Webinar. Before we begin, I'd like to announce that we will be referring to today's earnings release, which was sent to the newswires earlier this afternoon. I'd also like to remind everybody that the 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 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 the 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 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. Also, I'd like to mention that following the presentation, there will be a questions and answer session, during which you can submit questions by selecting the Raise Hand icon at the bottom of your screen.
Your question will be pulled in the order that they're received, and at which point you'll be prompted to unmute your microphone before speaking. With all of that, I would like to turn the call over to your host, Fred Vandenberg, Chief Executive Officer.
Thanks, Rebecca. Today we have myself, Fred Vandenberg, I'm the CEO, and Allan Benedict, Head of Biz Dev. Today we're going to talk about four main things. So just an overview of what we're trying to do. I'll introduce some financial results, then I'll turn it over to Allan for a more in-depth talk about our business development activities. Then I'll come back and talk about our product reviews. Our vision, you know, our core expertise lies in technology around music marketing. We envision expanding our range of products and services to directly support artists in these endeavors. Together with our customers, we'll be redefining the music marketing landscape. I think we've already done that.
You know, when we started, Play MPE was, you know, first to market digital distribution platform that displaced physical delivery of CDs. And I think we intend to continue that process now. We envision providing innovative marketing and music management solutions that both ensure both our customers and our Investors' interests are well served, and we drive profitable growth. Play MPE is our core business. It's a platform that is designed to deliver music for marketing purposes. We have developed a very well-respected service in our core markets and forms a cornerstone from which we can expand. We have a solid core group of customers and a solid core of recipients.
Now, I say that with a little bit of a caveat with the recipients, because the recipients, there's a, an appreciable amount of turnover, and so making an effective marketing distribution of effective requires that we address that high turnover rate. This is really one of our keys to success, and it's one of our the value that we provide our customers. In fact, you know, our Play MPE distribution lists, the, you know, the people that we engage with are about four times, almost four times as likely to have an interaction with a release than, you know, our largest customer in the United States. A few years ago, we undertook a massive project to move all of our international capabilities off from a PC-based platform to an online platform.
And then about mid-fiscal 2022, we moved that into a maintenance mode, and so we opened some capacity to do the things that we think are going to increase the revenue curve, to accelerate revenue. Our core strategy or the thing that we think is going to make a difference is investment into our into product, be it new products and services or things that will help us help biz dev grow, grow revenue. So entering 2023, you know, about six months after this movement of staff into a maintenance mode on the on the international features, we had a few things that that we needed to address. Allan will talk about the the marketing aspects, and he'll highlight what what we've done there.
And I'll just introduce product. Essentially what we needed to do when we entered 2023 is make sure we have a solid product roadmap, make sure we're executing on that product roadmap, make sure that we have a solid marketing plan, make sure we're executing on that marketing plan, and making sure that those two things are those two functions are coordinated. So in addressing product, we appointed Rocio Fernandez as a new Product Development Manager, new Director of Product Management, I should say, about mid-year. And the addition of Ro to our team had a palpable an immediate impact. It's perhaps a little bit hard to say immediate because you just can't turn that on a dime.
But, you know, Sergei is our head of engineering, and he's built a, you know, solid engineering team, but we needed, you know, that engine needed a steering wheel. And so I'll talk a little bit later about the product reviews, but, we in terms of our Product Development Investments we made in the second half of the year, we began on a project that is meant to allow our customers to fully self-serve, to create an account, select lists, and pay in platform, get a quote, pay in platform. And that's a larger project that won't be completed until approximately this time next year. But there's little components, maybe not little, but there's components of it that we're delivering as we go that do make an improvement to the platform.
The first one is list selection improvements. Now, this is really an ability for our customers to see what's available, select it, to see what's what the list is, what music goes to it, to save favorites, those kinds of things. Basically, it's just an improvement in the list selection process that is designed to increase the sales of our lists. Sorry about that. Then, we also added. I'm gonna be a little bit mysterious here, but there's a list creation and list maintenance feature that we've added. Now, earlier, I said that our lists are four times as active as our largest customer, but it's really something we're quite proud of. We do a very good job of maintaining recipient lists, and that's critical.
