Okay. All right. Thanks, everyone. Today I'm joined by Rob Ellin, Chairman and CEO of LiveOne. Rob, if you're all right with me, we just jump into it.
Beautiful.
Cool.
Hello, Craig. How are you doing?
Doing really well. Likewise. Maybe just to start, you can give us a little bit of background on LiveOne and how you got to where you are today.
Yeah, sure. LiveOne, I started 2016. I took it public in 2017, the end of 2017, and immediately started to build a moat around the music subscription world. What we did is we acquired Slacker Radio, then we acquired PodcastOne, then we built a pay-per-view business. We basically built a flywheel that gave the most unique opportunity for consumers to be able to absorb music. We have partnerships with every record label, every publisher around the world, and put us in the position of really growing. We've grown that subscription from 400,000 to well over 3 million now and on our way to 10 million.
Awesome. I'll circle back to the publisher relationships and stuff in a little bit, but this also isn't your first shot at building a business in the public eye. It might be helpful for folks to give a little bit of background on where you came from.
Yeah. Years ago, I started iWon.com, which most of you probably know was a search engine, ended up selling to Barry Diller. In the private markets, it was about to go public in 2000. The market crashed. We got a really quick learning curve that we'll talk about more deeply, Craig, as we go through this. We were fortunate enough to sell that to Barry Diller for almost $1 billion. I started a company called Digital Turbine. Most of you know it as APPS, A-P-P-S. Almost in the exact same fashion, B2B partnerships, owning technology with a world-class team in a microcap company.
Cool. If you wouldn't mind digging a little bit deeper on some of those lessons learned along the way, I think that might be interesting.
Digital Turbine took it public, 2008. We woke up one day and then skiing down the mountain in Aspen, we lost about 85% of our value. It took almost two years to recover that and fighting through all of the different economic issues as well as the stock market issues that you face. We turned that around and, you know, we fought through. We had to take costs down dramatically. We had to move from a story stock to a growth stock to a value stock. We woke up five years later and it went to $12 billion in change. I think very similar here, we're going through that same cycle. Same cycle as 2000 and 2008. This one's way harder, right?
This is way more difficult 'cause this we're now facing 23 months of this. 22 months ago, I woke up and my team woke up and we said, "We gotta get into the bunkers and we gotta change philosophically where the business is going. We gotta look at every single area of the business, and we have to really focus from growth to bottom line." We've taken that EBITDA from negative $18 million to positive $12 million this year. I just announced guidance for this year way higher.
Awesome. On that point, obviously guidance for this year looks pretty positive. Maybe you can recap for folks where you expect to wind up for 2024 and just a side note, right, 2024 is March.
Yeah. We just finished our year-end. We did about $100 million in between $11 million and $12 million of EBITDA. You'll shortly see those final numbers coming out with the March 31st year-end. We announced for this year, $115 million-$125 million of revenues and $12 million-$15 million EBITDA. For the first time ever, I separated out my audio business of PodcastOne and Slacker, and I'll articulate shortly why. I said, we're gonna do $95 million-$105 million and $18 million-$21 million of EBITDA. Okay? $12 million minimum of operating cash. What I said on that call, for any of you listened, is those numbers are really big.
That's already built into the current revenues, current business today, and there's massive upside from there in some of the projects that we'll talk about in the subsidiaries of the company.
Got it. A theme for some of the other folks in the music business over the last couple of quarters has been softness in global recorded music, attributed to a number of different, you know, things, depending on who you're talking to. Music has tremendous tailwinds. I'm curious to see, you know, or hear what you're seeing in your business.
I mean, we're built off the backs of two things. We're a creator-first platform, we're built off the relationship we have with the creators. We've had over 3,000 artists perform on our platform to a audience of 5 billion engagements and 640 million live streams. Every single one of those 3,000 artists hit their social media and told their fans to come listen or watch on LiveOne. We do not spend any money on marketing. We can't afford to compete with the Spotifys and the Apples at $80 subs. You know, when you talk about going back to learning experiences, years ago, I owned Kazaa, and I got a hardcore lesson on how expensive it is to try to buy a consumer and try to keep them, right? Keep that breakage.
