Hey, hello everyone. Thank you for joining us on the webinar today. Before we begin, I'd like to announce that we will be referring to today's earnings release, which was sent to Newswire earlier today. I'd also like to remind everyone that this webinar call could contain forward-looking statements about Destiny Media Technologies within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements are based upon current beliefs and expectations of management and are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements. Such risks are fully discussed in the company's filings with the SEC and SEDAR, and the company does not assume any obligation to update information contained on this call. During the webinar, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures.
The non-GAAP financial measures are presented in supplemental disclosures and should not be considered in isolation of, or as a substitute of, or superior to the financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP, and should be read in conjunction with the company's financial statements filed with the SEC and SEDAR. The non-GAAP financial measures used in the company's presentation may differ from similarly titled measures presented by other companies. A reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in the earnings press release. Following the presentation, there will be a question and answer session, during which you may submit questions by selecting the Raise Hand icon at the bottom of your screen. Your questions will be called in the order they are received, at which point you'll be prompted to unmute your microphone before speaking.
With that, I now would like to turn the call over to your host, Fred Vandenberg, Chief Executive Officer.
Thanks, Sean. On the call today will be myself, Fred Vandenberg, and Glenn, and Glenn will present a little bit later on in the presentation. This is our second webinar or second earnings webinar, I guess I should say. We've made some changes, but similar to the last webinar, we've prepared a PowerPoint presentation that we'll follow along, and hopefully that'll assist in the discussion. I'll just share my screen here. Okay. The structure of the call today, I really wanted to focus in on our longer term goals. Where do we see ourself in five years? It's that old, you know, job interview question. Where do you see yourself in five years?
The second item would be how we're going to get there, our strategy. The third, what we did in 2021 to get there. Play MPE has grown by about 22% over the last four years. I think it's 29% if you go back five. We wanted to talk about where we see ourselves going in the future. Looking forward. Play MPE is a B2B business in the business of music promotion. This is our revenue by source over the last five years. It gives you a sort of a foundation of the recent history. It's got an addressable market, we think of about $40 million. We think that's conservative, but we really view Play MPE as an anchor stone for additional businesses.
We like Play MPE. We think it is a business with a lot of potential growth, and it's a high margin business, but we look to grow beyond that. Where do we see ourselves in five years? This graph here is really to give you a sense of scale, a bit of perspective. We've used $15 million as our revenue amount in five years, but you know, will that take longer to get there? Will it be sooner? Will it be higher or lower in five years? These are all questions that I think as you go through our strategy, you'll get a sense of it, that it's kind of hard to predict.
It does give you a sense that we are targeting a higher growth rate. I'll talk a little bit more specifically later on, but as we have added staffing and especially product engineering staff, we've started to dedicate more time to new products. We think we're targeting higher growth with Play MPE, but concurrently, we're starting to invest more time into new products. How do we get there? I'm gonna spend the majority of time, and bear with me as I think it'll be a useful discussion, but on how we grow and add revenue and how we acquire new markets. Play MPE is a little bit unique in the sense that you know, think of it like Facebook.
You know, if you're the only one of your friends there, it's gonna be a pretty boring conversation. In acquiring a new market, we have to build up that network of youth. How do we do that? Really the first step we take is adding content, getting desirable music. That tends to be music from major record labels, one of the three major record labels or all three, I guess. In some cases it's more major independent. Anyway, it's content that's desirable. How do you get that is really a strong business development group and an easy-to-use platform. The second step would be adding recipients, getting recipients to actively use that. It takes an easy-to-use platform on the recipient side, intuitive languages, local languages.
We add a lot to the recipient player that facilitates a really good experience. The three, four, five here. This is the order that they typically come in, but they can be a little bit less sequential. There's more of an iterative process there. It's really adding lists so we can sell. These are critical to selling to independent labels where they don't have the resources to manage lists and know who to contact. We establish commercial relationships or agreements. You know, typically up until this stage, we're providing that network of use and then we start coming to arrangements.
