Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us on today's webinar. Before we begin, I'd like to announce that we'll be referring to today's earnings call or today's earnings release, sorry, which was sent to the Newswire earlier this afternoon. I'd also like to remind everyone that this conference 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 re-results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements. Such risks are fully discussed in the company's filings with the SEC on SEDAR, and the company does not assume any obligation to update information contained in this call. During the webinar, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures.
The non-GAAP financial measures are presented in the supplemental disclosures and should not be considered in isolation of, or as a substitute of, or superior to financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP and should be read in conjunction with the company's financial statements filed with the SEC on 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. I'd like to mention that following the presentation, there will be a question and answer session during which you can submit questions by selecting the Raise Hand icon at the bottom of your screen.
Your questions will be called in the order that they are received and at which point you'll be prompted to unmute your microphone before speaking. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to your host, Fred Vandenberg, Chief Executive Officer.
Good afternoon, everyone. Today we have myself, Fred Vandenberg, and Allan Benedict, who leads our business development group and marketing group. We're gonna follow the same format that we have in the past. We'll start off with our financial results, then I'll turn it over to Allan, who'll talk about business development, and then I'll come back and talk about looking forward. Revenue for the quarter increased by a little. As we discussed previously, we had made some price adjustments and started building out our international lists. This in combination with the recovery of our independent label led to the overall increase of 7%. While the euro is recovering, it's still relatively low to the US dollar compared to the prior year.
We're almost flat for the quarter. Expenditures are down 20%. As we've talked about in the past, we started capitalizing software development costs in the prior period, and we've just continued to grow that investment. Expenditures, if you ignore the capitalization or add the capitalized costs to our total expenditures for both periods, our costs did fall by still 5%. That 5% really is fully explained by the foreign exchange as the US dollar has strengthened relative to the euro and to the Canadian dollar, which the majority of our expenses are in. EBITDA for the quarter is $64k.
If we adjust the EBITDA for the capitalized costs, we've turned what was a loss of about $191K in the prior quarter to a loss of about $137K. For the year, you know, because Q2 is our seasonal lowest quarter, in terms of revenue, it's pretty much flat for the year to date. With that, I'll turn it over to Allan.
Thank you, Fred. Good afternoon, everyone. Last quarter, I had talked about the trend we were seeing with the independent revenue, specifically among artists and small independent labels. Just as a refresher, independent revenue in terms of our numbers is anything from a client that is not associated with 1 of the major labels, those being Universal, Warner and Sony. The decline we were seeing was isolated to individual artists and small shops or management companies or labels that might have a roster of 1 or 2 artists and are off cycle more than they're on cycle. As we thought with the industry stabilizing more and more after COVID, things are turning a little bit more to normal, streaming opening up as well. We are seeing a rebound in the independent space.
Specifically, we saw this rebound really start to pick up steam late in the quarter, which, as Fred mentioned a moment ago, it falls in line with the usual ebb and flow when you factor in things like Christmas and the beginning of the year and that. For the quarter, independent revenue is essentially level with what we saw in 2022. Isolating February, globally, the independent revenue increased by nearly 8% for the month. If we narrow that down to U.S. only independents, we saw a 20% increase compared to February of 2022. There's sure to be some ebb and flow with the independents throughout the rest of the year.
As we go into the summer months, things like new tours and festivals will start up and we'll see a little up and down. We expect this rebound to continue and especially with our focus on enhancing the products that Fred mentioned earlier, and he'll talk about a little more in a bit. Also at the beginning of this call, Fred mentioned the creation of more international lists and I wanted to dig a little deeper into that. We've talked in the past about revenue being the result of more releases being sent to more people.
A common question we hear from users and clients, especially in the artist segment, is how they can grow beyond their home territory and what the best way to tackle this is. We wanted to address this and began working with our list management team on creating international bundles of lists so that we can offer a package to help clients cover as much ground as possible, as easily as possible. For example, if I'm an artist putting out a country single and I wanna make sure I'm getting maximum exposure, utilizing international country bundle will deliver my release to every recipient in Play MPE's global network that is looking for country content, regardless of where they're located or which type of radio station or media company or anything like that they work for.