We focus all on creative first and helping them let them drive our audience. Second is on B2B partners who have massive distribution of 10 million to 2.5 billion eyeballs around the world to drive our audiences.
Got it. You may have just touched on this a little bit, but music distribution and profit are not often words that go hand in hand. Given where you are today from a scale perspective, hitting profitability this year in a meaningful way, what makes your model different?
It's a great question. The top tier at $9.99 going to probably $12.99-$15.99 over time, and I think there's tremendous price elasticity that they could raise prices. We're really the Walmart of our space. Right? We're in that middle tier where literally our average ARPU is in the $3.50 range. Because of that, it's based on usage, it's based on what music we include in there, so we don't have to have every single song. If I launch a watch, and I'm making this up, I launch a watch with Disney, and it's only for kids, I only need kids' music, right?
We define ourselves as that low-cost provider that has the flexibility and the nimble, right, behavior to be able to service those customers, but also be able to white label for our customers at a price that makes sense for them. Our margins are over 33%, right? Versus the industry of being at 17%, and I expect them to stay that way without raising prices. If we're able to raise prices as everyone's talking about raising them now, if they continue to raise prices, we'll be able to raise a little bit and the margins will even get better.
Over the last 12 months, you've taken a lot of cost out of the business. You referenced cost-cutting a little bit earlier. I think the number is somewhere around $30 million. What's been the focus area for you in terms of cost reduction and rationalization? Is there more to do from here?
Yes, we had to do a couple of things. First of all, it was hard to consolidate during COVID, right? I don't know what everyone else's beliefs are, but I think it's critical that people are back in the office. People, especially in the media space, collaborating together, having time together. It's when you acquire seven companies, it's hard to do that during Covid because you're not getting that experience of spending quality time directly with them from your key staff down. Now, we've been able to consolidate and the cream rise to the top. We found out which of our team members are willing to stay in the bunkers and fight, which of the team members are gonna be the best in each of them and consolidate that.
We took $31.9 million of cost out of the business. Again, we started it 22 months ago, and it's worked out great. The team is has fought through. I'm proud of them, and we're gonna continue to continue to look at on a regular basis how do we continue to increase our margins and keep our costs at a relatively low level until we figure out where this economy is going.
Alongside that, you've done a lot of work cleaning up the balance sheet over the last year or so. Maybe talk a little bit about what you've done on that front?
Yes, it was a dogfight. You know, when we acquired Slacker Radio, we took on $48 million of payables. All right? That was the record labels and the publishers, and there were a lot of hindrances in that I couldn't expand overseas until that was cleaned up. I had agreements with the labels and the publishers in order to be able to buy time to pay that over a period of time as we grew. Right? COVID hits, and they got tougher on us. We fought through. We, in many ways, were able to clean up the balance sheet. Number one is Universal Music converted $10 million of royalties at $4.14. Our biggest partner, Jeff Osher at No Street Harvest, continued to put money in for the third time.
He put $15 million of convertible debt in. He now has converted all of that into equity at $2.10. We took our partners, and we've made them bigger partners. Fidelity, the Puritan Fund, Dan Kelly, we're meeting after this. Dan took over for Ramin Irani, who is my lead investor. They've continued to be a huge supporter of the company, invested three times. We took that, we cleaned up the balance sheet, we restructured our debt. We're now debt-free, and have the strongest balance sheet we've had since since I started the company.
You've also been increasing your share repurchase program alongside that. How should we think about capital allocation for the company?
I've been buying back debt. Bought back debt at our podcast division. Bought back some of the bridge notes from our financing. We just announced we increased our buyback to five and a half million dollars. If we close a credit line, which we've talked about, right, that credit line, we'd have close to $30 million in short-term assets with no debt against it anymore. You know, it's very possible could borrow more. If the stock is gonna trade down here, we're gonna continue to buy as a company. I've personally bought almost every single quarter since in this company. Yeah, I like to put my hands, my feet, and my mouth in the same direction.
I've invested over $18.7 million in the company, almost a replica to what I did in Digital Turbine. I feel this is as strong or bigger company in the next two to three years.
