When Stingray announced its $175 million acquisition of TuneIn in November 2025, most industry coverage focused solely on the deal size or TuneIn’s latest issues. But that’s simply not seeing the forest for the trees.
The real story behind this acquisition is both simpler and more revealing about where the audio industry is heading. To understand what Stingray actually bought – and why it matters for radio – you need to look past the press release numbers and focus on a single question: what problem is this deal solving?
The monetisation puzzle
Start with TuneIn’s business fundamentals. The platform reaches 75 million monthly active users worldwide and provides access to over 100,000 radio stations, as well as podcasts, music, sports, and news. It’s distributed across more than 200 platforms and connected devices. By any measure, TuneIn has achieved significant scale.
Yet when you look at the revenue numbers, something interesting emerges. TuneIn is expected to generate around $110 million in revenue for 2025. Do the simple division, and you get roughly $1.47 per user per year. For a platform with that kind of reach, the revenue per user is surprisingly low, far lower than what most radio stations still generate from their traditional broadcast audiences.
This isn’t a criticism of TuneIn’s business. It’s actually the key to understanding why this deal makes sense. TuneIn built massive distribution but never fully solved the monetisation equation. Meanwhile, most radio broadcasters have strong monetisation of their existing audiences but are watching their distribution advantage – the FM dial – slowly erode.
Stingray saw an opportunity to combine what it does well (monetisation infrastructure, advertising technology) with what TuneIn does well (distribution at scale). But there’s a more specific reason why this deal happened now, and it has everything to do with the car.
Distribution is moving to IP – and TuneIn is already there
When Eric Boyko, Stingray’s CEO, announced the acquisition, he was explicit about what excited him most: expanding reach in the automotive sector. TuneIn is integrated into over 50 in-car audio systems across multiple manufacturers. That’s not just a nice-to-have feature. It’s increasingly becoming the primary point of access for audio in vehicles.
Tesla recently announced the removal of FM and AM radio from its cars, relying entirely on internet-connected audio. This seemed like a typical Tesla move: provocative, ahead of the market, maybe too aggressive. But as connected car systems become standard equipment rather than premium features, the calculus changes. Once you have a fully connected dashboard with a rich interface, maintaining an analogue tuner starts to look like supporting legacy technology just for the sake of continuity.
Other manufacturers haven’t yet followed Tesla’s lead, but the direction is clear. New vehicles increasingly treat IP audio as the primary interface, with FM as a backup or legacy option. This transition won’t happen overnight because the car replacement cycle moves slowly, with the average vehicle on the road for over 12 years old. But that’s precisely why this matters so much for radio. A slow-moving transition is still a transition, and the window for positioning yourself on the right side of it is narrower than it appears.
TuneIn solved the distribution problem years ago by getting embedded into car systems before most broadcasters realised this was the critical battleground. Stingray just bought a fantastic weapon to win this battle.
Why IP monetisation changes the economics
The shift from FM to IP isn’t just about distribution technology. It fundamentally changes what’s possible with advertising.
FM broadcasting is anonymous. You transmit a signal, and anyone with a receiver can tune in. You know your total audience size from ratings, but you don’t know much about individual listeners in real time. Your advertising is broadly targeted at best – you can pick the daypart and the format, but that’s about it.
IP streaming flips this dynamic completely. Suddenly, you have access to data that FM could never provide: location (geo-targeting, store proximity), profile (age, interests, listening history), behaviour (commuter vs. leisure drive), context (weather, traffic, time, etc.), device (car model, options, etc.). This opens the door to much more sophisticated targeting.
Imagine you need to recharge (or refuel) your car, and you are getting near a station that also offers great sandwiches or fancy coffee. It would make plenty of sense for the station to target you with an ad for its offerings.
This isn’t about being creepy or invasive. It’s about the basic economics of digital advertising. An advertiser will pay significantly more for an impression that reaches exactly who they want, when they want, in the context they want, than for a broadcast impression that reaches a general audience. The CPMs through targeted IP audio are simply way higher than traditional FM rates.
As Eric Boyko, Stingray’s CEO mentioned in La Presse: “TuneIn is already selling advertising inside Teslas, and our inventory is fully sold out – at the highest price. In cars, we know the profile of the person driving, we know the model of the car, and we know where they are. Suddenly, all of this becomes monetizable. We can generate between $1 and $16 per hour per connected car.”
So, when he talked about merging Stingray’s infrastructure with TuneIn’s reach, he was really talking about applying sophisticated monetisation to a large, currently under-monetised audience. TuneIn built the pipes. Stingray is bringing the machinery to extract far more value from what flows through those pipes.
The battle for the interface
There’s a deeper strategic layer to this acquisition that goes beyond just improving TuneIn’s revenue per user. Stingray is positioning to become something more fundamental: the default audio interface inside connected cars.
Think about how audio worked in the analogue era. The FM tuner was the interface. Listeners turned on their car, and the radio was just… there. Stations competed for preset buttons, but the basic interface – the tuner – was neutral infrastructure that everyone could access equally.
In the IP era, the interface itself becomes a competitive asset. Car manufacturers need to offer audio to their customers, but they don’t want to build and maintain their own audio platforms. They want a turnkey solution: someone who can aggregate content, manage the technical infrastructure, handle advertising, and offer a revenue-sharing opportunity.