In November of last year, we launched with nine international genre bundles, and we just recently added our 10th, which is one I'm particularly excited for. They bundle that targets all non-commercial public and community radio programmers globally. We often get asked on how to reach things like CBC and NPR and BBC, this international bundle is gonna be a way for artists to easily kind of solve that problem. The response and feedback from clients so far has been very good. Really excited about additional bundles we can offer in the future. Our goal for this year is to learn even more about our recipients and grow these offerings to make sure that they're getting the content they need and our artists and labels and users have an outlet for whatever they're trying to put out.
Speaking of international growth, I wanted to update you quickly on our progress in the Latin space. Growing in this segment has been a priority for us, I know we've discussed it pretty regularly on these calls in the past, we're seeing that growth come about more and more. Last quarter, we spoke about focusing on Mexico as our lead territory in the region, the first step there has been expanding our network of recipients. Once they're expanding, making sure they're active within the platform.
Similarly to how we've grown in other territories, it's a little bit of a chicken and the egg situation where we wanna encourage new and existing clients to send their content to these lists, but we need to make sure there's activity on the recipient side to deliver value for our clients and keep that content coming through. We were able to grow active recipients in the Latin space by 13% this quarter. One thing to keep in mind while looking at active user growth is that a product like Play MPE is still a relatively new concept to a lot of radio programmers in the Latin market. This requires a little bit more of an education process than some other territories would, and that leads to a slightly longer onboarding process.
With recipients growing and becoming more active, we're now working to make sure more and more content is being delivered and that our existing clients and new clients there are knowing that lists are there for them and that they're utilizing them as much as any other. One last point I wanted to highlight is the revenue growth we've seen from Warner Music Group. For the quarter, US revenue from Warner was up more than 40% from the prior year, and that's thanks to increased usage from some of Warner's subsidiary labels like Atlantic Records, Rhino Entertainment, and also a large quarter from Warner Music Nashville. On a global scale, the Warner offices in Norway, New Zealand, South Africa are all increasing their usage as well.
As we discuss things like global efficiencies that Play MPE can offer, we're seeing more and more Warner associated labels and territory offices utilizing the platform. It gives us a great opportunity to connect some of those dots and become an even larger part of their global workflow moving forward. When we start to think about things like global workflows and how we can improve the product to meet those needs, it comes back to the overall strategy that Fred mentioned in the past. I'll pass it back over to him now to discuss that in a little bit more detail and talk about moving forward.
Thanks, Allan. Looking forward, this probably is nothing new to longer term investors, but our focus really is in investing in the product, platform development. That really is in three different ways. One way is to increase our sales, increase the lead conversion. Another is to add selectable new features that are more in the true SaaS sense of revenue, where we have monthly recurring revenue. Then the last is distinct product. Sometimes there's a little bit of overlap in these last two things, but sometimes it's a clear distinct product that can stand on its own.
With that, you know, one of the things you've seen in our expenses probably in the 10-Q is a little bit of a shift from sales and marketing to platform development, product development. In some ways, we'll let the platform do the lifting for us in terms of marketing and business development. With that, I don't wanna talk too much about what's happening in the near future because you'll see some press releases come out in the very short term. We have one new feature that is launched and is in beta testing. This is one of those features that will be a true SaaS feature, but we expect it to be two things.
1, there will be a free version that is limited in its use. We expect that to help attract users into Play MPE generally. There will be a premium version of it that we hope to sell as a subscribable feature. I think I just invented a new word there. We've also soft launched our monitoring service. Again, I don't want to talk too much about it because there'll be a press release coming out. This is a separate and distinct product. Albeit with a great deal of overlap with our existing customers and actually our recipients on the recipient side as well. We've received some questions throughout the day, and I've hopefully answered some of them as we go. I want to preempt 1 of them.
It is really a question about full service versus self-service revenue. Full service is where our team prepares a release and sends it out, and where self-service is where we're just really providing the platform, and the customer has full control over the distribution. The implication of with the question is really a question about margins. Intuitively, that makes sense because if we're doing the work, the margins won't be as strong. I would say that's generally true. You probably need to carve out Universal when you're talking about that. Generally 2/3 of our revenue is self-serve. Again, when you carve out Universal, that ratio flips where then 2/3 of it becomes full service revenue.
The question really is how we're making progress on moving people over to self-serve so our margins become a little bit stronger. I don't think this is generally how I would look at it. I think there's a few things that we probably need to do to move customers over to a more self-serve. 1 is the easy to use lead creator. I think we're there, and we've talked about that in the past. 1 is easily selectable lists with good descriptions of them. We've actually been working on that, and I think we'll be releasing that imminently. The other 2 things are a self-sign up and self-checkout. That's where you can pay within the platform. You decode yourself and pay with a credit card.
