives, from indie podcasters to large corporations. You’ve known us by many names — as companies and as individuals: Media Creek, AudioReach, EmpireStreaming, Abovecast, AudioCatapult, and Live365. Rockie Thomas, Mike Reznick, Jason Stoddard, and more.

Today, we’ve assembled the different aspects and expertise of our company under a single brand that does it all: SoundStack. Our promise is to simplify audio in every step, providing an end-to-end platform for the largest audio publishers all the way down to individual users. It’s a stack built of unique components that work together without the need to procure multiple technology vendors, run different sets of servers, work with multiple ad partners, and more. The combination of tech, starting with SoundStack Engine, is truly unique as it allows clients to integrate only the solutions they require and use us when they need it, so customers can focus on creating awesome content and executing their business strategy in audio.

One major advance you’ll see us focus on going forward is our commitment to making audio simple. Simple doesn’t mean feature reduction. It means integration along every part of audio. Simple means intuitive and easy to use. Our products are centered around simple workflows that work across boundaries of protocols, streaming formats, and uniquely, other platforms. Over the coming months, you will find even more products centered around this simple mission.

The foundation: SoundStack Engine

Our flagship product is SoundStack Engine which is publicly available beginning April 21, 2022. Engine tackles all of the complexities of live audio streaming and podcast distribution, integrating them into an intuitive offering. Simply put, SoundStack Engine is audio infrastructure for the internet. It was built for dynamic audio distribution from the start, not patched together on other providers or 3rd party software. Why try to deliver programmatic podcasts over CDNs built for static files? We built Engine while knowing modern requirements for all audio publishers from the true long-tail of audio to large enterprises.

With SoundStack Engine, we took the fundamental approach of re-engineering audio delivery from the ground up. Our first step started with physically installing infrastructure in data centers and creating our own network. We did this to maintain full control (more on that in an upcoming blog post). And next, rather than just installing third-party software on our infrastructure, we set out to create a true high availability audio server (for both live streaming and podcast) with a core focus on monetization and modern web technologies. While under the hood it’s complex, our goal was to simplify audio delivery for customers and partners, making it available via an intuitive UI and API.

What about Live365?

To our Live365 community: We’re not going anywhere. You’ll still know us as Live365. Our pricing model is the same, our offering is the same, and the people are the same. Our commitment to providing royalty coverage and an all-in-one broadcasting platform continues to grow. With the rebrand of SoundStack and the launch of our Engine product, we’ll be able to offer more reliability to Live365 stations and get innovative features first to our broadcasting community.

What’s ahead for SoundStack

While the new name is designed to clarify our mission, you’ll find that our core values and fundamentals haven’t and won’t change. We’re still the same great team of 50+ and growing, fully distributed across the globe and delivering the hustle and accountability we are known for. With an even clearer vision of the future, we are eager to launch even more powerful ways to deliver and monetize audio at scale. And the best part: we’re still at the beginning of audio. As a company, we will always be focused on simplification, innovation and staying nimble. And we will continue to break down barriers, affording access through an agnostic and unbiased way to further the audio ecosystem.