Switching to the M&A side. You've referenced, I think, seven deals over the last several years. Tell us about the long-term vision for LiveOne. Do you have all the pieces that you need, or are you still looking for other opportunities?
This is the first time in my career I have six TAMs within one company. What do I mean by that? Start at the top of the pendulum, right? There's 500 million subscribers to music. Goldman Sachs says it's gonna be 1.7 billion paying subscribers by 2027. It's a massive number. Probably 2/3 of the world will have some form of subscription, free and paid. What I've said was we're gonna get to 10 million subscribers within five years. That's less than 1% of the addressable market. If you guys are podcast fans, TAM number two. Podcasting has grown since COVID from 400 to 1.2 billion.
From all the conferences and time I'm spending on Wall Street, it's amazing to watch how many hedge fund managers, how many investors, how many of their children have moved their habitual behavior towards podcasting. That market is going from $1.2 billion- $10 billion by 2030. Our pay-per-view business, which we did $28 million and $4 million of EBITDA during Covid, has expansion to billions of dollars in it. We have these remarkable TAMs within one company. Our publishing business is unique opportunities in AI that we'll talk about as well. We're gonna continue to look at additional acquisitions. I haven't done a single acquisition in two and a half years, right? As I spin out our podcast business and our Slacker business into their own public companies, right?
You're gonna see a lot of chess moves in those directions and where there's a great roll-up strategy now to continue to roll up in those specific spaces and those specific TAMs.
You obviously mentioned a number of different opportunities. How do you think about prioritizing? Takes a lot of focus, I assume.
Yeah, it's, you know, we've got a great team. When you look at my team, they've created over $10 billion of media and technology companies. I'm sorry, over $100 billion of media and technology companies. We have some of the best professionals in all of media who sit on our board, a lot of them free agents. As we look at these divisions, we see opportunities to really expand them towards that $1 billion-$10 billion range of where they can go. As we see that, you know, our priorities are right deal, right partners. Everything we do is really focused on, is that the right positioning for the company, and are we bringing the right culture, right? We describe our team as a family, and we wanna keep it that way.
You talked about some of the corporate activity that's underway in terms of the spin-out of PodcastOne, the SPAC deal that was announced for Slacker Radio. What's the objective in all of this?
Always, you know, in all the companies I've built, private or publicly, the focus is my shareholders, right? For anyone who's been an investor before, right, you know, billions and billions were made in Digital Turbine. Really was focused on it, right? The focus the energy is, how do we unleash value in a very, very difficult market, right? Our podcast business got valued at $230 million-$270 million. It was not very cavalier since Sirius Radio just bought Conan O'Brien. $10 million revenues paid $150 million six months ago, right? You just saw another acquisition done at 17x revenues. We're in really, really unique spaces that we have to focus that energy.
This was to unleash value, to give our management team some flexibility and to give us real flexibility to be able to both grow internally as well as externally. You're watching in our podcast business. I think we've announced a new podcast. We're moving from one of the large platforms almost on a weekly basis for the last eight weeks. You're gonna see more of that. What I mean by those podcasts is already have traffic. They're already mature podcasts, but they're moving over because they need the full 360 service that we provide for them to grow.
On the podcasting side, you know, if we look back maybe two, three years ago, a lot of the large streaming businesses making a lot of headlines in terms of investment there. Why are you winning today? How are you attracting that talent to the platform?
Great question, Craig, and thanks. To start with, again, when I describe the 360 play, just like we do in music, we produce, we distribute, we market, we get a sponsor firm. We really handhold our creators in a fashion that they're not going to get servicing large ones. Then we partner with all of our competitors who are our friends and our partners. We stream across Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Samsung TVs, there is just a massive opportunity to continue to grow those B2B deals and give our creators an opportunity to expand their horizon of where they can reach around the globe.
In terms of the separations of the different units or separate listings, I should say, the different units, how do we think about the importance of having all those pieces together under one roof?