It's critical for our sales, for many of our customers, and it's a, it's a value add for all of our customers. But we added something in the latter half of Q3 that helps us build and maintain lists, and our goal there is to, you know, to have more things to sell, essentially. And, you know, the more things you have to sell, the your revenue is gonna grow. We added probably about, depends on how you measure it, but about 5% to our list capacity in the months since then. At the beginning of the year, actually, this is something that happened at the beginning of the year, not in the latter half, but Allan will talk about it a little bit in a bit more detail, but we added international lists.
We are unique in the sense that, you know, Play MPE is still a it's still probably between 5% and 10% of the global market for this business, so I think we have a lot of room to grow. But we're also, I believe, the largest supplier of this service. And so what makes us a little unique is that when we go into a particular market, that those customers in that market have the ability to sell out, to distribute their music outside of that market with us. You know, absent like a competing service just wouldn't have that capacity. So what we did at the beginning of the year is add, take our lists that we had for each individual territory and make genre-specific lists. Again, I'll let Allan.
I don't want to steal too much of Allan's thunder. Later in the Q4, we started on two different new things in product development. The first one is recipient-sourced content requests. That's probably not how product would describe it, but one of the best ways for Play MPE to grow is by the recipients requesting content through Play MPE. Now, you see that in the United States, our independent revenue has grown by about an average of 9% every year-over-year for the last more than a decade, twelve years, probably. And that's really because of word of mouth, a lot of times our recipients are saying, "Just send it to me through Play MPE." Well, now we have an in-platform ability for customers to do that.
Now, this is kind of the first step into a fully functioning recipient-sourced content request, but this should toggle revenue. That wasn't delivered until after year-end, just recently, but we started working on it during the year. Same with client marketing. We added this feature just recently, but in Q1 of fiscal 2024. But this is, this is we updated our charting displays and made it easier, much easier for clients to post images of where they sit on the chart. You'll see that clients are quite happy with when they are charting on Play MPE, like the top 10 downloads in Australia for country or something like this. And so we're hopeful that this allows our clients to do the marketing for us.
Okay, so the last one, this is the, this is the thing that we're probably most excited about. This is Meter. MTR, Meter, is a standalone business. Now, I posted something on my personal LinkedIn, it's also on the website, but it's a link to an article that was written about us recently that does a fairly good job of explaining what Play MPE does and why Meter is now a thing. But we launched Meter in beta, later half of Q4. And what it is, Meter is a digital tracking service. So it, you know, you send your song through Play MPE, you wanna get it played on the radio, Meter will help track that. We'll actually show you when it's played, where it's played, that sort of thing.
We've soft launched it earlier in the year, beta launched it mid-Q4, and we're working through market adoption, marketing, break-even analysis, and we're just figuring out the business plan for it, basically. But it's a really interesting business that our initial customers we're gonna market to, to the Play MPE customers. Okay, so I'll take you through the financial results. For the year, currency-adjusted revenue is up just under 2%. It's really well, and again, we'll tell you a little bit more in depth about what happened with our revenue. But in Q1 and Q2, revenue was down 5.5%.
Part of that was foreign exchange, unfavorable exchange rates, which didn't exist, that didn't exist in the second half of the year. And some volume decreases, but again, now and we'll take you a little bit more through that. But a number of things have taken hold in the second half of the year to result in a little bit more than a 6% increase in revenue. I mean, these, these aren't the growth rates that we're hoping to target, but it does indicate some positive returns on the various investments we're making, whether it's in marketing, lead generation, or product, where you'll see improved list selection features, all these, these kinds of things.
Overall, salaries and wages, you know, it's the largest expense by far. It was consistent versus last year. Part of that is favorable exchange rates on the expenses, as the U.S. dollar rose relative to the Canadian Dollar, where most of our staff is. But there has been some changes. There was approximately a 30% increase in product development, and that's just a fully functioning product team to move out MTR, to build and move out MTR, Meter, and to continue to invest in our product, offset by some temporary declines in biz dev staff. Some declines in operations because it was a little bit higher in the prior year, and then some temporary declines in general administrative staff.
The one thing I did want to highlight, and this is in our 10-K, our annual filing, but net income for the year was just a little over $300,000. We wanted to show this chart to show what would have happened had none of the software development costs, if none of them were capitalized. And this just shows you that we're, there's a small negative income. There's some non-cash expenses in there, like stock-based compensation, that sort of thing. And so we're investing for growth. That's where we are. So with that, I will turn it over to Allan.