They can be any kind of commercial arrangement where it's a smaller pilot agreement that just funds some of our investments, or they can be full commercial agreements. Then the fifth step is really your block and tackling, adding independent sales, marketing, lead conversion, lead generation, lead conversion, all that sort of steps. This slide really talks about where we are, and it builds on that previous slide where the colors match up, so you can sort of see where each market is. It's never as clean as this slide would suggest. For example, we don't have independent sales in the Baltics, you know, up in the northern part of Europe up here.
U.S. is a bit of a split market where we have a lot of room to grow in rhythmic and urban and Top 40 music. We also have an established presence with country and Christian and alternative music. South Africa is. We'll talk more about what we did there. You know, Northern Europe, Australia, New Zealand are all sort of more on the blocking and tackling stages. Our immediate focus really is to expand our Latin initiatives. We think South Africa is a bit of a stepping stone into Africa generally. We wanna take advantage of these active recipients receiving a lot of content in Europe. How do we get there faster?
You know, I think the first thing I need to say is that establishing a new market takes time. It takes time to educate recipients. It takes time to get the content, and there's really no way around that. I think the reason I'm confident that we can, you know, get that revenue scale up is because we've seen it before, we've done it before. We've experienced everything we're experiencing now. How do we get there faster is, you know, it starts with content. How do we get more content in there faster? We'll talk a little bit about product developments or platform developments later. We get more content from Universal, for example. They tend to be a foot in the door in a lot of markets.
We're working on things like localizing our app. We've localized. When I say localized, we translate it into their local language. We've localized our web player. We wanna do that to the mobile app as well. It's strong business development. We've made some progress there that Glennn will talk about a little later. We've made the Release Creator a little bit more intuitive. We launched that, I think it was in January of 2021. We're working out everything to automate content, getting content in the system quickly and just better marketing. On the recipient side, it's kind of the same process. It's ways to make recipients engage more.
There's a lot of things we've done over the years that make our recipients experience quite good. We tend to invest in that quite a lot, and we're gonna continue that. The next one, lists, is a big one. This one I want to spend a little bit more time on. Lists, we present lists for sale. That's presenting people to independent artists and record labels or even the majors. We present them in 12 countries now, and we have a couple of lists that are more international in scope. This is critical for independent sales. We've undergone some things this year that help our list management department produce those lists faster, more efficiently.
No other competitor really has the international presence that we do. Oftentimes when we enter in a new market, that new market wants to send to international destinations. It's not just with that local market. In this type of sale, you need active recipients, and then you need to tell people who they are. You also need an easy-to-use platform. One of the things we'll be working on this year is, in fiscal 2022, a checkout function. You know, we have a real easy-to-use distribution Release Creator, but we want to have customers check out at the end of it rather than go through a coding system.
One of the things that is probably interesting here is that two-thirds of the users of Play MPE internationally are not on our list, so this is a great opportunity for us. Another thing we're working on in this aspect is facilitating ways for those recipients to become on our list, like getting them to do the work for us. That'll be a little bit further down the road. Commercial agreements. That's really better biz dev, better marketing, customer education about our benefits. Independent sales just goes back to the checkout feature that we're talking about and better marketing. The last thing. How do we get there faster? Part of it is the R&D into new products.
As we get further down the track in improving software development processes, we're able to spend a little bit more time on R&D. We're never short of ideas. The space is evolving all the time. I'll get into it a little bit on the next slide, I think it is, but about what we did this year. We are spending more time exploring what comes next. What we did in fiscal 2021. The first part is investments in the core Play MPE. I talked about the Release Creator. That's a bit more intuitive. That sort of builds on. We did a web Release Creator back in 2018.
In fiscal 2021, we updated it to be a little bit more intuitive, a little bit slicker, more powerful announcement preparation. In the second half of the year, what you see here is the left side nav in the Caster software, that's the distribution software. There's all sorts of components that are within that platform. This year we really focused in on the contacts, the release sharing, and within releases is release scheduling. You know, I would love to spend some time talking about each of these models, modules rather, to tell you all the great things that are within them. I think the biggest takeaway here is that the functionality within these modules, for lack of a better word, is critical for UMG's global agreement.
