Peter Henderson. I work with Jessica. I've worked with her for the past fifteen years in the media and cable side. This morning, we launched coverage of Live Nation, and we're very excited to have Joe Berchtold, President and CFO from Live Nation, here today with us. Joe, thank you very much for joining us.
Sure. Thanks for having me. 15 years with Jessica, I should be interviewing you for stories.
So, it's been a good run. It's been a good run. So a lot of topics to discuss, but I'd like to start from a very high level, big picture.
Sure.
The live entertainment industry has experienced tremendous growth over the last, really, several decades. You've talked about the industry growing at an eight to 10% annual rate in the future. What are some of the key structural tailwinds that will drive that next leg of growth, you know, over the next five to 10 years?
Yep, yep. Well, I think the first is, I think you have this continuing trend of consumer spend away from goods towards experience. That's been going on for twenty years. COVID's disrupted it, and then, you know, supply chain and inflation around consumer goods has disrupted it. But, I think any survey you do, any conversations with people in their twenties and thirties, that you have that as a clear structural tailwind. And then the other, which is truly the driver, is the globalization. The globalization then ties into what I'll call kind of the economic business model, right?
So you've got, on the demand side, you have a globalization, which is a shift from the record companies as the determinants of distribution, to then the global distribution with the Spotifys, Apple Musics, the streaming platforms that make sure content's delivered everywhere simultaneously, globally. Then you have, I think... And that drove a lot, call it from 2005- 2019. I think then the further acceleration you've seen over the past five or six years is then really the social platforms as a point of discovery. So now they're able to discover the artist on TikTok, Instagram, the social media platforms, and then they can consume the music, and that's just given it. I think that's given it another leg of acceleration in terms of that global growth.
And then on the supply side, you have the shift of economics, where the artists used to make their money on record sales, you know, and now they're making it on the road, so they're seeing the global opportunity. They're touring longer, in more markets, which is another point then of driving the growth. In our mind, it really is a supply-driven market. The latent demand is there for the reasons I talked about. You have seven million potential fans. So you just need a small portion of them to show up at some concerts, and when the artists go out, we're seeing they're continuing to show up.
That's right, so you know, I think there's been some concern around consumer weakness, et cetera.
Yeah
... but at this moment, it appears that live events are not experiencing any slowdown in supply or demand. So, you know, as you look out over the next couple of years, are you more concerned about the demand or the supply side for live music and live entertainment?
I'm not really concerned about either. I think on the demand side, and I maybe am making up a new metric, I haven't quantified it yet, but it's sort of the memorability-to-value ratio. So we have a business where two-thirds of our tickets are under $100. A third of them are under $50. The high-priced ones will get some press, but the vast majority are very affordable. And if you think about typical fan goes to one or two concerts a year. If you think about that event, how memorable it is, those are the things you're still talking about with your friends a couple months later: "Remember that night? That person got drunk. Remember we did this? Had a great time. Lost my voice screaming." You don't...
You spend, or you can spend, if you want to, the same amount on that as going out to dinner on another Friday night with your wife. But it's just much more memorable. We just haven't seen the fans show an interest in cutting back there if they're going to be cutting back. I think that's fundamental to live music, even more so than other forms of live entertainment, 'cause live music, you're engaged in. It's as much a social outing as it is an outing to see the artist, and you're not passively sitting in your chair watching it. You are active. You're on your feet, you're dancing, you're singing, you're drinking with your buddies. It's just a much more engaged level than you have with most other forms of entertainment. That's consistent, again, consistent globally.
Yeah.
Keep reminding ourselves, since we live in the U.S., where we tend to be so U.S.-centric. It's a big global world out there, and behavior is the same or more so. And then on the supply side, I think what we see is the artists that have been touring are continuing to tour, but every year, for these reasons we talked about, because of the distribution, because of the social media platforms, you're adding more artists into the mix, so you have more people touring. So I was looking at some data the other day. In 2015, we had about 90 artists that we sold over 100,000 tickets for. And 100,000, you know, those are people that would be in some amps, some larger, you know, mid-sized, but good-sized acts. So that number by 2019 had grown to about 150, 155.