Thank you, Fred. Good afternoon, everyone. As Fred mentioned, as we started to undertake those product improvements in the product development, we did implement a few things meant to increase revenue in the meantime. One of those, which Fred also already alluded to, is the international genre list that we launched early on in the fiscal year. These lists were created using mainly existing recipients. Our Operations Team was able to build these out relatively quickly, and these genre lists were put in place to answer a desire from independent artists to expand their reach globally and much more easily. So we began with eight individual international genre lists.
About midway through the fiscal year, I'd say, we added an international, non-commercial, and community targeted list that is really to serve where a lot of radio begins playing more of the independent, smaller artists, these, these community stations and the non-commercial versions. That's quickly become one of our most popular lists, and the usage of these lists not only really picked up in the second half of the fiscal year, but at the end of the year, we also added a new international holiday list, which has so far been a big hit as we move towards the holiday season. With these international lists, they've contributed to the average sale or the average revenue generated per release. That's risen consistently quarter-over-quarter throughout the fiscal year.
The specific impact here is a little difficult to carve out, but we also implemented pricing changes to a select number of our most popular packages. These changes had a positive impact of about 4%. This impact is offset to some degree by the volume declines that Fred had mentioned, and then, of course, the negative FX. Speaking of the volume declines, there are a few reasons for those declines. There are temporary economic conditions in certain markets, especially for independent clients who need to watch their budgets a little more. For instance, some of the territories have been slower to recover coming out of the pandemic as well. A good example of this is Australia, which was one market that was pretty severely affected by COVID.
I think their lockdowns and the kind of shutdown of their industry lasted longer than a lot of others. But looking at the second half of this past fiscal year, both the volume and revenue has rebounded. We also had a temporary reduction in staffing on the Business Development T eam, and we really moved to undertake a hiring process that made sure we had the right people with the right skill sets focused on the right markets. I'll touch on that a bit more in a moment, but the team was fully settled and fully staffed by the end of the fiscal year. These volume declines were not connected to our pricing increases, as segments in which we saw volume declines were disconnected from those increases, so there isn't the connection there.
As I mentioned, we've seen volume rebound in the second half of the year. Moving from that, I wanted to go over kind of our overall acquisition strategy. Our strategy itself is universal, but we obviously utilize different tactics depending on what stage each market is in. To put it simply, new recipients need relevant and desirable content to become and remain engaged, and then new senders or new clients need to have those engaged recipients in order to see the value of delivering their releases and really putting Plan B to use. In new markets or just markets earlier in that customer journey, this leads to a longer education process, where we work with strategic clients, making sure we're sourcing the right content, making it desirable for the new recipients.
We do that through a series of things like free trial periods, pilot agreements, anything to kind of get that content flowing towards the recipients. The international lists are actually a great asset here, as we're able to kind of funnel them into lists that are being actively used and get that content flowing into their accounts, a lot more quickly. Once those recipients become more engaged, we're able to leverage that value to grow the client base and then expand into the Independent Sector as well. In markets later in the journey, content is somewhat easier to come by through some existing relationships, whether that be other teams within a label that uses us for certain genres, introducing us to other teams within the same ecosystem, or through more proven and established marketing channels.
Speaking of marketing, our marketing team underwent a few changes in the middle of the fiscal year, and we were able to bring in staff with a bit stronger expertise, specifically in digital marketing and the analytics side of things. As they dug in, some issues became apparent in our SEO and conversion tracking and some of the analytics side of things, and this discovery led to a full audit, and we were able to begin implementing some fixes in the late stages of the fiscal year. So far, we've seen positive progress there as well. For instance, our digital ad conversion rate is now north of 20% and improving through those fixes, like continued keyword research, better analytics, better targeting, better testing, all those type of things.
We've also implemented some optimized landing pages, some strategies to re-engage past leads. Basically, a series of improvements to make the discovery and investigation stages even easier on potential customers and get them into the onboarding process a lot quicker. Speaking of the Lead G eneration, these fixes and just continued improvement on the digital side of things have led to a 20% increase in Lead Generation, specifically for the second half of this fiscal year, and it's more than double compared to the second half of last fiscal. The conversion rate or the processing rate, if you will, it's remained steady despite both the increases in volume of leads and despite those staffing changes we experienced earlier in the year.
