All right, great. Thanks, everyone. Let's get started with our next session for today. My name is Stephen Laszczyk, I'm the Lead Entertainment Analyst here at Goldman Sachs. We are excited to welcome to the Communicopia Technology Conference, Michael Rapino, the CEO of Live Nation. Michael, thank you so much for being with us today.
Thank you. Catching your breath?
Yes. I wanted to start off high level. Michael, at your Investor Day back in November, you outlined the opportunity for growth in the live music industry, and the opportunity for that growth to accelerate from the 8% annualized growth that we've seen over the last two decades, which I thought was very impressive. It's an industry that's come from $5 billion of revenue back in 2000 to $35 billion just last year. So I'm curious for you to talk a little bit about the high-level opportunities, the secular tailwind that you see playing out over the next decade, and really why you think growth can accelerate from here.
Sure. Thank you. Yeah, when we look at the industry in general, it's at its best time and has a great growth opportunity. If you just look at supply-demand, you look on a global basis, this demand that's been unlocked through the Wi-Fi and the Internet and the phone now has just unlocked all of this consumer base that wasn't there. For 50 years, the music business was very controlled: the record labels, MTV, radio, the gatekeepers. So the business was entirely a U.S., Western Europe business. That was it. You had 100 dates, you toured 60 in America, you did 30 in Europe. That was the only place you could really make money, it was the only real controlled place where they sold CDs, where you could sell a ticket, where the demand was there.
Napster and Internet and everything unlocks, and all of a sudden you have a fourteen-year-old anywhere in the world with a phone this morning that knows the next Kendrick song. So that demand was always there, it just was never marketed to. Now, overnight, what we've seen is these incredible global consumer base of fans that want that artist. They want them to see them in São Paulo, they want them to come to Milan, they want them to come to... I was on the phone yesterday talking about a Nigerian opportunity we have, and how do we bring Drake there, and how do we bring big artists?
So these are markets where the demand unmet, probably, like, unlike any other industry you can think of, the consumer was there, the fourteen-year-old was there, they just weren't ever marketed to because of the old model. In the last five to ten years, that consumer now is marketed to every day on Instagram, TikTok, Spotify. So that has been the greatest kind of supercharge to the live music business in general. So you have this whole new consumer base of global consumers that were really under-serviced from an enterprise perspective, venues, ticketing, all of those things in Latin America, South America, Asia, that will get there and make this even a better business. And then you have the artist side. A similar story. The artists were under the gatekeeper model forever.
You hope to get signed by a label. They only sign so many every year. They push those forward on MTV, the radio, the playlists. A very select amount of artists would get pushed forward into the consumer base. Today, as you see, that consumer can go from anywhere in the world. So you can be sitting in Mexico City, launch a song, get it on TikTok, and you can be playing the Greek Theatre six months later. So this idea that there's this global artist base now, too, no matter what country you're from, you have now this complete free distribution access point to go market. So my fourteen-year-old tells me about a band from India that he found out about through TikTok, right? That never happened. That band in India, first of all, never got a shot.
Maybe one day they pilgrimaged their way to Britain and hoped to get a label deal and maybe put on radio, and statistically low odds. So you have this incredible moment right now where you have no other industry that probably has this supply-demand unlocked on a global basis, thanks to the Internet.
That's a great overview. Maybe just thinking about how Live Nation fits into that and the opportunities ahead of yourself. You target fan growth to 200 million fans, double-digit AOI growth over the medium term. What do you see as some of the most important execution points that Live Nation needs to achieve over the next 3 to 5-year period to work towards those goals and achieve those goals?
We've already started, and you know, one of the biggest principles to Live Nation, when we launched this company, you know, me going from Toronto to New York, to London, to LA, my years in London, it was very clear to me this is a global business. We started really early, realizing that we needed to be everywhere in the world. That artists, when they started to tour, if you had an office in Cape Town, if you had an office in Colombia, you were value add. You look in the last 10 years, we've gone from 20 to over 50 offices globally. Continue to expand on a global basis. We're always looking at Latin America, Middle East, Asia, Pacific Rim, Eastern Europe.
