The Mixcloud story

Mixcloud is an online music streaming service that allows DJs, radio hosts, and music enthusiasts to upload and share their radio shows, DJ mixes, and podcasts. The platform specializes in long-form audio content and provides listeners with a wide range of genres and styles, curated by its community of creators. Mixcloud operates on a unique model that ensures artists and creators are compensated for their work through licensing agreements and a subscription service.

The Data Problem

Aiming to boost their retention rates and increase conversions of artists and listeners to their premium plan, Mixcloud sought to implement highly personalised and relevant email and push notification campaigns. The challenge, however, was their enormous user base—over 50 million registered users with corresponding events data stored within BigQuery to the tune of petabytes. This vast amount of data introduced significant hurdles with all the traditional customer engagement platforms they considered:

Unresonable data volume based pricing:

With a large user base (50 million) and relatively low subscription fees ($3-5 per month), the cost structures of traditional customer engagement platforms—typically based on Monthly Active Users (MAUs) or data ingestion volumes—were financially unjustifiable for Mixcloud, making it difficult to ensure a good return on investment.

Underutilisation of customer data

The replication of petabytes of customer data onto a third-party customer engagement platform was neither cost-effective nor scalable from an engineering perspective. This limitation greatly restricted Mixcloud's ability to leverage their extensive data for crafting personalised customer experiences.

How Castled solved these problems

In pursuit of a solution adept at handling large volumes of data, Mixcloud turned to Castled. Castled enabled Mixcloud to segment customer data directly on BigQuery without needing to duplicate it, facilitating the deployment of finely tuned email and push notifications based on user preferences like favorite artists or music genres. Furthermore, Castled's seat-based pricing model alleviated concerns about escalating costs related to increasing data volumes, allowing Mixcloud's marketing team to concentrate on improving marketing effectiveness.