So we're expecting this to improve even further as we move into the new fiscal year, and those, those fixes and improvements continue to get better and better.... Looking at a few of our target markets, looking at Latin, which I know is one we, we've talked about on past calls quite a bit. The Latin market is still in the early stages of the customer journey. I'm sure it seems that the process should be theoretically faster than it is, but it becomes more difficult when a platform like Play MPE is pretty much an entirely new concept that we're introducing to a region. For instance, the education process for recipients actually took a lot longer than we anticipated, since they really haven't been approached with a system like this before.
They're used to kinda doing things in one way, and it's almost a whole new world to them as we kinda show them what, not only Caster, but Player can do. Once we cleared those hurdles and got recipients onboarded to the platform and created those new lists, our active recipients within the region have grown year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter as we go through. And most importantly, they've remained active. It's one thing to get a rush of new recipients and have them stay active for a month or two at a time, but sustaining that activity is something that clients really see value in.
The industry setup within Mexico itself, and the other Latin territories as well, is also somewhat different from many of our existing territories, where the large, kind of, multinational major record labels have slightly less of an overall impact. And that void's filled by whether it be independents or third parties, such as distributors, large management companies. So this difference has forced us to adjust our tactics to a degree, and we've started to make some inroads there in the later stages of the fiscal year. Speaking to Latin, the revenue here is obviously still small, but we've seen the revenue generated by these lists grow quarter to quarter, with the majority coming in the second half of the fiscal year. Some other changes we've made, in Canada, we launched full commercial pricing for individual genre lists within Canada.
That was put in place in the middle of the first quarter. With these new saleable lists, deliveries to Canada from outside territories increased throughout the fiscal year, specifically in the second half as well. And for new genres in the U.S., which I know we've touched on in the past, looking at the U.S., we've mentioned that we have a dominant position in quite a few genres. Country, we're very strong, Christian, jazz, et c., but there are still some areas that are primed for growth. In the U.S., we're able to leverage existing relationships a bit easier to make this kind of a smoother transition.
For instance, as I mentioned before, a team within a label can introduce us to another team focused on a specific genre, and the kind of name recognition and trust is already there inherently. Focusing on these new genres goes back to what I mentioned earlier about making sure we have the right people with the right skills focused in the right areas. There was earlier, or I guess, later in the fiscal year, towards the end, our competitor within the rock space in the U.S. eliminated their staff, and we were able to bring one of their reps over to our team.
This kind of expertise doesn't only go a long way with clients, but it also allows us to further improve upon both our distribution lists, with their experience and connections, working alongside those proprietary list management processes that Fred mentioned, and also just the ability to connect with clients we might not have direct relationships with in the past. With any new genre, it can take time to change habits. Obviously, especially in a market like the U.S., a lot of these promoters or potential clients have been doing the same thing for quite a long time. But with a more fractured marketplace, the product improvements Fred had mentioned really give us an advantage. Things like easy list selection, security, reporting, et cetera, it really kind of sets us apart from other options they may have.
One of the aspects of Plan B that does always set us apart and always helps us with new genres and territories is just outstanding customer support, an intuitive product, and a positive client experience. So over the years, our metrics in this area have only improved, and with that, I'll pass it back over to Fred to walk you through some of the product reviews a bit more.
Thanks, Allan. So I talked earlier about, you know, the changes we've made to product, to the product development process to help us accelerate revenue, whether it's new business or whatever. The one thing I would like to take a little bit of time is to talk about, you know, where we are. Because I think we have a really solid core foundation of happy clients, and I think it's probably good just to tell you guys about that. The first one is, This is a what's called an NPS score. This is a score rated from our users of Caster, the distribution side of the platform. We essentially get feedback from four main sources. We get feedback from recipients on the recipient side of the platform.
We get feedback from the customers, the distributors of content, whether it's full service or self-service, meaning that they go through our operations team, or they operate the software themselves, and they distribute, and they handle everything themselves. And the fourth one is tech support. This one here is the senders of content, and you see it right now, I think it's at 74 here on this list. It depends on when you measure it, but throughout the year, we grew from 62, you know, which in this rating here is great, to an excellent score of 74. The benchmark for our industry depends on which industry you.
You think we're in, but it ranges from anywhere from low 30s-low 40s, and we're well above that, and we're really happy about that. But it's also going, improving, too, as we've made improvements to the platform. Tech support, we get a CSAT score of 98.7%. It's ridiculously good. And that's something, you know, our Senior Tech Support Manager is Peter, and he runs that Department, and this is something we've consistently had rave reviews of over more than a decade. And you get feedback. We're constantly getting feedback, that's and gets good scores, and ratings, and all that sort of thing. Then also, we collect feedback informally.