All of those markets, we're looking to launch an office in, launch a promoter, a festival, a venue, any one of those pieces. So you know, part of the benefit of Live Nation is we're already in most markets that matter. Maybe we have low market share in a lot of those new markets, so we have a great opportunity to grow there. But as the water kind of rises with this global supply-demand, as the market leader, our numbers will go up because our fan base will increase, and as our fan base increases, so do our revenue and our businesses. So most of it is just being in these markets, being able to capitalize on the Latin America, the Asia, India, all of these markets that are going to grow. It's just a matter of, can you get there?
Can you build a venue? Can you have some infrastructure to monetize and professionalize that business?
You mentioned the artist relationship and the variety of artists-
Mm-hmm
... that you can now tap into as part of the global platform. You spend a lot of time working with artists directly, developing their careers, their touring careers.... Can you talk a little bit more about how those conversations have evolved over your career and, you know, really what the artist is most focused on today, as it relates to the opportunity in touring for them?
Yeah, you know, the artist is again over the last ten, fifteen years of Live Nation, we've seen it. You know, the center of the wheel for that artist financially has become the tour. You know, again, for fifty years it was get a record deal. That was the payday. Get a long-term re-record deal, get a big advance, and then you went on the road to sell some CDs. That's obviously changed over the last ten years. Now, as a new artist, you're probably barely getting a check from the label. You're getting some distribution and marketing services. But the road is where you will make your fans long term and where you'll make most of your revenue, whether you're an up-and-coming artist or obviously a stadium act.
It's been a kind of a professionalization of the business. Again, the labels were long professionalized. They had always been kind of consolidated, public companies. For 30, 40 years, it was always about the labels and MCA versus Universal versus... Promoters were always a little Wild West car salesmen. We were the first company to kind of professionalize them, brought them together, consolidated them on a global basis, and had started setting some new standards. As we saw it, the artist wanted and every artist wanted a better service. They wanted someone that thought globally. Big piece of their business now. They want to sit with someone in Los Angeles and say, "Where do I tour next year? Should I go to Latin America, or should I do more dates in America or Canada?" Globalization is big.
They're all consumer direct brands now. These are incredible artists. They've all got, you know, on the low end, 10 million to 200, 300 million followers. They're brands now. They know where their fans are. We just recently successfully did this incredible ten-night run with Adele in Munich. The idea that we would sit there and say, "You know, you're not going to want on a tour, but we're going to take a bet that you're going to sell 700,000 tickets in one city. We're going to spend $100 million building this incredible temporary stadium," world's greatest stadium, because it's not a football stadium, it's an end-stage with the largest video screen in history.
You don't make those bets if you don't, one, know fan data, so the artist knows where her fans are. Adele would know how many fans she has in Europe, how many in Munich, how many follow her, how big of a potential radius. So the artists now are much, much smarter around their data. They're mini corporations. They're looking for partners that understand data, understand globalization, understand pricing, monetization. If I'm going to build this incredible big show, it's going to cost. You know, I'm going to have 72 transport trucks on the road. I'm going to spend millions a week in production costs. I need an equal partner that understands how am I going to monetize that. Three shows a week, how do I best price this?
How do I make sure that when I get home, I didn't spend all my money on production? I covered the cost, put an incredible show on, and had a return on my investment. So there are many corporations that got their great accountants, lawyers, business managers, product managers. You know, the Beyoncés of this world, they're a mini corporation. They're brand strong, and we've just had to continually elevate our game, hire better and better data scientists, hire better marketing, brand people, globalization, understand, you know, the markets to them, know the difference between what it's going to cost to tour in Europe versus America.
So, you know, really, in the last ten years, the game has elevated from a mom-and-pop shop to a global business, and that artist now wants, much like they want a global record label that can think globally, they want a global promoter with great local and global resources to help them.
It seems like that data and scale gives you more comfort in managing the risk and the risk profile of committing capital to an artist, and minimum guarantees are a big point of the contracts, and you're also balancing that with the ethos of wanting to pay the artist top dollar. Is it fair to say that that competitive advantage at scale is what allows you to win that business and, you know, could help you accrue more artist supply over the coming years?
Yeah, I would say we are by far the most professionalized promoter in the business, so being able to sit down and build that global plan, local plan, whatever the artist needs are, to make sure their needs are met, understand their consumer pricing strategy, make sure that they get their return and ours, we would be by far the best at that.