This is precisely what TuneIn offers, and exactly what Stingray can now monetise more effectively. Together, they can approach car manufacturers with a complete package: access to over 100,000 radio stations plus other audio content, a tested interface that users already know, sophisticated advertising technology that creates a new revenue stream for the OEM, and the operational capacity to handle everything behind the scenes.
The radio industry has recognised this threat. Initiatives like Radioplayer emerged precisely to create an industry-controlled alternative: a unified interface that keeps radio stations in control of the listener relationship while providing the aggregation and technical infrastructure that car manufacturers want. But the challenge for industry-led solutions is always the same: they require coordination across competitors, consensus on strategy and editorial choices (which radio to put forward, for example), and sustained investment without immediate returns. Meanwhile, commercial platforms like TuneIn can move faster, make autonomous decisions, and offer car manufacturers a simpler negotiation with a single partner rather than an industry consortium.
If Stingray’s strategy works, if TuneIn becomes the default “radio” experience inside a significant portion of new connected cars in North America and elsewhere, then the platform will control something extremely valuable: the primary relationship with listeners in vehicles. Radio stations would still be available through TuneIn, but TuneIn (and Stingray) would own the interface, the data, the advertising inventory, and the direct relationship with both the car manufacturer and the listener.
For radio broadcasters, this should be concerning. You’re moving from a world where you controlled the transmission and had a direct (one-way) relationship with listeners, to a world where you’re one content source among thousands inside someone else’s platform, accessed through someone else’s interface, with someone else owning the listener relationship and the best part of the monetisation.
Why radio needs to act now. Not later
A natural response to all of this is: “But FM is still huge. People still predominantly listen to the radio in their cars. We have time to figure this out.”
This is both technically true and strategically dangerous. First of all, it’s important to keep in mind that according to an AAA (American Automobile Association), 29% of U.S. drivers now use their phones for audio content while driving, a percentage that has nearly doubled since 2014.
Then, such a reaction is typical of the different stages of denial during a digital transformation. From “this is marginal” to “let’s meet the politicians and try pushing for regulation”
Yes, today FM listening still dominates in-car audio. Yes, the transition to IP will take years, possibly a decade or more, because the car replacement cycle can’t be compressed.
If you’re a radio broadcaster and you wait until IP listening becomes the majority of in-car audio before you invest seriously in streaming, CarPlay, Android Auto, and relationships with car manufacturers or the OEMs, you’ve already lost. The cars on the road in 2035 are being designed and built right now. Partnerships between audio platforms and OEMs are being formed now. The interfaces that will become familiar to millions of drivers are being tested and refined right now.
This is why the Stingray-TuneIn deal matters beyond just these two companies. It’s a signal about where some see the market going. Stingray isn’t betting on FM. It’s betting on becoming the infrastructure – the layer between audio content and connected car systems. And it’s making that bet with $175 million and a clear execution strategy.
The window for radio to position itself advantageously in this transition is open, but it won’t stay open forever. The work that needs to happen includes:
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- Making sure streaming infrastructure actually works reliably. This sounds obvious, but some radio streams still have reliability or quality issues.
- Taking mobile interfaces seriously. CarPlay and Android Auto let people bring their phone’s audio into the car. If your station’s app doesn’t work smoothly in these environments, you’re cutting yourself off from a growing segment of listeners.
- Optimizing discoverability. In the IP world, being easy to find matters enormously. Stations that haven’t thought about how they appear in search results of the various platforms, how their metadata displays, and how algorithms surface their content are making themselves invisible.
- Building relationships with the platforms or – better – with the car manufacturers. This is complex and requires patience, but if you’re not at the table when they decide which audio services to integrate, surface, or promote, it will be an uphill battle.
- Understanding what IP monetisation looks like for your station. The advertising opportunities and economics of IP audio differ fundamentally from those of FM. Stations need to develop expertise in this area rather than treating streaming as just another distribution channel for the same ads.
These aren’t abstract recommendations. In Radio’s Digital Transformation Playbook, I break down each of these transitions with specific frameworks, case studies from other industries that faced similar disruptions, and practical implementation strategies that broadcasters can adapt to their own situations.
None of this requires abandoning FM or pretending the existing business doesn’t matter. But it does require taking the IP transition seriously as a strategic priority rather than a nice-to-have digital initiative.
The centre of gravity is shifting
The radio industry isn’t collapsing. Most stations are still profitable, still serving their communities, still creating content that people value. But the business’s underlying structure is changing in ways that increasingly favour platforms over individual broadcasters.
The Stingray-TuneIn acquisition is a clear example of this shift. A company looked at the audio landscape and decided that owning distribution infrastructure and monetisation technology was worth $175 million. That same company could have bought radio stations or invested in content creation, but it didn’t. It bought the pipes and the technology to monetise what flows through them.
Radio still has advantages: strong content, established brands, trusted voices, deep connections to local communities. These are real assets that platforms can’t easily replicate. But advantages don’t matter if no one can access what you’re offering, or if someone else owns the interface through which people find you.
The fight is shifting from transmitters to interfaces, from broadcast reach to IP distribution, from general advertising to targeted monetisation. Radio can adapt to this new landscape, but only if it acts while it still has leverage. Once you’re entirely dependent on platforms you don’t control, your negotiating position deteriorates rapidly.
As car fleets turn over slowly, ten years sounds like a long time. But partnerships take years to build, and by the time the data clearly shows the tipping point has passed, it’s too late to change course effectively.
The time to prepare is now, while things still look relatively stable. Because in technology transitions, stability is usually the period right before everything changes.
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