I'm gonna go through these and just sort of slowly present a few of them. But we have, you know, dozens, and dozens, and dozens of these. I'm not gonna go too slow, but so you can read it, but maybe in the reviewing of it and the video on the website, you can review it. But these are really just people that are sending content throughout the world, and they're really happy with Play MPE. So I think it's just a solid core base of happy customers that we can build from. And with that, I'll just turn it over to questions.
Great. Thank you, Fred and Allan. So yeah, we'll begin our question and answer session. If you do have any question, please press the Raise Hand option at the bottom of your screen, and your questions will be pulled in the order that they're received. If you raise your hand, please ensure that you do have access to a microphone, and if you wish to retract that question, then please just click that Raise Hand option again so that your hand will be lowered. Your camera will remain off, but once prompted, please unmute your microphone, and before asking your question. And so if anybody does have any questions, please hit that button now. So I don't see any raised hands, but we do have a written-in question if you wanna take a look at that, Fred and Allan.
So it's, "Fast-forward in one year, what does a successful year look like for Meter, revenue-wise?" Oh, you're on mute, Fred.
Oh, thanks. That's a good question. I don't know. We are really going through the for Meter, we are working through the client adoption phase. It's like, how do we market? How quickly will our customers come on board? What's our price point? And that will inform. We have a break-even analysis on the other side, sort of a sort of a cost. You know, our cost for Meter will rise as the number of stations we're monitoring rise, and they will also rise as the number of songs we're monitoring. So we wanna get a good sense of the break-even analysis there, before we figure out what our next steps are.
You know, while we're doing that, the Product Team is still working through a bunch of features that are probably necessary to put our best foot forward in the first product. But we'll figure that out. We'll figure out how fast that business grows. It'll be a bit of a function of what our Analysis tells us over the next few months, half a year. Yeah, I think that's I don't wanna predict revenue.
We do have a raised hand from Jerry, if you want to unmute your microphone and go ahead.
Fred?
Hey, Jerry.
Hey, how's it going?
Not too bad.
Good. A couple questions, Fred. First of all, you kind of showed on your slide in the back half of this current fiscal year that your revenues were up 6%, to kind of mute the lower first half. For investors going forward, what kind of revenue growth rates would one expect now, given some of the Product Development you did, or advancements, and the different market conditions, and the MTR? Are we gonna see some double-digit growth, you know, in fiscal 2024?
We are doing a lot of different things. I think... Entering 2024, I think the major area that we need to address is our marketing function holistically. I think we've done an excellent job of addressing the various issues in product development. In 2023, but we've added some resources just recently to focus in on our marketing strategy. And, you know, our product development is improving our revenue simply from improving the list selection process. So you get international lists, which increases your average sale size. You have improved list selection features that improve, again, the average sales. The.
I think if Play MPE revenue is to grow double digits, we have to make progress in, you know, our core markets, but also expanding those distributions globally. Like I said earlier that we're sort of unique in the sense that we are present in a lot of different markets: Australia, the Nordics, Canada, United States. And that's, I'm not aware of any other service like ours that has the breadth of use that we do. So I think we can capitalize on that to grow international distributions. We also have to make more progress in those target markets, so the U.S. new genres, Latin, South Africa. South Africa is a reasonably tiny market, but, you know, everything helps.
So, it's a roundabout way of saying that I think... I don't want to put numbers, I don't want predictions. I would have thought we would. If you'd asked me five years ago, I thought we would have been ahead of 10% for sure. But, you know, that's ultimately where that's our target, is to grow by a lot more than 6%, for sure.
On your OpEx spend, as a percentage of sales going forward, is there gonna be major variations in the different spend bundles?
Uh, ooh-
Like, do you expect, do you expect your, your R&D as a percentage of sales, or your sales and marketing as a percentage of sales, your administration as a percentage of sales? Based on where it is today as a percentage of sales, do you see increases or decreases, or how should somebody model, model that going forward?
Yeah, that's a good question.
Um-
I mean, ultimately, we are investing a lot right now for growth. You know, whether it's in business development activities or product development. We see a lot of potentials. Like MTR is the first real new product we've had in a long, long time. And we wanna build that out. So you'll see, depending on how aggressive we are in approaching that market, you might see some growth in infrastructure costs. I wouldn't expect to see too much in staffing costs for that, but you'll see incremental costs there. But that's a decision that we make going forward to see where, how quickly we can, how aggressively we can go globally on that, in that business.