It's critical to their workflow. Contacts management is very powerful. Again, I'd love to get into the detail of why it's good, but it really helps our list management group manage lists efficiently, and that's why we are able to present as many lists as we can. I mean, that functionality was somewhat in the PC version, but we've added some functionality in a web-based platform that will make it even faster. These pieces of software are very complex in their building, but you know, they result in a very easy-to-use and powerful, flexible platform for our customers.
Release sharing in particular is, well, contacts in particular too, but release sharing is something that's critical for UMG and Warner in Northern Europe uses it as well. With these investments, the implication will be that Universal will expand their usage, or at least that's what the plan is. We've already seen it. You know, this year we've added a lot of increased distributions. You know, Israel is one territory where UMG is added. I think with this, when they move over to the web-based platform completely, they'll be able to expand worldwide. What that does is creates many more opportunities for us to have that foot in the door in new markets. Second thing I hinted at earlier was investment in new technology.
We started the year exploring ways to partner with other providers of airplay monitoring. That's something I think we were thinking at the beginning of the year that we could, you know, partner with them. We thought that that would be a good idea for Play MPE because our customers are asking for this all the time. As the year progressed, we started thinking that maybe we can do it ourselves. We've built a prototype. It's really just at a prototype stage. I know that people will wanna know what the addressable market is. I can tell you that I think it's a very appealing market for us to pursue. It'll be complementary to Play MPE.
One of the things that I think is interesting in this technology is that it doesn't have the same kind of latency in terms of market expansion. Like, Play MPE, you have to invest in a market and build that user base, and then eventually you'll be able to establish commercial relationships and grow it. This won't have that same sort of latency. The reality is it's at a prototype stage, and I don't wanna build up expectations too much because we still have to build out our team to build it, to design and build what we think is a sellable product. That's something we're gonna pursue aggressively. We have the cash to do it. We think we can do it with that cash.
The last thing is this year we added product and design staff. One of the challenges we faced is engineering staff generally. They are a hot commodity, especially in Vancouver. We've expanded our search for that, but also, with added product and design staff, we think we can really leverage what we have more efficiently and produce more. With that, I'll turn it over to Glennn.
Thanks, Fred. Thanks, everyone, for taking some time out of your busy schedule to tune into our presentation today. I think if you'd asked me a year and a half ago if we'd still be battling a global pandemic, I don't think I would have believed you, but here we are. Despite these obvious challenges that the pandemic has thrown at the industry, 2021 represents the fifth consecutive year of revenue growth while we make these investments for larger revenue growth. We believe this growth has been a result of a significant restructuring of our management team and marketing and business development groups over the last couple years, and our continued refocus on our core Play MPE business, which has commenced seeding network use to expand our territories.
In regards to new staffing, you know, in order to nurture and grow our existing markets and facilitate and accelerate our new market acquisitions during the year, we continued to restructure the team. During the year, we added six account reps and supporting staff in the U.S. and Canada for a net gain of four employees. Each of these account executives were carefully chosen for their wealth of music promotion experience in their respective formats and territories. We believe that their in-depth knowledge of the industry and network of contacts help and will continue to expand our engagement with our customers on both sides of the platform. Play MPE has long-standing use in core markets such as Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and of course, the U.S..
Our strategy in these existing markets is to increase marketing efforts to attract and educate new customers, expand distribution opportunities to new types of recipients, and to expand distributions to Play MPE's growing global presence. Over the course of the year, Play MPE's marketing team worked along with the business dev group to focus on new markets. We commenced a series of marketing initiatives that included partnerships with music-related associations and awards, social media posts, blog posts, and advertising. Our marketing team has helped us immensely through a lot more detailed strategy and our lead generation over the year improved a little over 28%. Popping over to revenue. The total revenue for Play MPE for the 12 months ending August 31, 2021 increased by over 9%.
I'd like to highlight that again, that independent record label revenue grew by 23.1% for the year. The majority of this independent music growth is due to an increase in leads within existing territories where Play MPE has well-established use. Also contributing to this growth is independent record label revenue in new territories, as the company has established sufficient use to begin attracting paid use from these newer territories. This includes U.K., Asia, South Africa, and some of the newer genres in the U.S. and Canada.