They'll always be under one roof, right? The objective of all this was unleash value for our shareholders, it also is the parent company is maintaining 75%-80% of these companies. It gives us capital, it gives us currency, it gives us relevancy in those specific spaces. One of the most exciting things about it, when I think about the community of PodcastOne, we have 2.4 billion downloads. We have 11 million uniques a month. This is a massive community, right? Way bigger than any of the companies I took public previously at this early stage of it, right?
It gives us the ability to consolidate all those into the parent company, continue to run that flywheel and grow off of each other, but also give some room for them to grow and stretch their muscles on their own.
Does the strategy change how we should think about the economics of the business going forward, decision-making? How do we think about all of those pieces?
No, it really hasn't changed at all. You know, we've always talked about the six different TAMs. We talk about them now as they'll have separate trading stocks. Little Barry Diller, little John Malone in it, right? It happened by accident originally. We got an offer to put $8 million into our podcast business. We had originally announced we were gonna spin out our pay-per-view business, and I expect that to happen as well in the very near future. Once the capital started coming in in a tough market, it became such a great strategy for us in that we're able to use that capital to clean up our balance sheet, to buy back stock.
If we do that same in one of our other divisions, we've just announced that Slacker Radio got valued at $160 million. $160 million, that's $2 a share. PodcastOne at 230, 270 is $3 a share, over $3 a share, right? That's $5 a share. Hopefully, the street will start to recognize and LiveOne will start to trade properly as well.
You've built a pretty special relationship with Tesla over the last several years now. Can you talk about sort of your relationship with them, state of that relationship, because it's pretty important and where it goes from here?
Yeah, you know, historically, when I've done acquisitions, I try to find an activist move at the time of acquisition before we actually close. When I bought Slacker Radio, there was a little tiny contract with Tesla, which was a 3-year contract, we were doing about $210,000 in revenues. My team went out to the facilities, went out to the plants, we determined that this was going to be $10s of millions, if not $100s of millions, of the revenues over the next couple of years. This is now my fifth year going to sixth year. We just extended our contract for the tenth straight year. We average seven years life. Every car that opens in North America, we are picking up a subscriber for an average of seven years.
Massive growth this year, massive growth opportunity, and couldn't be more exciting to hit that 10-year mark. With that 10-year mark, we've just put all of our podcasts into the cars. For the first time ever, not only do we have a subscription revenue, but now we have an advertising sponsorship revenue. We also have an opportunity to talk to those consumers for the first time. Upsell, grow the relationship, expand the relationship. I'd love to see as I'm a big believer in self-driving cars, I'd love to see video in the cars. There's a massive opportunity for us to expand overseas and potentially take over the cars overseas. This is a terrific partnership, and I think on top of that partnership, what it's done is it opened the floodgates for other B2B deals. We're now in Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint.
We just announced a amazing deal with Android Automotive to white label our technology, our technology stack into cars and be able to use that as a Ford Radio, as Cadillac Radio. I just think Elon's smarter than the rest of us. He understood by making a Tesla radio and not having a Slacker or Spotify, he was talking to his consumer every day, selling more cars. I think it's a brilliant move, and I think that strategy is gonna expand, and I do expect to have at least a second car company this year. Our technology is now in 86 other cars and expanding. I expect to expand overseas as well.
Double-clicking on that, as we think about international, I guess the predominant focus of the business has been domestic, it seems thus far. When does international really start to come into play? What's held you back so far?
I talked about earlier those, you know, sizable payables when we acquired Slacker Radio. That's now cleaned up. We in fact, we have advances with the record labels now for the first time. It's really a pleasure, and it's starting to become fun. As it becomes fun, you get to expand those licenses. This is a year to expand the licenses overseas. The opportunity, that a third of our traffic, about 30% of our traffic has been global because I've streamed the biggest music events in the world from Rock in Rio to EDC, China, Japan, Mexico, to Jazz Montreux in Switzerland, just about every one of the major largest music events, and we've never got to really monetize them. We got a little bit of sponsorship dollars, but we've never been...
A little bit of distribution dollars, but we've never been able to monetize and convert those because we didn't have the licenses overseas. I look forward to this year. For most of you to know, the subscription model is 50% is U.S., 50% is overseas, right? There's no reason we can't have 10%, 20% of it overseas quickly and eventually to 50%.