But as far as Play MPE goes, you know, I think we, we need to invest in growth to capture those core target markets. And those, the margins, I think, once we do that, are pretty healthy. So I wouldn't see... Like, you'll see that there's a gross margin on our income statement, and you'll see, you'll see healthy margins from revenue growth as we grow.
As a whole, do you think OpEx, as a percentage of sales, will stay the same, rise, decrease, or can you give me any-
It'll decrease.
Okay.
Operating as a percentage of sales, right now we're almost break even. So, I mean, our target is to grow rapidly and, you know, revenue should far outpace expenditure growth.
On the MTR product, I mean, you talked about this product, you know, releasing it and things like that. Can you give me the revenue model for this product? I mean, i.e., is it gonna be a subscription, a usage base? Is it only for the independent labels or musicians used? Would Sony use this product, or they have their own? Could you just... And maybe the size of the opportunity for this product. Can you just give a little, you know, background of what one could anticipate?
Sure. Essentially, what, the model is... Well, that's a good question, Jerry. Okay, so, if you bear with me, the model is that we have a subscription fee. So you monitor a song times a price, times the number of months or potentially years, I guess. And that's the simple- that's the first step into the industry. So you'll get customers that have one song that they wanna monitor, and you'll get customers that will want to monitor a number of songs. We're figuring out if we build that pricing based on the number of territories you monitor. Right now, we're only in Canada, only in a small group of people. But, but we're just, we're charging by, you know, song times, months, monitoring.
Now, what's interesting is that, the big players in the industry for this really... There's quite a contrast between what we do and what they do. Typically, like a larger company like Sony or Universal or whatever, would get that reporting data from a charting-based software, where those charting platforms, they monitor fewer radio stations in a local territory, but they monitor all songs or, you know, as close to all songs as they can, and that tends to be quite an expensive endeavor. So, you know, a small label that would be our first customer really can't afford to buy and pay for the information for all songs. They just wanna look at their song.
The advantages that we have is that we can price it low enough that those customers can now buy that information. So we, in contrast, digitally monitor. Those charting platforms monitor in different ways, and they're not nearly as cost-effective, but they provide a, you know, a slightly different service. I think as we grow, there's no reason why Sony or a larger label will not be able to buy our service, and we think we can be competitive in those endeavors. Especially because of our efficiency and because we can monitor globally. And once we get all the radio stations added... Well, I shouldn't just say radio stations. I think some people get misled when I talk about radio stations.
MTR monitors digital broadcasts, so terrestrial radio stations that are broadcasting in the internet, which, you know, this is a new opportunity because terrestrial stations are duplicating their broadcasts digitally now, for the most part. And there's also digital-only stations that... So this is kind of a new thing that is becoming a bit more prevalent in the industry, where you have internet stations and they're growing. And you have broadcasts, you have narrowcasts. Narrowcasting is really like a very targeted specific narrow casting of your music. So as we as MTR goes out grows, you can monitor a bit more than what's traditionally monitored, and you can grow globally, and there's no reason that a larger label can't use that.
The product roadmap for MTR is, you know, kind of in its infancy right now, but it's a really kind of an interesting one, where it's a bit of a messy thing when it comes to royalties around the world. You get places that aren't even monitored 'cause it's just not cost-effective to do it. You'll get a very manual process for reporting royalties. You don't get one solution around the world, and I think, you know, this is your blue sky eventual product development for MTR, but it's something that gets us really excited. Like, we think we can cost-effectively monitor stations around the world and monitor all songs. It's a long ways away, but it's an enormous opportunity.
We've projected what our potential market potential is. I don't wanna say that number because it's huge, and I don't wanna... I wanna manage expectations a bit, but it's a big market. It certainly would dwarf Play MPE.
Can you give a scale of the market in, like, say, in the USA alone or in Canada alone, or that... Give a sense to investors and, you know?
I'll get that to you later. I'm not gonna opine on it-
Right
Right now.
No problem. And finally, my last question. Your largest customer is still Universal, is that correct?
That's correct.
And, your relationship with Universal as it stands right now, the contract is up for renewal again, or you have another year left?
Contract's up for renewal, at the end of March, April 1st, next year.