This year, we expect that number to be about 250. So again, you've got a top number that are selling over 500,000, and yeah, that's continuing to grow some, particularly as you see continued growth in the stadium volume, but it's that hundred thousand plus that's really telling you the robustness of the supply that's continuing to grow on a global basis.
That's great. So pretty clear then, the demand for live entertainment and events remains strong at this point. Where would you expect to see signs of a slowdown? And, you know, are you seeing any moderation, for instance, in secondary ticket market pricing?
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, as much as I say structurally, I'm not worried, believe me, we're paranoid every day, when a tour goes on sale, how is it selling? How is it selling at every price point, top to bottom? Is it still selling front to back, which is what traditionally a show would sell? What's happening in the trough? Are you continuing to see the normal flow-through? Are shows closing well? What's happening on site? So we're looking at all of those metrics on an ongoing basis. I gave some of them at earnings. I think that on all these points, we continue to monitor. We're not seeing issues, and so we'll just kind of continue on that path.
That's great. So let's talk about fan growth just a little bit. I mean, Live Nation has grown attendance at a roughly 8% CAGR over the last decade. So how do you continue to maintain that strong momentum? And then also, like, what initiatives do you have in place to expand the fan base, you know, beyond the traditional concertgoer into the more casual?
Right. You know, this is again, where it's great. We talked about the tailwinds of the business. When you have the structural tailwinds of globalization and fan spend on experiences, and then you have the ability to globalize, it's nice when the world spots you a mid- to high single-digit growth before you even have to do the things you need to do to continue to drive double-digit AOI growth over time. So, but what do we need to do? Again, it goes back to globalization. We need to really continue to develop Latin America. We need to develop Asia to a much greater extent. Europe, I think, has a good ways to go in terms of the hyper-localization that we've been focused on for almost a decade now in the U.S.
I think it also ties in when you look out over time. It ties into our venue strategy as well, particularly internationally, where we know we have the latent demand. We've seen that we can bring the supply. There are some cities, if you looked at your top 100 cities globally, where you'd say that infrastructure is not optimal, that they don't have an arena, the arena's too small, the arena's 50, 60 years old, needs refurbishment, doesn't have premium, doesn't have a hospitality that's gonna let you gross in the same way that you can gross in other markets.
Mm-hmm.
So over the next five to seven years, I think an important part of our growth strategy will be continuing to add and enhance that international arena portfolio. And I use it broadly. You know, in some cases, South America, we're seeing great opportunities for a Sol-type model, or GNP now, sorry, that we have in Mexico City, where it's a bit of an amphitheater meets a stadium. I think we've learned a lot from the Adele World experience. That was a raging success. Can you take some of those sort of temporary, semi-permanent, open venues and do more with that? So we'll look at different ways, but that is the additional benefit of our venue strategy is it's a great strategy to make money in and of itself.
It's also a great way that we can help continue to drive that fan growth globally. In terms of getting the fans, you know, I think we're in a different spot. We used the example before of Bad Bunny, who's been one of our top touring artists over the past few years. If you look at his social following, his streaming following, he has about 150 million fans.
Mm.
And his last tour, which was a massive tour, he only needed about three million fans to go to the show, so he only needed a 2% penetration rate. So we don't really have that issue of saying: Oh, I need to get that casual fan to show up. It's a minority of people that go to shows. Those that go to shows tend to go to one or two. I think if we can show up in the market with an artist they like, with a good value proposition with the tickets, we do a good job of marketing the show. I think that part of the equation is an impediment at any level.
That's great. So let's just touch upon that international growth aspect a little bit more. Like, how do you prioritize between entering or further developing new markets versus expanding in existing ones? And maybe you just touch upon also how it impacts the economics of your business.
Yeah
as you expand internationally.