In terms of territories and areas that we're excited about, the Latin music market, which is large and vibrant, but lacks one well-established system for promotional distribution and discovery of music is an area where we believe our platform's market-leading advantages will result in market acquisition. Our marketing team focused heavily on what we see as a key area of expansion for our platform. Our product website, we've got explanatory videos, Caster and Player software are all now available in Spanish. Back in November of 2020, we hired a senior Latin music industry executive to assist our existing team to expand the reach in the Latin market. Over the course of fiscal 2021, we...
Fiscal 2021, we continued to build on the Latin market usage of Universal Music Group with the addition of seeded content from Warner and Sony, as well as several key independent labels. We're seeing very strong growth in usage. On the recipient side of the platform, our total active users in these markets grew by 130%. Concurrent to the efforts to grow the available content, our operations group began constructing distribution lists throughout key Latin territories. Preliminary experience suggests that well-maintained and accurate recipient lists are critical, not only to independent record labels, but also to the larger, major independents, and the major record labels. In addition to expanding our Latin lists in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, our business development and operations team developed operational lists in 19 additional countries.
I don't need to list them all, but from Argentina to Venezuela, we really spent a lot of time expanding these lists. Moving to South Africa, which is a great example of success in acquiring a new territory. Back in 2020, in fiscal 2020, we added Warner Music South Africa's trial use to the existing use of Warner Music in South Africa. At the end of fiscal 2020, we entered into a reseller agreement in South Africa with Stamp Communications. In August of 2020, we commenced our first independent record label sales in South Africa. I would like to mention that shortly after our 2021 fiscal year-end, we entered into an exclusive two-year agreement with Warner Music in South Africa.
We expect to see similar revenue growth with South African independent record labels and to expand into the Sub-Saharan African market. Perhaps most importantly, we believe as Fred mentioned that the South African market will act as an influential strategic stepping stone to the African market generally. We've already commenced some small distributions and training beyond South African borders. Looking to the U.S., where we've had a long history and strong user base with many music genres, including Christian, country, jazz, non-commercial, college, adult, contemporary, and alternative formats. Over the course of the year, we worked to strengthen our business development team's engagement in these existing markets through strategic hires, refined sales processes, marketing initiatives, pardon me, and product improvements.
Over the course of the year, we secured several multi-year contracts with some strategic and major independent labels. We do have stronger competition than other formats, including urban, rhythmic, and Top 40. It's within these underserved genres where Play MPE can grow substantially within the U.S.. The company is focused on capitalizing on recent investments in the platform, commercial arrangements with major labels in the U.S., and the platform's functionality, as we've discussed. As part of the additions to the business development group during the year, we added a team member with broad promotions and radio experience in these rhythmic, urban, Top 40 formats in early 2021. With our focus on these segments, we have new and increased usage from several major sub-labels and major independent labels in these formats.
The improved flow of content, which is distributed through our platform, has fostered stronger engagements with recipients in the various formats. Just some examples compare the number of active recipients, comparing it to the previous year. Rhythmic, we've got almost 25% more active users. Urban, 23.5%. Top 40, up about 13%. We're gonna continue to focus on these genres, and the focus is also on the independent records business that we'll promote. Moving on to Canada. Back in 2019, the company saw an opportunity to expand into Canada due to the relative strengths of our platform over an established system which operates within the country.
Though we view our system as having numerous competitive advantages, our key Canadian competitor benefits from brand awareness and process inertia. To initially attract users, we focused our business development on garnering major label and major independent content. In Late January 2020, Universal Music Canada commenced distributing all releases within Canada through our platform. By Q3 of 2020, Sony Music Canada had commenced sending significant content through Play MPE. In Q4 of 2021, Warner Music Canada commenced as well. All three major labels are regularly using Play MPE in Canada to varying extents. Late in the year, we onboard a new business development team member within Canada with 17 years of promotions, marketing and project management skills, and he's having worked for major and independent labels as well as broadcast groups within Canada.