Got it. Maybe switching gears and focusing on your concerts business this year, there's been a lot of focus on the mix shift in the slate this year away from stadiums and towards amphitheaters. Could you maybe talk a little bit more about how that mix shift is impacting your concerts segment this year, and particularly in the back half of the year? And then a higher level question, I'm curious, longer term, should investors think about these supply shifts as normal course, something that we should come to expect, or are there ways you think over time you could perhaps create more consistency in the supply that comes to market year in and year out?
Yeah, I think if we, you know, zoom out, this has been a very consistent industry. I think, you know, as you mentioned, I don't think there's another industry you know of that has an 8%-9% compounded growth for the last 20-25 years and through recessions and else. So, as I've said before, I believe in the next decade, that 8%-9% will continue to be the beacon. This will be an industry that we should look at to have continual global growth on an annual basis. Let's get through, you know, last two years and this year. Let's group all that into COVID-related up and downs. You know, we doubled our business in two years, from 2019, 2020 to 2023.
You know, you're not going to grow at 30%-40% a year. So we had some incredible pent-up demand, and this year is the first year we're probably feeling a little bit of the hangover effect of that huge stadium business for two years. So we always knew this year was gonna be a little light on stadiums, but we were gonna do our best then to monetize our venues, our amphitheaters, where the business walks in our door, and we can manage it. So we're very proud this year that, you know, we always used to hear these things like air pockets and all this stuff coming out of COVID. The fact that we grew almost 80% for two years, and this year we're still gonna be flat to growth, is exceptional, right?
I could have convinced you all, geez, 80%, I'll go down 30%, and we'll return to some number next year. The fact that we were able to grow this year off that incredible comparable, we're very proud of. We look at 2025 to start to be back to normalization, if you call it, of this ongoing 8%-9% annual growth for consistency. We know next year's gonna be a monster stadium year. We lost a little bit in Europe this year because of the Olympics, so that affected our stadium business. Probably have a little bit of 2026 World Cup stadium pull back in America, but it'll be somewhere else. But we look next year to be a really big stadium year.
But to your bigger question, anyone should look at this business and just come away with, this is gonna be a continual 8%-9% great growth industry. Some years up and down a little bit, but we'll be more consistent going forward now that we're through kind of the backwash of the COVID overhang. So strong growth ahead for the next decade, and anytime the industry grows, that means our business. We tend to over deliver against the industry, but we think we'll ride that wave well.
You mentioned stadiums coming back next year. As you think down the venue profile, amphitheaters, theaters, and clubs, how do you see them shaping up for 2025?
You know, next year looks really strong. We see our... You know, it's still early, so you got-- most things are set in stone, but there's always things that shift. But our stadium business in 2025 looks like it's bigger than 2023 right now. So that's a big, big number. Our arena business for 2024 looks bigger than it was this year, and we had a good arena year. And I think our amps will be consistent to where we are now. So we think it's probably the best of everything next year, a strong high on the top end and consistent on the amphitheater end.
That's great. Maybe switching to the demand side, even with the headwind from stadiums this year, you mentioned Live Nation's sold 118 million tickets through the middle of July, which is up relative to where you were at this point last year. That said, we've seen some companies in the travel and leisure space over the last couple of months speak to a weaker economy, maybe some reversion to the mean coming out of COVID. I'm curious what you're seeing on the demand front through the end of the summer, heading into the fall. Any pockets of weakness across the footprint?
You know, we don't see it. And you almost hate saying it because everyone else is saying it. But you know, we do think we have a very unique product, right? We are not the theme park. I have three young boys, and it doesn't matter if I take them this week or May, as long as I tell them sometime we're gonna go to Disneyland, they'll be okay. But my son wanted to see Green Day last week. I had to do it, right? That's the one scarcity moment that Green Day's in town. So we have this great thing called, you know, scarcity. Probably like the NFL has it, right? If they're reporting numbers, I don't think anyone in the NFL is gonna say that they're feeling any pullback.