Those things are on our product roadmap yet. If we're really looking at this ratio of self-serve to full-serve customers, I think it's really a question of growth. We would like to move people over to more self-serve to grow those margins. I think the focus here really is one of how its impact will be on growth and how quickly we'll accelerate revenue. Some of you will see that we made a change in leadership in the quarter in that department, that's really to help get things across the line. We can move them over the line and get them delivered. I think you'll start to see a real palpable increase in the cadence of press releases in that regard.
I think there'll be a greater alignment of product priorities with the company's priorities. When we look at product development, we really assess the return, you know, on a quantum of how it will impact the financial performance of the company, the probability that that impact will come true, and then we prioritize on that. If there's a delay, typically there's a delay in our investment and the return. That does vary depending on the product feature. You'll see over the last several years, our investments have been really heavily centered on our global infrastructure. Those are all the global distribution features that provide significant economies of scale and some efficiencies that are really focused on benefiting Universal's distribution process.
Now I think you'll see things will start to toggle over to revenue. With that, I will turn it over to Q&A. Actually, before I switch it over to Rebecca, we did have one question that I'll address. That was with respect to the litigation with the former CEO. The former CEO was terminated now almost six years ago, and that case is still pending. It's been delayed now for the fifth time, just we were scheduled to go to trial next month. It's delayed again by from the litigant. I think there's probably good reasons why he wants to keep delaying and ultimately...
It's not a distraction for the company, so it's a bit of a who cares, and we'll just, we'll evaluate what we do with it, over the next little while. With that, I will turn it over to Kathy.
Thank you, Fred. I'm Kathy Allen. Yeah. Now we'll have our question and answer session. If you do have a question, please press the Raise Hand option at the bottom of your screen, and then your questions will be called in the order that we've received them. Just make sure as you are raising your hand that you have access to a microphone. Once we call your name, then, you can unmute your microphone before speaking. Your camera will remain off. Yeah, if you've got a question, please raise your hand. Okay, maybe we don't have any questions today. We actually do, sorry, have a written-in question. Fred, if you want to address that one, I can read it out. How has Canada performed in terms of usage/revenue?
That's the question in the question and answer box.
Allan, do you know that off the top of your head? I think it's, we've generally been making progress, but, let me I'll turn that one over to you.
Yeah. As far as numbers of releases and numbers of distributions, I would have to grab that info at a later time. Overall in Canada, prior to really breaking in or breaking out distribution with by format in Canada, we saw a lot of Canadian clients sending outside of Canada, sending to other lists, and looking at it more outward than inward. Over the last year or so, we've put a big focus on trying to capture that within Canada distribution. We have made progress there. With major labels in Canada, it is a slower-moving transition. It's, as you've probably seen in some other territories, it's tough to get a large multinational to change something they've been doing for a long time.
We've found more success targeting independent artists and some of the independent promoters. Without going into too much details about them, we've arranged exclusive agreements with a few different independent promoters, one of them being With A Bullet, whose usage continues to skyrocket, and we're treating them as kind of champions in the market. They're recommending us to other artists, they're recommending us to labels that hire out on them. We are making progress there. It's a slower process than I'm sure we would like, but we are seeing more of those independent promoters and more of those independent artists come to us for their needs, not only going internationally but within Canada as well.
Yeah, I wanna probably add a little flavor to it, like, in general, how we approach it. When it comes to a market like Canada, we're trying to displace a what was an entrenched competitor. Now, we do things... We, we're very confident that our platform is quite a bit better, the question is, how do you, how do you... what's the balance? What's the tradeoff? Are the ease of use features, you know, the improvements in this, all the features that make us better, are they enough to tumble over a platform that's been in use for quite a long time? That's what we're trying to do, and we've been successful to date, maybe not as fast as we would like.
If, when we are investing in product, I think we will continue to invest in things that will help in this context. They'll help, this will be a catalyst for sale. Certain things will be a catalyst for sale. Certain things will provide new products and services to customers that, you know, may-maybe make it easier to have one service providing two different things that they need. We think that we're, you know, we're quite a bit larger than the Canadian competitor in terms of this segment, and we invest a lot more, and we think that eventually will win the day.
Okay, great. I don't think that there is any other questions.
Okay. Thanks, everyone. A quick call today. We'll see you in a few months.
Goodbye.