We've seen a significant increase in Canadian usage in fiscal 2021. By the end of fiscal 2021, active recipient users in Canada had grown by 52% to over 1,100. Revenue from Canadian labels grew 170%. As the market becomes more aware of Play MPE, recipient reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. The French-Canadian content market subsegment, if you will, lacks similar things. There's no dominant system. Following the brief but successful trial period, Play MPE signed one of the largest distributors of French language content in Canada to a one-year agreement. Thanks to our lists in a variety of global territories, it's very easy for labels to distribute to international recipients. As Canadian record labels become aware of our global presence, labels have commenced distributing to international recipient lists.
We plan to add recipient lists in French-speaking territories due to the demand from French-Canadian artists. As we add new French-speaking territories to our distribution lists, it'll be very easy for a company like a French-Canadian distributor to build it to France, for example. Basically, if you build it, they will come, ultimately. With that, I'll pass it back over to Fred.
Thanks, Glenn. Just before we turn it over to Q&A, I just wanted to sort of summarize what we've talked about today. I think Glenn's done a great job of taking you through the progress we've made in each of our new market initiatives, you know, the block and tackling with existing markets and then how we've gone about acquiring them. Really I wanted to highlight and sort of refocus that we are aligning our product development and our staff development into moving our new market acquisition faster.
The last thing is that, you know, as we move further down, this, the stage of moving new markets on faster, we are also investing more time in, new products that, should come online. With that, I will turn it over to Sean to introduce the Q&A session.
Thank you, Fred. Now we'll begin the question and answer session. Should you have any questions, please raise hand by selecting the hand icon at the bottom of your screen. Your questions will be called in the order they are received, at which point you'll be prompted to unmute your microphone before speaking. Your camera will remain off, and once unmuted, you may ask a question. If you raise your hand, please ensure you have access to a microphone, and should you wish to retract your request to ask a question, you may select the hand icon again to lower your hand. One moment for your first question. Your first question comes from Gerry Wimmer. Please go ahead once you've unmuted your microphone.
Hello, Fred.
Hi, Gerry.
Hey, how's it going?
Good.
Congratulations on a good year to you and your team.
Thank you. I think we've accomplished a lot. It's been a very busy year, I can tell you that.
Yeah. First question, just going back, historically to the financials that you just reported. One thing that jumps out is the revenue growth in Q4 as being flat. You know, the 9% over the year. Is there something specific in Q4 that would have resulted in a flat quarter?
Well, good question. I think there's— We had Q4 in fiscal 2020 was a particularly good one. You'll see the comparative as strong. You still see some progress. I don't have it in front of me, but you still see some progress in well, various territories. We do see a bit of a negative impact from a reduction in Sony revenue in Australia, but otherwise I think it's just a strong quarter that has a tough comparison. You know, the real long-term growth is yet to come.
Great. Second question. Moving forward on your three spend buckets, technology, marketing, consumer marketing and admin, as a percentage of sales, say going forward this year, are the percentages gonna be the same as last year? Or do you see some deviation from those spend buckets?
That's a good question. Well, look, admin would be, there's nothing that would grow with admin. In fact, I would suspect that overall is gonna decline. We are investing in growth. You see a lot. We've hired a net two account executives and two support staff in biz dev. Is that-
That's correct. Yeah. So.
Okay.
Yeah.
The investments there are growing, and that's really a focus in on growth. R&D and software development, there's a certain amount of maintenance and a certain amount that is all designed to grow the business. We grow that business by adding things to the software platform that will provide revenue in and of itself. There's a couple of things in there that we think will be chargeable as a service. Things that will help our biz dev convert sales to clients. Just nice to have improvements to the platform, additional functionality, whatever it is. In terms of those buckets, you know, it's.
I don't know off the top of my head what the ratios are, but you know, we're essentially trying to bake more cakes and you know, we're adding eggs and you know, flour, whatever else goes into a cake. But it you know, so that we're growing expenses to you know, ultimately lead to improved revenue.
As somebody modeling or looking at it, would the percentage, combined percentage of those three buckets be increasing at a slightly higher rate than the increase in sales or stable, or how would somebody look at that?