On the current state of the label relationships, sounds like you've done a lot of work over the last couple of years getting that cleaned up. How would you characterize the relationship with the labels today?
Well, I got a few black eyes. For anyone who's dealt with the labels, it's hard. It's hard. It's a tough battle, you know, it's also a battle that is worth it, right? I'm a huge fan. I've been in the music business for close to 30 years now in different aspects of it's always been a moneymaker. We're really proud of those relationships, we're gonna continue to grow those relationships and expand those relationship. I'd love to have the video rights that we had before COVID hit. We had built a mode to be able to do pay-per-view for live music events. When I streamed Rock in Rio, you know, for 5 straight years, we averaged... There were 91 million people a year watching Rock in Rio. Coachella this year broke 100 million.
These are fall off your chair numbers. These are Super Bowl numbers, right? If you think about, Outside Lands had $42 million and Lollapalooza had $72 million. These are staggering numbers. Our vision always when we built our technology for pay-per-view, when we built our technology for meet and greets, NFTs with Polygon as our partner, the opportunity was for us to expand that and be able to do pay-per-view. When COVID hit, we had to pull back obviously. We lost all of our live partners for two and a half years, almost three years. Now's the opportunity that pay-per-view come back, we see a huge opportunity to go back to the labels and have those video rights and create a brand-new revenue stream that's never existed before, just like sports did 40 years ago.
Maybe diving a little bit deeper on that point, how does live play into the future of LiveOne? Not, you know, all puns aside. It's obviously a huge portion of artist income. Where does it fit in for you guys?
Five billion engagements, 3,000 artists. What do I mean five billion engagements? Not only did the consumer watch or listen, they actually repurposed it and sent it out to their friends. It's expanded that relationship dramatically. The live side of it, and again, just going back to a Rock in Rio, I'll use an example. 90 million people watched. 1 million people attended, okay? Let's call the average ticket price. We'll give it a low number and call it $100 because Brazil's gonna be a lot less than Coachella. Call it $100. Do you believe the consumer would pay $5 for a pay-per-view event to watch seven days of the best music in the world? If you do, there's billions of dollars of revenues coming in pay-per-view, and I think it's coming right now.
When I got when COVID hit, I was doing $38 million in revenues, and a large portion of my business was moving to the live streaming side and the digital side of it, and then we got hit with COVID. We had to pull back. Now's the opportunity we can really expand that, and I see this as our biggest year ever in pay-per-view.
Within that, obviously, LiveOne plays a critical role. How do you see other folks in the ecosystem, right? The people that are actually putting on the events or a Live Nation or somebody, right? What's their role in all of that?
We locked up 2,500 largest music events in the world on the thesis that we would take the ESPN model, of which Steve Bornstein, who built ESPN, then built the NFL Network, right? Blessed it and called it the ESPN of music. Right? We bought up all those properties to create newsroom hosts, anchors, correspondents, and really create that next generation MTV or the ESPN of music. We did that, right? It opened up the floodgates to us to partner with iHeart and Live Nation and AEG, and we partner with all of them, right? Now is the opportunity where the consumer, because of COVID, got to watch all these live events, and I'm sure all of you had that opportunity. They won't forget it ever, right? It's like sports 40 years ago. The consumer is now enamored with watching these live events.
100 million people watch Coachella, right? They're never gonna stop. Now there's gonna be sponsors coming in. There's gonna be pay-per-view coming in. There's gonna be merchandise coming in, and you're gonna create that new revenue stream. I see us, you know, very shortly, really expanding that. You'll see it across our entire platform, that all that tech stack that we built will be used for podcasters. Their live shows will now be pay-per-view. Festivals will now be pay-per-view. Music events will be pay-per-view. We stream everyone from BTS to Monsta X to Wiz Khalifa to Pitbull, depending on what kind of music, and we live and learn every day which ones are gonna work, but the consumer is enamored with it, and the consumer wants it, and they're not turning their back on it.
As you look across all of the different TAMs you address, each one of them has some pretty large and deep-pocketed competitors. How do you stack up against those folks? What enables you to win long term?