Okay.
We're in talks with them right now.
The relationship stays, stays... is good?
... Yeah, I mean, I mean, we're in talks with them. But I think they don't wanna overpay, but at the same time, the value that we provide Universal is gigantic in terms of-- compared to the fees they pay us. And you know, the buying decision for Universal isn't really in one location. Ultimately, we do a lot of things for head office, that these global admin features that provide a tremendous value for efficiencies and control, globally. And they provide really positive impacts for Universal's revenue that are really hard to quantify.
You know, there's-- it helps in marketing endeavors that, that, be it communicating ISRC codes so that, that your royalty collection's faster or more accurate, or coordinating marketing efforts that produce better results. But you'll never do the, you know, AB testing with our system. Like, you can't say, "Well, that song went out in system one, and song went out in system two," you know, which one did better? Because, you know, it really depends on when it's done. And if you do two different songs, well, two different songs are gonna be wildly different in terms of their success. So, but there's anecdotes. There's a narrative there that is really strong for us, and we know we have a loyal customer base with Universal holistically. We have got a great reputation.
The NPS scores that we showed, that 74, I think it was, that's collected from... That includes Universal. But we can separate Universal out, and the NPS score is the same. It's great. So yeah, I think we provide great value. We just, you know, they don't wanna overpay, and we gotta get enough revenue to pay for the things that we provide them.
Sure. My final question, you're, as you alluded, you're near cash break even, maybe be cash flow positive in 2024. Any other potential uses of your cash position?
Well, we are doing a buyback right now. It's a little—you know, it's always challenging to buy, but we think we can do both. We do have a... For a small company like ours, we do have a fairly large cash position. I think it's a little bit higher than 20% of our market cap. But anyway, that I think will be nice to have if we decide to be aggressive in the MTR, the meter market acquisition. There'll likely be a small... Well, I don't know what the quantum would be, but there will probably be a negative cash flow in the beginning as we ramp up the number of stations we are monitoring. And then, you know, the customer adoption comes after that.
So that's essentially the break-even analysis that we need to do. And you know, we have to figure out how much risk we'll take on, and the cash in our bank is, you know, nice to have, for sure. I mean, ultimately, if we went global, and didn't have any revenue for two years, we would still be fine. So, you know, there is some comfort in that.
Thank you, Fred. No further questions.
Thank you, Jerry. So we do just have one other question that was written in, and Sonya, you did have your hand raised. So if you do want to unmute your microphone with any follow-ups, feel free. But Sonya asked, "You've been growing Play MPE, the Play MPE business for the last several years. Has anything surprised you?
I've been asked that question before. There's a few questions in these calls. It's always a bit of a opportunity to look back and think about what we've done or, you know, what we need to do to be successful, and what does success look like? And there's been a few questions in these calls that have sat with me, and that's one of them. The first time I was asked that question was before COVID. I'm pretty sure, because COVID sure surprised me. But you know, I said my answer at the time was no, nothing had surprised me.
Well, even as I was answering it, I was thinking, "it's not really quite right." I mean, I knew that we had to... If you go back far enough, I knew that we had to make significant changes in the company with staffing to make us more successful. So that didn't surprise me in the sense that, you know, I knew that that problem existed. I think it probably surprised me. There's things I learned along the way. You know, that you make hiring decisions, you know, sometimes you know, you have a wrench when you need a hammer, or vice versa, or something like that.
So there's things you learn that, you know, you gotta get the right people in place, and that is not always a quick endeavor. You know, I think it's the people management, the making sure that people are on the same page, making sure people understand what we're trying to do. All those things, there's an evolution of learning. I don't think that surprised me necessarily, but certainly, I've learned some stuff. The investment that we had to do for Universal, for the global admin features that, you know, provide them just a gigantic amount of value, that's a project that it's extremely hard to value before you do it, but I think our estimates were low, and the...
I mean, there was probably some scope creep in there for sure. But they were really kind of things that were dramatic improvements for the cost, so we did them. But ultimately, the whole investment there took longer and was bigger than, So that surprised me, I guess. Yeah. I don't know. I could ramble on about that for a while, 'cause I do... That's one of the questions that does sit with me for a while.
Okay, looks like we have no follow-ups to that, and no other questions, so thank you.
Okay, thanks, everyone. It is, it's always a short turnaround for Q1, so we'll speak to you in January.