Well, sorry. I think the three buckets you said were admin, sales and marketing, and product.
Yeah, R&D. Yes.
Okay.
As a percentage of sales.
As a percentage of sales. Well, admin would decline as a percentage of sales. I mean, admin is admin, and I think overall costs are likely to decline. So as revenue grows, that is even a sharper decline in terms of its proportion of sales. I think in the very near term, both development and marketing and biz dev costs are gonna grow as a percentage of sales. I don't have the split. I'll add that a little bit later and get more details on that. We're really just trying to grow. When you talk about R&D, you really have probably three different types of things. There's one that is maybe four.
There's one that is just really maintenance of the existing software. It's improvements to the software in the sense that, you know, upgrading programming languages or fixing certain things or whatever. There's R&D that is really, truly R&D. It's stuff exploring things for new products or new processes that are truly new. There's another bucket which would be adding functionality to the Caster or to provide new services.
Great. Thanks. Two other questions. First of all, how should somebody view you talk about the exclusivity agreement that you got with Warner Music South Africa. From investor standpoint, what's the Can you put a ballpark figure what that means in net revenue generation, say, in that market for your company annually?
It's a small, you know, if it was a material agreement, we would press release it in the sense of it being a big revenue generator.
Mm-hmm.
I don't know. I think it's about like 0.3% to our average or something like this.
Okay.
Don't quote me on that. I'm just roughly. It's small. I think it's more, the impact is more interesting in the sense that I think it gives us a foothold into Africa generally. Certainly what you've seen in the past with independent sales in the U.S., for example, you know, you have this network of use, and we've grown independent revenue in the U.S. by 9% year-over-year for 12 years or something like that. If you add more, if you go back further, it's higher percentages because, you know, you have that initial really steep curve. We hope to see that same sort of growth within South Africa. It's an interesting.
It's a little market, but it's an interesting one that I think in the sense that it's a foothold into Africa. I think Glenn touched on this a little bit, but there's no provider of this service that I think has the same kind of global presence as we do, and certainly not when you consider curated lists. Knowing who to contact in a foreign territory, for example, is a valuable commodity that we provide. We are working towards things that will allow us to provide more lists in more territories.
We think that kind of snowballs or just results in exponential growth because you'll get South African indies that wanna hit the U.S. market, or you'll wanna get Australian indies that wanna hit the South African market or those kinds of things. If you look at our releases generally, about 15% of them are more international, and I don't think any other provider of this kind of service is providing that. We think that as we grow and we acquire a new territory, you will see interesting growth. Like, for example, our Latin growth, we're very happy with the way it's going. We're starting to generate lists in those territories.
That's gonna take some time, but that's lists that are valuable to Latin music, but it's also I guess what they would call Anglo music. It's interesting for Anglo music going into South America. You know, Justin Bieber is popular in South America as well, you know. That kind of those kind international distributions are interesting. Sorry, that's a long-winded way of answering your question.
Just, you touched at the beginning of your presentation on kind of the big picture. You talked about, you know, growth rate you had, 22% over the last four years. You know, kind of between 5%-10% annually. You also talked about getting, you know, $5 million-$50 million in five years. Shouldn't the, and maybe it's, you know, it's a question for your board too. You know, the company has a pretty small revenue base. We're a public company. It's a small revenue base for a public company to attract attention or to build currency in your stock price. Should the company be thinking a little bigger, a little differently? Maybe you shouldn't be a public company.
Because $50 million over five years is still a very small public company, and it's pretty hard to generate currency in your stock price, you know, on even 50 million revenue base. Can you just provide me a little viewpoint of, you know, you and the board on the sense of being public at this size?
It's not something that we, you know, think, you know, something we talk about, but I think inherent in the question is Play MPE. I gave the $50 million as a, you know, a place marker. I don't know where we'll be. What I would want to emphasize is that Play MPE is a really interesting and good little business. It's a niche business. It's a B2B business in the music industry. I think it's a. You know, our focus over the last few years was really to shore up the platform, shore up our staffing, make sure we're going in the right direction. We think we can start growing that business more programmatically. From that, we think we can add revenue streams.