It's a great question. To start with, they're all my partners, right? I distribute across all of them, and I partner with just about every single one of them. We don't compete with them. We're really a unique model in that LiveOne, you're a subscriber to it. Many of our subscribers are subscribers to Spotify. In fact, I am, right? I love Spotify, right? There's certain aspects of that playlist that are amazing, do amazing things. We're a very different experience. Ours is built on original programming. If you wanna come see something truly unique in music, truly unique in music and pop culture, you're gonna come to our platform. Because it's so cheap and because it's so inexpensive, at that Walmart level, at an average of $3.50, it's really not gonna make a dent in your budget for your subscription model.
We love partnering with them, and we love continuing to grow that. you know, who knows? In the near future, one of them could be a strategic investor. They could be a buyer of the company. We're kinda ripe in that space to be able to fit in with any one of our competitors, and we have great relationships across the board.
One of the things that's been talked about a lot today here is potential for a recession. Given the increased exposure to advertising over the last few years, how do you think about recession risk for the business? If one happens, how should we think about, you know, exposure?
Well, we're seeing, you know, some very troublesome times in sponsorship and advertising. Really, we're winning because we're adding so many new podcasts and so many new original programming. We're winning. Definitely CPAs and CPMs are gonna struggle. It's gonna get worse, in my humble opinion. It's also gonna get better because there's gonna be a lot of fallout from it and a lot of opportunities. There's gonna be a lot of opportunities to acquire more creators. There's gonna be a lot of opportunities for those creators to come to our platform knowing that we give them that full 360 service. It's gonna be a tough market, and you're gonna have to battle through. The exciting part is our sponsorship, which pre-COVID, we were at 98% subscription. We're now 50/50.
All right? We had seven sponsors on our platform. We now have 600. Okay? As we go public with PodcastOne and public with Slacker on their own, you can be sure there's gonna be dynamics there of both external as well as internal growth engines, right? That are gonna be explosive to it 'cause we wouldn't take those public unless there was chess moves that made sense.
One of the other things that's caught a lot of attention is AI. How do you think AI impacts the music business? How do you think it impacts your business?
We've talked a little bit about our publishing business. Josh Hallbauer just took over as President of our publishing business. He came out of Roc Nation, ran their publishing, and owns pieces of every song from Peaches on down. We saw a technology play that I think is so dynamic and so unique, again, focused on creatives first. If any of you know what beats or sounds are for a song, right? There are beats and sounds that you can go to these platforms, and you buy those beats and sounds, and they're royalty-free. We found the platform, a young man, 26 years old, absolute superstar. We acquired his company, and we dynamically moved his company by putting our entire tech team behind it. We're literally growing on a daily basis, adding sounds and beats of songs.
We own pieces of songs from everyone from Post Malone to Drake. You can almost name it across the board. What's happening now is by using AI, we used our tech team to start with ChatGPT, although I used Bard today, and it's amazing. I don't know if any of you used it. Right? There's amazing things there. I'll give you an example. We had someone come to us and said, "I want the beats from the drummer of the Chili Peppers. Could you find me music that sounds just like this?" With ChatGPT in conjunction with Drumify, we were able to found 13,000 sounds that fits in with it, and you'll be reading a lot about this 'cause we just announced 40,000 songs we own a piece of. Those numbers are gonna grow to hundreds of thousands over the next few years.
I'm really excited about AI. I think there's really unique usage for it and for our business, it's explosive. We've always used AI. In Slacker Radio, part of the beauty of the technology in our 45 patents is they've used AI, which they've now expanded with the newest forms of AI, in conjunction with human behavior and human decision-making. Those hosts or anchors choosing the music, that if one of you is listening to rock and roll and you listen to soft rock and another listen to hard rock, your radio station when you go into a Tesla car or you go on our app is gonna be very different, even though you're on the exact same app.
You mentioned Dramify. You also have Splitmind. I guess, how do you, how are you enabled to invest in and or operate with these platforms? Whereas, you know, I'm sure folks like Spotify and others would love to go deeper into publishing, but are restricted. How does that work on your side?