We're decentralized, so we don't think about it in terms of making a trade-off between, am I doing Latin America? Am I doing Asia? We have a team that's very focused, a few teams focused on the U.S. We have a festival team in the U.S. We have a promotion team. Internationally, we have a Latin America team, with presence now in all the major markets. Europe, we have a U.K. team. We have a Europe team. We have an Australia-New Zealand team. We have an Asia team. So each of those teams has their own business development resources that are tied into some global folks to make sure we have consistency of standards and thoughtfulness in terms of how we approach the different deals.
Every one of those teams has a mandate that is on a market-specific basis and country-specific basis, in many instances, what it is that we're trying to build. We're not making trade-offs. No concern, I think, as we've demonstrated now to our investor base over the past few years, that we are getting quality returns when we make those CapEx investments or we make those M&A decisions, that we now have, I think, the support of our investors to say, "Yes, if there's opportunities, go get them. If there's more opportunities, that's great, continue to go after them." We don't see right now, really, either from a resource or from a capital standpoint, constraints in building out that business. In terms of the economics, the real difference in the economics is not North America versus international.
It's, well, is this person in one of our venues where I get the beer money, the parking money, the service fee, or not? That's the driver of the economics. And then, obviously, festivals are different economics. North America economics are good in totality because we have a lot of people going to amphitheater shows here. We don't have that internationally, so we have a higher skew of fans going to shows in our venues in the U.S. But that's, it's not because it's the U.S., it's because this is where we have our amphitheater.
Mm-hmm.
We'll do just as well with a GNP in Mexico City or just as well with some arenas that we have in Europe.
This year's been a strong year for amps.
Yeah.
And I think 2025 is setting up to be a strong stadium year. Can you just sort of discuss the pipeline and mix for live events in 2025?
Yeah.
As well as the, you know, financial implications of stadium events representing a larger-
Yeah
... portion of overall?
Yeah, I think right now, 25 is shaping up to be a bit of the best of both worlds, where we see very strong growth in our stadium volume, but also continued growth in our arena volume at this point. That's looking good. So that growth right now is probably a little more international than North America, but North America growing as well. But that's also just a factor that this year you saw U.S. continue to grow more than international. So as you get the normal year-to-year fluctuations, what happens in a year like this year, that we've talked about a lot on our calls, is that you tend to not be, you don't have big fan growth, you don't have big revenue growth. You have AOI growth, which means you have margin expansion.
Mm-hmm.
So we've told everybody, great, this year we're having margin expansion. Next year, we'll have, again, good fan growth, we'll have strong revenue growth, and then we'll have a foot race on our margins between a high-priced, lower-margin stadium ticket. But if you continue to build out your venue portfolio, and you continue to perform well there. So, but that's, that to me is, doesn't matter. I haven't even spent any time trying to model it, because I think it's, that margin question is irrelevant. What I care about is what's the cash AOI we're generating? I'm never gonna turn down a stadium tour 'cause it hurts our margin.
I'm never gonna tell an artist, "No, you should lower your ticket price, because that means we'll have less margin dilution on your show." I mean, right, it just. When you stop and think about every action that we would take in order to preserve margin, it would be pretty dumb. So, right now, again, I haven't even tried to model it. I'm not concerned about it. It'll be a great year on every front, we expect, next year, because of that supply coming back on the stadium side in particular.
So just because it's live, let's switch gears a little bit to your relationship with artists. 90% of artists' income at this point, or 95%, some huge number, is generated through touring. How much longer are artists touring for, and sort of how does that impact the economics, and why do artists choose Live Nation?
You know, I think we're proud of, you know, the whole longevity since 2005, and Michael being CEO, he's been very clear since day one: we are a service business here to serve the artist, and we're gonna create a business model that says, "We absolutely respect the fact that this is your art, that you should be the one to get the value from. We're a service provider.