You had to see the Chargers kick Oakland's ass on Sunday Live. It didn't, you couldn't see it a week later, sort of, to Oakland fans. But, you know, so we don't see the pullback. We think that there's, you know, a bunch of factors. Pricing, as much as it makes headlines on the, on the top end, it's still the most affordable opportunity out there. Average 75% of tickets are under $100. Most half the tickets are under $50. Still look at it compared to sports. We've never been able to figure out this PR struggle, but, man, sports is like a. It's a badge of honor to say that the f- you know, that the courtsides were $7,000, and you're horrible if you charge $800 for a, for a front row concert.
Incredibly affordable opportunity in the big picture. You can stack it up to sports, theater, a good night out at a restaurant. Concerts are always gonna be much more bang for your buck and cheaper, accessible. Number two is, as I said, the scarcity of the moment. These artists, although we hear a lot, they tour, they tour every three, four years, once in your city, not eighty home games a year. So that's scarcity. Then the third is, you know, the great advantage and disadvantage of our industry is this consumer base is so passionate. These are music is inspires. It's one of the most passionate consumer experiences in all of our data. You ask them over and over, it ranks number one, two. It's higher than any other Kodak moment that they experience.
So they're very passionate fans. They wanna connect with that artist. There's no digital duplicate, replication here. You cannot watch that show at home. You do not get goosebumps when you watch it on Apple TV. So we're really lucky. We're in an industry where you've got to go see it to feel it. The artists put on incredible show, better and better every year. Their production's great. They've risen to the occasion. So to go for that spectacular one or two times a year, that Kodak moment of memory, we still look at consumers, and they will make sure, even if they don't go to Disneyland or maybe put off the dishwasher, the one or two times a year they're gonna go with their kids or their wife or their friend, this is still a most really impactful moment for them.
Let's talk about some of the ways you're looking to meet that scarcity with capacity on the Venue Nation side of the business. You've been coming increasingly focused on building out your portfolio of owned and operated venues. I think at the moment, you have an active pipeline of about 40 venues across the globe, with 14 major venues set to come in over the course of 2024 and 2025. Could you maybe talk a little bit more about where you see the greatest opportunity to increase the venue footprint, and how quickly you can really address and attack some of those opportunities to ramp the pipeline?
Yeah, you know, we've always been a venue operator. We lease a lot of venues, the Shoreline Amphitheatre down the street or The Fillmore, so it's in our DNA. Really, through COVID, we did a restructure and brought a lot of the pieces together under this Venue Nation strategy. It was really about where we were not doing a good job is we were never front-leading development. We were just kind of the back catcher. If you went and built a venue down the street, you did an RFP, and we gave you a twenty-year lease, and you took that lease, went to the bank and financed it. Always drove us a little crazy since the content drove it. We realized we needed to be in that front end of the business, too.
So instead of paying that incredible, huge lease for 20 years, what if we built it? What if we then managed it and could finance it? So that was the strategic shift to us 'cause we started to kind of compare when we put a show in a non-Live Nation venue, when we put a show in a leased venue, or put a show in a venue we own, and your return on capital is incredible on the third option when done right. So, Austin Arena was kind of our first big moment, where so let's build an arena in a white space market. Let's run it, build it, and manage it. And that's been an incredible 25+% return on capital.
So we think on a global basis, we always look at the market as there's a hundred cities that matter. They all wanna be New York. They all want a great venue. They all want Beyoncé. They all want entertainment. And outside of America, most of them don't have much infrastructure 'cause of soccer or football dominates the rest of the world. There is no NBA, no NHL. There's no brand-new Chase Center in Singapore or São Paulo or Mexico City. So we look globally, even though we're in those markets, and we're putting artists in beat-up, old venues, has-been arenas or cut-down stadiums or probably a lot of greenfields. In the middle of fields, we create products. We realize there's a great white space in the arena business outside of America.
That's our greatest opportunity, so, you know, we have now some arenas in Europe, and we think there's a great runway there. Everywhere from São Paulo to Rio, we think they're all underserviced, and we think we can build them effectively. The Austin model we love. We're not building a $1 billion-dollar Chase Center. We're building a $300 million-$400 million music venue, and we can get a great return on capital and expand the market. So that's our greatest opportunity.