I mean, it's impossible for them to be nimble like us, right? You know, they're gonna buy us one day or they're gonna buy someone to size, right? I think even in podcasting, everyone's got their learning curve. There were some great moves here, but they paid, you know, enormous amounts of money to get into the space, right? We're never gonna do that. When I bought PodcastOne, I bought it at 1x revenues. When I bought Slacker Radio, I bought it at 1x revenues. They both had hair on them, just like Digital Turbine, and they both had fortunes of money spent in building those technologies. They can't be nimble like us, and they can't do the things that we're doing.
They're gonna smartly wait, and there'll be a next round of podcast buying, just like there's gonna be a next round of audio buying. They're gonna wait for that to develop and be big enough for them. They're so massive in size that right now is just a great opportunity for us with VC money, with private equity money shrinking dramatically. This is the opportunity for us to really grow this and be able to really do some chess moves that we haven't been able to do in the last two and a half years.
We talked about some of the separations, or separate listings that you're doing. You tossed out numbers, I think $3 a share for PodcastOne, $2 a share for Slacker Radio. With the company trading under $2 a share today, what do we think investors are missing?
Well, I think you got the perfect storm, right? Starting with, you know, when you lose the Russell 2000, you lose 16 million shares of buying, you lose your index buying, right? After you lose your index buying, the shorts that come with that. You get, with the shorts that come with it, you get algorithms that come with it, right? You get tax selling, you get panic selling. You got just a disastrous, literally terrible market for anything under $1 billion today, and especially in media and technology. It'll change. It'll change. That Warren Buffett, for anyone that watched it, the Warren Buffett video I think is so genius. I think I've been telling this story for...
I feel like I've been telling it for 38 years of my life as CEO or largest shareholder in public companies. You know, the stock market is like a guy at a bar drinking, right? The first couple of drinks, he's falling down, he's slipping. All of a sudden, he hits the right drink and everything turns fun and happy, and the market turns fun. When it does, you get rich. It's gonna happen soon. I don't know if it's three months, I don't know if it's six months. Somewhere in the next two years, we're gonna have another great market rally, right? You're gonna get a market rally for the small caps, not just for seven stocks and everything else kinda sit where it is. I'm excited for it. This is where you make all your money.
This is where you make your 10 or 30 xs. you know, Digital Turbine, when it went down to $0.40, it was as brutal as you get. I had $40 million in debt. We had to battle through a lot of different things to get there. We turned the business. We focused the business. We focused the energy, and it went to $12 billion. I think we have the same thing here.
Great. I see we've got just about a minute left, so to cram as much as I can into that last minute. The ecosystem has changed a lot over the last 3-5 years, COVID impact and everything else that goes with it. How do you think the ecosystem evolves over the next 3-5 years? Where do you shake out in all of that?
I think right now you have the first time in our lifetime that content is king. Historically, distribution is King Kong. Right now content is king, and content is King Kong. Content is enormously expensive. $2.5 million per hour is up 50% in the last three years and almost 100% over the last 10 years. It's becoming unaffordable for all these platforms. One of the reasons I went into this space is, as difficult as music is, music, my cost per content is under $20,000 an hour. I think we're uniquely positioned right now to really be able to explode this business, and we're growing the fastest we've ever grown, right? We grew 60,000 subscribers last month. We're growing. We grew 600,000 subscribers.
When you think about that number, 600,000 subscribers, right? Our competitors spend $80 a sub to get those subscribers. That's $50 million. We spent zero money. We're gonna build off the back of B2B deals. You're gonna see more and more of them coming. I just announced a big television deal with OTT networks to put our content across 47 million TVs. I announced Samsung TV. I think it was, I think it was 400 million TVs. I forget the numbers anymore. They're so staggering. We're gonna get a little piece of those, right? You're gonna continue to grow. My humble opinion is every platform with 10 million to 2.5 billion eyeballs, right, from social to media to cable, to satellite, to internet companies across the board, must have live and must have music.
This is a unique opportunity for us, and I look forward to you guys seeing, you know, more and more B2B deals to help grow our business and grow our subscribers, our sponsors, and of course, that just turns into revenues and bottom line.
Awesome. Thanks, Rob.
Thanks, man. Nice as always.
Yeah. You got it.