We wanna take better care of you and pay you better than anybody else." And our business model is built around that, saying, "Yes, promotion's a low-margin business, and you're gonna give us the ability to make some money in secondary and tertiary profit streams, but we're always going to respect and wanna pay you well." When we talk about pricing, we absolutely believe they deserve the value of their show. We support them in that. We believe they deserve to control the distribution of the tickets, and we support that. So everything we do culturally is very much around where Michael started 20 years ago, of this is all artist first, and if we do a good job supporting them, we'll turn out fine. So that's the core of our thesis.
I think they're touring more now for the reasons we've been talking about on a-
Yeah
... because it's a globalizing business. I looked at a few tours over the past few days that we have planned. It's hard because you need to get the repeat of the same artist to have apples to apples.
Yeah.
But I think pretty typical, you'd see an artist have 20%-50% more dates on their tours, which is really almost all international dates.
Mm-hmm.
Because now the conversation. Ten years ago, the conversation was, "Hey, let's talk about the U.S. tour, maybe some European dates." Now, it's the: "Hey, let's talk the three-year plan. What's the role of the U.S., Europe, Latin America? Do we do Asia? Where do we do festivals in there versus tours? How do we think about that cycle?" So the conversations are much more extended, and in particular, the international legs are a lot longer.
That's right. So you talked a little bit about artists performing at your own venues, how the, you know, much better economics there. You've announced plans to open 14 venues, I think, globally over the remainder of 2024 and through 2025, up from 12 planned earlier this year. How do you evaluate those potential opportunities for, you know, both strategic fit as well as for financial returns? And also, if you could just touch upon, you know, the typical return profile of those projects.
Yeah. Yeah, so tying back to part of what we talked about before, our focus on venue is really, really on market expansion, right? You know, because that's where we get the double win of attractive venue economics and also feeding the overall strategy of continuing to build our fan base. So we're not looking at, "Hey, how do we go put in an arena somewhere to compete with the arena that exists?" That's not the you know, we've talked a lot over the years about Austin being a prime example of that. There was no great amphitheater in Austin, so we built it. We're building an amphitheater in Richmond, Virginia. There is no amphitheater. There's nothing of that capacity. We're gonna expand the marketplace doing that.
So from a strategic standpoint, what I would say is, when we talk about arenas in Europe, whether we're gonna build them or buy them, we're looking at where there is really a void in that top market in terms of having a building that has the ability to deliver grosses that are gonna be attractive to artists to want to come and perform in those buildings. So that's the strategic intent. Financially, we've talked. We generally have a threshold of at least 20% for these investments in major refurbishments or in new buildings. I think we're a relatively natural owner of the buildings in a sense, relative to a financial player. I think we're a pretty good operator.
I don't know if we're that much better of an operator than somebody else that we get hired, but I think we're as good as anybody else, and then I think where we differentiate is, goes back to the market expansion point, is we have the ability to help drive utilization, which if you have a couple of levers at the end of the day, when you build a building, it's what am I getting when people show up, and how many people are showing up, so the utilization is critical, so when we talk about building an amphitheater in Richmond, well, somebody just building it and saying, "If I build it, will they come?" is gonna have more uncertainty, different risk profile, as opposed to us saying, "No, we know we can build it because we know how shows get routed.
We know that there's a demand. We know that there are gonna be able to be shows there." Or the same over in Europe. If we have, if we're adding arenas, the artists are gonna be attracted to the arenas that can gross the most. We know how they route. We know the sequencing. We can have a much greater degree of confidence and expectations of a utilization that are probably different than what somebody else might have.
Mm-hmm. So and how do you think about sort of investing that next dollar and the trade-offs as you contemplate between buying, I think building, which you talked about a lot-
Yeah.
And then partnering as well?
Yeah, I think it's situational. Again, you're not. When you're talking about Europe and arenas, you're not walking into a city and going, "Oh, I got three options. I got a guy who has one wanting to sell. I got three pieces of open land I can trade off each other." You're going in, and you're usually dealing with the hand that you're dealt. So in some cases, you might have either a municipal-owned or some investor-owned building that's old, hasn't been invested in 40, 50 years, so that might be a purchase opportunity. If you're gonna build, you generally need strong municipal support because these things have all sorts of codes and entitlements and issues, so you need to make sure you have a market that wants that and embraces that.