What about on the refurbishment side? I feel like there's a whole host of amphitheaters that you might own or lease on a long-term basis that were built back in the eighties or nineties. There may be some opportunity for you to enhance the food and beverage and VIP portions of that business. I think Jones Beach was a great example this past year. How much of a runway is there in venue refurbishment and ROI that could come from those types of investments?
Yeah, we think that's our most obvious, biggest opportunity, and it just comes with in general. The business in general is becoming an area where premium pricing is something we can really look at at in these events. You know, if you look at what the sports business, they're ahead of us. You know, they used to have the Oakland Arena. Maybe they had a ring of suites, and then you look at the Chase Center, when they built the Chase Center, and they went in. And I remember when they were building it, they presented it to me, and they talked about the 17 different zones of premium. It's no longer, you know, sell a suite to a corporation for the year. It's, "How do I monetize a night?
How do I make sure that I have all this premium opportunity for a one-off event?" Our amphitheatre is kind of like the Oakland Arena. We still live in that older model of premium suites. Jones Beach would be the first example where we said, "You know, if we took our venue, which is average about 9% premium, if we can get to 30% premium, that's where most new arenas would be looking to do. You have huge unlock and opportunity. So Jones Beach would be the first, where we went from a crappy VIP to multiple VIP, multiple premium areas, upgraded food and beverage, and you've got the fan base already coming. We know if we upgrade, give you higher premium, our per heads are going to increase, and the return is...
We look on-site. Our return's 20%-30% return on capital when we have an existing venue with a good consumer base. They want a better experience. We just need to provide better opportunity and more products on the shelf that to satisfy that need. So we have a current program. We're working in-house with our design department and looking to roll out more VIP, more premium across all of our top amphitheaters over the next few years.
You mentioned some of the returns that you're able to generate on venue investment. Curious, looking at new builds, venue renovations. In the past, you've spoken to north of 20% ROICs. Curious, you're looking out over the next five, maybe 10 years, how much capital you feel like you can put to work at those types of returns, and, you know, is it a limitation of capital you're willing to invest or just the pace of opportunities that come about as the limiting factor to how quickly you can deploy that against that opportunity?
Yeah, you know, our balance sheet, we've been doing this for years. We're always adding 10, 15 venues through our current cash flow, so we have no balance sheet limitations, and if we did, there's always great financing opportunities in this space now. We've seen a big shift from residential, obviously, to these long-term commitments. You look in Austin, when we brought that to the bank with a 20-year committed revenue business, we got incredible debt against that business, so we're not worried about that. No, it's more really. It was first just we got to get our own infrastructure in place. We've been staffing up, building this Venue Nation development team over the last 3 years. We just made another big, great hire in Europe, hopefully a couple more on an international basis.
So we're building that infrastructure and that muscle so we can be first and, you know, so over the next five years, it's more our pace, growing faster, building the competency, and putting those deals in place. There's more opportunity than there is time right now. But the good news for us on the return on capital is there's no one we have to do. The advantage of being global is you don't have to go chase any one venue. You don't have to do Vegas if it doesn't make sense for me. I can do São Paulo, which absolutely makes sense. You can do, you know, we're looking in Cape Town right now, Johannesburg, where it's so underserviced. So we've got a lot of these on the board.
You're looking at long lead times, approvals, capital return, and we continue looking at which ones have the highest of it and rise it. And if ones aren't working, we can put them aside. So we think the return on capital is going to be the easy part. Hardest part today has just been the last three years, build the right team so you can be the leader in it.
I want to turn to Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster continues to attract new clients. So far this year, you've added 17 million net new fee-bearing tickets on top of the 21 million from last year and the 23 million from the year prior. Good track record of success. Can you maybe talk a little bit more about the driving force behind some of those Ticket wins, why Ticketmaster is winning out over the competitors in the space, and then looking ahead, how much more opportunity you think there is internationally for Ticketmaster to go after market share?
Yeah, I mean, Ticketmaster. Listen, ticketing, as we all see, it's a tough front door. You know, in today's world, consumers are never happy when they can't get a ticket. They might not have known before when they waited in lines, but today, the internet, you quickly know when you're trying to serve 500,000 tickets to 10 million people, you're waking up with 9.5 that don't like you instantly. So it's always been a tough business from a front door, but what Ticketmaster has continually done is built the best enterprise global platform.
