One Day After Injunction Win, Cumulus Inks An Autostage Ratings Deal

It has already inked an agreement with Eastlan to provide the advertising community with ratings currency in such markets as Atlanta, where Cumulus Media relied on Nielsen Audio data until a legal spat put a stop to that. Now, it is the flagship launch partner for the AutoStage Radio Audience Measurement Service from Xperi.

As the first commercial licensee for the AutoStage Broadcaster Portal Premium, pitched by Xperi as its next-generation radio audience intelligence platform, Cumulus stands to benefit from “near–census-level insights into in-car radio consumption, where the majority of radio listening occurs, providing unprecedented visibility into actual, nearly-real-time listener behavior.”

DTS AutoStage’s “ratings,” as colloquially referred to by many across the radio industry, enjoyed outsized attention at the 2026 NAB Show in Las Vegas, putting familiar faces at Nielsen Audio on call that other services such as the Broadcaster Portal Premium could put a dent in its dominant market position within the U.S. radio industry — a result of its September 2013 merger with Arbitron.

In Cumulus’ view, the agreement with Xperi “underscores the audio industry’s growing interest in new approaches to audience measurement beyond traditional survey-based methodologies.”

For Cumulus Media President of Operations Bob Walker, “We’re proud to be the first broadcaster to deploy AutoStage Broadcaster Portal Premium as part of our broader effort to bring new sources of audience insight to radio. The platform gives us access to a level of audience intelligence that hasn’t previously been available, creating new opportunities for content creators, sales teams, and advertisers alike. The AutoStage heat maps are a particularly compelling example, visually illustrating where listening is concentrated, on an aggregated basis, relative to advertiser locations. By giving advertisers a richer understanding of audience distribution and listening trends, the platform helps them plan more effective campaigns, optimize audience-level planning, and maximize the impact of their radio investments.”

Cumulus will deploy Broadcaster Portal Premium across its portfolio of stations, comprised of 393 stations in 84 markets.

“This agreement with Cumulus marks a major step toward deterministic measurement in broadcast radio,” said Joe D’Angelo, Senior VP of Commercial Strategy and Partnerships at Xperi. “By leveraging large-scale, aggregated in-car listening data, broadcasters can move beyond traditional sample-based measurement toward large-scale data-driven audience insights—enabling better programming decisions, stronger advertiser accountability, and more competitive positioning in a data-driven media landscape.”

The AutoStage connected car platform is presently integrated into upward of 16 million vehicles across Earth and measures monthly AM/FM listening hours; it is capable of offering in-car listening data across 300 U.S. markets with granularity including share-of-listening, audience flow, geographic patterns, market-level reach, and near-real-time station rankings by daypart.

The timing of the announcement says everything about Cumulus’ continued stance toward Nielsen Audio, which has been tussling with the nation’s dominant audience measurement and data analytics firm in a New York federal appeals court. As RBR+TVBR reported on July 14, that court upheld an injunction won in late December 2025 by Cumulus Media against Nielsen, agreeing with the Southern District of New York that the ratings giant likely violated antitrust law by leveraging an alleged monopoly over national radio data to pressure broadcasters into buying local data they didn’t want.

Cumulus sued Nielsen in October 2025, alleging its 2024 Network Policy unlawfully tied Nationwide, the only national ratings report of its kind, to local ratings data in every market where a broadcaster operates. Nielsen controls 100% of the national ratings market; Eastlan is its only local competitor.

And, that competition has accelerated in 2026, with Eastlan — led by President/CEO Mike Gould — expanding beyond small and mid-sized markets to large metropolitan areas where Cumulus Media has stations. As such, Atlanta entered the mix of markets served by Eastlan, along with Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Oklahoma City; while Seattle-Tacoma is also a new market for Eastlan, Cumulus does not own or operate stations there.

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