I think Play MPE is a really nice business in the sense that it's high margins and it's probably has I guess what I would say is an outsized importance in the music industry that is that I think what that means is really that we're more important than our revenue would suggest. Which I think begs the question how do we change that? We are exploring ways to do that. It is a nice business that we think we can really layer on things to it. You know, whether or not we should be public, why not?
You know, it does take some of my time to do calls like this. I do investor relations and that sort of thing, but the costs aren't that significant, and it gives a lot of opportunities for people to invest in a pretty cool business.
Yeah, I think my point is that you need to build currency in your stock price in order to leverage that currency to grow bigger. It's at current growth rate, it's tough to do for a microcap company. I think, you know, the stock kind of reflects a steady state valuation, you know, give or take. You know, I know it's not that liquid. That's the point.
Well-
I think you guys should think bigger if you wanna be public and use the stock as currency. That's the point. I think you have a good business. It's small. Small public companies will remain small public companies on the market capitalization. That's the reality. Despite some of the good things you guys are doing.
Yeah. Well, okay. I don't wanna harp on it too much. I would beg to differ on it. I get what you're saying. I do think that as we grow revenue, even in the context of the Play B business by itself, a growing revenue base, especially with what we hope to do, will create some interest in the stock that will drive. You know, we had a pretty good year in terms of our trading, our volume. You know, if you look at the last couple of months, maybe not so much. Generally, I think our volume is pretty good. I think we.
You know, adding David Mosberg to the board is something that we are looking more proactively on generating interest in the stock. I really do believe we do have an outsized importance in the industry, and I think that in itself, as we look at more creative ways to invest in investor relations, that it'll generate some interest.
Okay. No, fair enough. I'm just. My point is, you always have to attract another generation of investors.
Yep.
-ideally going to you-
I agree.
other than retail investors. It's difficult to do when you remain.
Well, I think.
Small in market capitalization.
I think that's true. I think the old way of doing IR is maybe not the best way to do it. I think we're looking at creative ways to generate some interest. You saw all sorts of interesting things have happened over the last year with stocks and trading, and I think we'll be smarter about our IR initiatives.
Okay. Finally, is the buyback still in place? Was that renewed or not? I can't recall.
It was renewed in January, I believe. I'd have to check the dates exactly, but it's effective for a year, and that means it's still effective now. It is effective now. I know that.
You plan to renew it or that's not known yet?
We haven't. I haven't broached it with the board, and we'll think about it. I do think, you know, I'm gonna get some flak for this, but I think we're undervalued, you know. When we do have uses, I think, you know, in terms of your earlier comment about the size of the business, I think if we add these layers of business on, we'll generate a lot of interest, I think. It takes time. It'll take time to build out these things, but we wanna use that cash to do that as well.
Okay. Thank you, Fred, for answering my questions. I appreciate it.
Just while we're waiting for the next question, if there is a next one. The one thing I have been asked this morning is the status of the Universal agreement. The term expires at the end of December. We're looking at extending that with them. We have a certain strategy behind that. There's nothing in anything I've ever seen that would suggest that there's anything but a successful renewal. What that looks like is a different question, but we're working towards that.
Great. Thanks. I'd just like to remind everyone that if you do have a question, you can submit your question by hitting the Raise Hand icon at the bottom of your screen and unmuting your microphone afterwards. If there's any more questions, please select the Raise Hand button at the bottom of your screen.
I'll address another question I got this morning. What's the size of the LATAM market? You know, that's one of the ones that I think is pretty exciting for us. When I talk about the addressable market size for Plan B, we say $40 million. We kind of arrive at that in a bottom-up approach. We split up the market based on territories, and we think that very conservatively that would exceed our current revenue. That's just the Latin market alone. You know, as we've progressed further into it, we are starting to see that that might be very conservative. It's a market that we're building out.
In terms of market share, it's. We can't really say what percentage we have because we haven't commercialized it yet. But we have Universal distributing in various territories. We have Warner distributing in, I'm not actually sure how many territories. It's throughout South America, Spain, the Caribbean, and the U.S. itself, and Central America. A lot of independents. I think we've got a number of releases and we're starting to build up that activity in those lists. It's really a market under construction, but it's one that's very exciting for us.