Internationally, I think we probably are, you know, we do partner some with Oak View and with others because they bring us more capacity.
Mm-hmm.
It's a simple way I would think about it. Tim's a world-class at development, spends his life on the plane, goes around, brings us opportunities we wouldn't have otherwise had. We're happy to partner with them. We're happy to partner with others in situations where they can bring that sort of new opportunity that we wouldn't have otherwise had ourselves. I don't think of it as a capital allocation question so much as it's just what's the opportunity that exists in that market. I'd rather look at it as, here's the hundred markets that matter in the world, and what are the opportunities in each one of those, and how do we pursue them?
Okay. So if we could just dig a little bit more into sort of what the Venue Nation strategy contributes towards margin expansion, and particularly in terms of reducing costs or increasing your ancillary revenue streams.
Yeah.
-like VIP experiences, et cetera.
Yeah, it's really about driving high-margin spend by fans that we're capturing is really the strategy on the venue side. If we look at our amphitheaters historically, it was mid-single digit any sort of premium experience. Our target now, when we're developing a new one, is 30%. Give a lot more of that differentiated experience for people that wanna show up, and continue to enhance the overall general experience, what we're doing with bars, what we're doing with bathrooms, what we're doing with the overall setting, and then figuring out what are the whole range of use cases that people have when they come to a show. It's different when you go with your buddies versus your wife versus your daughter, so thinking about what are some of those use cases...
How do we just give fans the opportunity to spend the money they wanna spend?
Mm-hmm.
A lot of that becomes about eliminating friction, and yeah, I don't think we're doing anything necessarily new and groundbreaking. If you look at what arenas are doing today, you go in, you take a lot of their ideas. They're doing the exact same thing.
Okay, and so, like, to me, what are some of the ways that you're improving those fan experiences, and, you know, how does that impact the economics of your business?
I think it starts from when you show up. You have different levels of parking now, generally, in all of our amphitheaters. If you wanna do the GA parking, you gotta walk for a while, that's okay. If you want VIP parking, if you want valet parking, if you want platinum parking. So, again, it's a matter of you segment the market, you charge what the market's gonna bear. When you go in, do you want a very nice VIP club where you can sit down, have dinner, air-conditioned? Do you want just a mid-level club, where it maybe has a separate bar, no lines for the bathrooms, calmer setting with a little bit of shade? You know, do you wanna sit in a Rock Box?
Do you wanna sit in a Rock Box for 20 people? Do you wanna, do you wanna be in the pit? Do you wanna be in a VIP area in the pit? Do you wanna be on the lawn? So it's all about that segmentation and just making sure you're creating the opportunities for people to-
Spend that money that they, they wanna spend.
Yeah.
Yeah. So in what ways are you looking to sort of expand the relationship with just artists and fans and the live entertainment ecosystem more broadly? And then, you know, as part of that, sort of how far along do you believe you are in monetizing these direct relationships?
Yeah, I think there is a lot about what's the relationship with the fan? How do we help the artists build their relationship with the fan? I think as you look at the era of digital ticketing, if you look at artists wanting to really be brand managers themselves. They always have been, now they've got the ability to get some of that direct-to-consumer interaction. So we do a lot of work with artists on, we have signups of various forms for the tour, so they can start to have that data, start to build that direct relationship. We find that when we have that direct digital relationship with fans, it's much more effective in terms of our ability to communicate with them after the purchase.
Mm-hmm.