Okay. It doesn't appear there are any more questions submitted at this time. Oh, we have one more question here from Lawrence Goldstein. Go ahead, Lawrence.
Larry, you're on mute.
You may need to unmute your microphone.
Yes. I'd just like to comment on an earlier questioner and your response. I don't know what any shareholder wants in the way of promotion. Destiny's stock is only up 69.5% this year. What do they want? 690%? I would not like to see you spend one cent on investor relations. I think you should just go about keeping your nose to the grindstone and continue to do what you're doing, which is to build the company. I am a shareholder. My firm is a shareholder, possibly one of the larger ones. I think you should pay no heed to shareholders who want you to do promotion because 69%, 69.5% year to date as of November 23 is not bad. Thank you.
Thanks, Larry. I'm sure we'll all take note of that. The reality is that we've really been focusing on the business and we
Excuse me. Excuse me. I just wanted to be on record because.
Yeah.
Some shareholder made a big to-do out of it.
Yeah.
That gentleman should know another shareholder's view. You know, there's nothing more you need to say to me about it. Thank you.
Yeah. No, appreciate that. Okay.
We do have some more questions here.
Oh, okay. Thank you.
Your next question is from Craig Johnson. So please go ahead, operate your microphone.
Okay. Thank you. Can you hear me okay?
We can, yeah.
Okay. You've said that your independent revenue is about the same as it is for the major labels. It's going up quite quickly, but overall your revenue is going up a lot slower. I'm wondering what the reason is for the major labels. It seems like they're declining. Will that decline stop at some point so that the independent label revenue will shine through?
Well, that's a good question. I think that's a hard one to answer holistically in general. I think major label revenue will go up. When we sell into different territories, what you see is independent labels that their revenue comes second, typically. Certainly the use comes second as we build up recipient lists. I think that independent label revenue will be a very interesting place to grow, and I think it'll continue to see high growth rates. I do think you will see growth in major label revenue as we add services, as we add territories. I can understand you've seen a decline or at least a leveling off recently.
As we add, you know, for example, Warner South Africa, or hopefully a Warner Central and South America as we build out that market, which I think would be a much larger contract. Generally I think we'll see independent revenue is going to be really interesting to see as we add new territories and you see that cross-border international appeal to Plan B. I think the more we expand, the more that cross-border label revenue will be.
Okay. You would say that. Look, it seems as if, just based solely on the percentages, it seems as though the major label revenue is going down, or at least recently. Would you say that's leveled off now? That's my question.
Yeah. I would say I wouldn't expect it to decline if that's what you're really asking. I think it'll grow. It might stay level for a little bit of time, you know, but you know, and you'll still see a steeper growth in independents, but we will add territories, and so you'll get a step-up in major label revenue as we do that.
Okay, thanks. That was my question.
Okay, thank you. We do have some additional questions, Fred.
Sure.
We have another additional question from Gerry Wimmer. Gerry, go ahead, once you unmute your microphone.
Fred?
Yeah. Can you hear me?
Further to our previous caller's point, my point was not spending on investor relations. My point was growing the company in order on its market cap, on its business, in order to attract next-generation investors. Two very different things.
Okay. I don't want to get into it with you guys. You know. You know, I get the point, but I think we.
I just want you to understand where I'm coming from.
Yeah, I understand. All right.
Okay. Thank you.
Thanks, Gerry.
We do have one more additional question if there's time. An additional question from Lawrence Goldstein.
Yeah. All right.
Please go ahead once you've unmuted your microphone.
Larry, you gotta unmute. There you go.
Oh, no. I didn't have one.
Larry?
Oh, I don't have a question. I thought you were inviting me to unmute.
Oh, sorry. I thought you had a question. Okay. I think we'll stop it there. Thanks everyone for joining the call. I hope that was a good presentation for you to learn about our strategy and I think we've had a very successful year. Thanks again.
Okay. That concludes the webinar today. Thanks for joining us today, everyone.