Are they interested in that VIP parking? Are they interested in a club? What's the opportunity to upsell? And similarly, we can work with brands who can deliver value to the fans for their experience. And what we find is the fans are very receptive to communication, interaction that we have with them if it's about enhancing their concert experience. If you're just peppering them with ads, that doesn't work, but if you're doing something that's actually gonna make the experience better for them, you're a Hilton Honors member, you get free entrance to the VIP club, or you're a T-Mobile customer, you get a free lunch, or... Those things are always gonna be welcome, valuable for the brands, and they're really...
But I'd say we're also still pretty early on in terms of the level of sophistication of doing that, and then also post-purchase, figuring out and having enough data, how do we really continue to build that lifetime relationship with the fan?
Mm-hmm.
I think we're still pretty early stages of that. A lot of that gets disrupted by COVID, and-
Yeah
... now you're rebuilding the data I have on you, because you go to one or two shows a year. I need to build that profile out.
Interesting. Let's talk a little bit about ticketing. Just what are some of the learnings from the major tours that you've ticketed over the past year, and, you know, how do you connect with your customers through ticketing?
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, again, we see on an ongoing basis just how in demand tickets are. So I think if you think about the generations of Ticketmaster, for 40 years, Ticketmaster was truly focused on venues, and they weren't that concerned... and then, by implication, sports teams, because most of the venues in the U.S. are owned by the sports teams. They weren't really bothered about the consumer, they weren't really bothered even about the promoter.
So if you then look next generation, over the past 15 years since we bought Ticketmaster, there's been a tremendous focus on making Ticketmaster a great platform to sell concert tickets, which people forget, but it wasn't 15 years ago, and if you look at it in comparison today, absolutely would stack it up with anybody in terms of what it can do to sell tickets. And you look at the innovations that we've had at Ticketmaster, the digital tickets, the Verified Fan, Face Value Exchanges, just the capacity reinforcement to stop bots, to handle the volume of major on sales, all of those. Ticketmaster's absolutely world-class in. And that's been a very important investment and critical to our Live Nation promotion side, who's taking $12 billion of risk underwriting the promotion of shows.
They need to know that if I'm gonna do that, I'm gonna be able to sell the tickets, cover my risk, and make some money. So I feel very good about the progress that Ticketmaster's made over that period, being a great platform for selling tickets of all sorts. Now, what I think we've seen over the last couple of years is Ticketmaster just has to now get better on the consumer side.
Yeah.
It has to get better in terms of really thinking through... It's not enough just to say, "Yes, I made the venue happy, and they took a whole bunch of service fee money. I made the promoter happy, and their tickets got sold." What is it we need to do on the consumer side to continue to make that a better experience? I think a lot of that has to do with better transparency. We moved all of our venues in the U.S. to all-in pricing. We've been advocating for all-in pricing. I think there are some other enforcement on bots issues that haven't been done, some other things around banning spec tickets. As I said earlier, we're very strong supporters of giving artists more control over how their tickets are distributed and ultimately resold.
But really underlying all that is better communication, better transparency. How do we let the fan know what to expect, what's going on? You know, I'd love to make the front row a mile wide and have it cost $39. That's not reality. So I get that, at times, Ticketmaster will inherently bear the criticism when 10 million people wanna buy 1 million tickets, and so 90% of the people are gonna be inherently unhappy. That is the nature of the industry that we're in, but we can absolutely do a better job around some of the pieces to set up the expectations in terms of what fans should be experiencing.
Sure, sure. So no question, there's been a lot of progress and many improvements on, with Ticketmaster, but just touch upon sort of the DOJ and Ticketmaster for briefly. Maybe you just provide a little background of your viewpoint of the issue and maybe why you originally acquired Ticketmaster, how it's been integrated-
Yeah
... into the broader company, and then also just give us an update on the process, the timing, you know, any impact to your business until the case is resolved.
Yeah, if you dial it back, why did we make the acquisition fifteen years ago? Number one was Live Nation was a B2B business, wanted to be B2C. Back then, you didn't have the digital sophistication to where you could get that data without being the actual platform, and so that was a major driver. We just saw B2B companies were gonna get squeezed and not have the same strategic importance as a B2C company. And then the next was what I just talked about, which is we didn't think there were any good-
Mm.
-concert at the time. We felt if we were in control of one, that we could do a much better job, which would allow us to grow more. So, you know, we tried to semi-build one on our own. That didn't work out, ultimately led to the Ticketmaster acquisition and the progress that we've made over the past fifteen years.
How important is it to Live Nation that Ticketmaster remain part of the company?
Look, I think it's a nice compliment. We believe that we have... you know, gives us the ability to earn more money on the risk that we take in putting on the concert.
Mm-hmm
... which we think is reasonable. I talked earlier about decentralization. We run the businesses very separately. The concert people are told and incented, "Drive your concert business." The Ticketmaster people are paid, incented, strategically pushed, "Just build your business. Don't worry about the two." So I, I'm not in any rush to separate them, but I do think that if you look at what Ticketmaster is now, it's an enterprise ERP system with strong growth, strong margins, very sticky installed base. It doesn't get compared that way all the time. The concert promotion business has more others that you can compare it to, but I think they're both great businesses. They would be great businesses.
I'm not in, you know, looking to force them to be separate, but I also know strategically with confidence that the right thing for us to focus on now is continue to build both of them. I expect we're gonna prevail. I don't expect we're gonna have major changes to how we operate through the process we have to go through with the DOJ. But, you know, I can't ultimately control some of the politics, so we'll just continue to build each of the businesses the best we can. You know, we're in process now. We're going through motions back and forth with the DOJ.
I think next year is a period of discovery and depositions, and then, you know, the trial would begin in early 2026, if nothing between now and then happens that would let us come to an agreed resolution.
Yeah. Okay. Switching back here to, like, the lines of the business, sponsorship has been a significant driver of revenue for Live Nation. Been a great area of business for you guys. Can you just discuss recent trends in sponsorship and your expectations for growth in this arena?
Yeah. You know, I think we've benefited. Again, it's always nice to have tailwinds in businesses. As brands are seeing that some of their traditional ad platforms aren't degrading, particularly on the brand side, they're looking at us. They're looking at live experiences in general. Once we hit one hundred million fans a few years ago, I think that was a bit of a tipping point, where the brands were realizing, "Wow, this is actually now one hundred and fifty million fans. This is a tremendous base that we can go and we can connect with." As I said, I think the experiential side, brands are also learning what I talked about in terms of adding value. It's not a matter of putting up a thirty-second ad and hoping somebody's paying attention.
It's about how do I create some value for the fans and that has real engagement, real positive reaction, positive purchase intent after, positive recollection, so it's a very high-performing ad. We're very proud. Our renewal rate is 80% plus, which when you're in an ad business, long-term contracted, not just a basic CPU, that means we're delivering for those brands, and they're seeing the value out of what they've been spending, and right now, one of the great trends we have is this, what we've been talking about all morning, globalization. Mastercard example is a great example. We took our so-called international card partner from a handful of countries to 20 countries, and they're able to act global and local, right?
They have specific country-by-country strategies, but then they have a global umbrella, and we can work with them to tailor to the local market what they need, while continuing to drive that global brand presence. I think that's gonna continue to be a good growth area.
Great. So I think this is the last question. So what are your key priorities? And which area of your business would you like to be focused on for the next three to five years? You know, what innovations, new technologies, you're most excited about-
Yeah
... in the live event space?
Again, all starts with continuing to drive that fan growth, right? We'd go from... When we go from one hundred and fifty to two hundred million fans, all the other pieces will continue to do well. Very excited about the Venue Nation side of the business and both the Venue Nation and the concert side, particularly Latin America and Asia, as we really grow out those markets. Ticketmaster, the technology, they're continuing to build there to make it a better fan experience, the focus on the fan experience. At the same time, figuring out how do they continue to grow their revenue stream outside the service fee, so that business continues to grow. And then the sponsorship that we just talked about, continuing to grow that double digits is important part of what we'll do over the next several years.
That's great. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.