If you are a sports team, if you're a venue, and you need, you know, the sports business, the most demanding business when you're servicing the Chase Center, when you're servicing the NBA team, the NFL team, the soccer team, in international, that's mostly your customer at that big venue. Highly demanding. Hundreds of different tools you need to develop for them so they can deliver their game day, their seasons, their charity, split up programs. They've always been the best at building a global enterprise that you, as the venue, you've got many options to pick from, but you got to find that Microsoft or Salesforce type enterprise that's evolved, that has CRM, that can plug into all my players, that's easily for my staff to use.
So we've been obsessed since we took over Ticketmaster to continue to elevate the enterprise platform. At the end of the day, that's number one tool that's on B2B. Make sure that venue who has options continually says: You know what? I like the other options, but they have the deepest connection, they have the most tools, the greatest data tools, the greatest way for me, the team owner or the venue owner, to use that and outsource that to Ticketmaster, much like their Salesforce decision, or their Microsoft decision. So there's no one that has invested as much as we have in enterprise platform for that customer, and it continue will win. And, so that's number one.
The marketplace side is still growing, the secret sauce advantage, because if you're the team owner, you want your own data, you want to sell on your own site, you want all that, which we've all turned around in the last 10 years. We took Ticketmaster over. It was a closed platform that didn't give data away. Today, it's an open platform that lets you take the data, right? You are the customer. So, and one of the great things, though, is if you're the San Francisco 49ers or the Warriors, you have your own database, you have your own agenda, but you also have a bunch of season tickets or single tickets to sell.
So putting them on the Ticketmaster Marketplace, using Ticketmaster's database to help sell those tickets, no matter where else they put tickets, they'll always find that they sell more tickets at tm.com than their own site or AXS or StubHub or wherever else they may be distributed. So marketplace-wise, they've done a great job of selling incremental tickets for the business customer. And on the enterprise, that's their core business. They've done a great job evolving, continuing evolving. We got some new AI tools we'll build into that over time, help you build your events better, help you price them. So continually building great enterprise, sticky software that the team owners, venue owners want to use on that. Now, globally is the great opportunity. Why?
Just because other than, you know, Canada, U.S., the U.K., maybe Australia, most other markets are really, really, you know, unsophisticated. Maybe they're still selling at retail, maybe they're still selling on their phone. Most of those markets are very, very old, antiquated systems. So anytime we launch, like we did in Brazil, and launch TM in Brazil and sell out festivals and bring these tools there, we see great opportunity. So most of Ticketmaster's expansion will be on an international basis in these markets that are underserviced, have maybe, maybe existing competitors, maybe, but nowhere near the technology that Ticketmaster's enterprise would have.
Sponsorship's been a great growth story for Live Nation over the last decade. I'm curious, looking ahead, where do you see the most opportunity for growth? And then as you think about stepping up perhaps some of these regional sponsors that have come into the vertical over the last couple of years, international or even global sponsors, what's the key pitch for them, and what is Live Nation doing to work with some of these sponsors and to get them up the value chain to spend a little bit more money with you guys?
Yeah, my sponsorship team, they're the unsung heroes. They have. We've got over nine hundred sponsors, and these six hundred plus salespeople are working every day with the biggest brands in the world. You know, when we launched Live Nation, we were looking for the name. I gave the creative brief to the agency, the creative brief of the NFL. And I said, "How do we come up with a name? We're kind of the NFL of music. Trusted if you wanna be in business with us." Thus, we came up with Live Nation. If you're a brand right now, you probably want our demographic, incredible demographic. We can actually tell you where they're gonna be on a Tuesday, so we have such, you know, direct data about that customer. It's very unique.
Unlike, you know, while you're trying to solve how to reach customers on social and advertising, and what's the new way to reach on scale, you can have some of your budget that says, "You know what? I just wanna make sure I reach 19-34 customer in San Francisco." Man, you have that customer and scale, let's develop a program for them. So as our business has become very data-driven, elevated our team, and can deliver against your acquisition costs and deliver you a real structured business, customer with results, our business is continually growing. So we have a very attractive customer base with the great tools now. There's no one in our business would be as sophisticated as we are. So we are the NFL, if you wanna call it.
If you want to talk to customers in the music business, which is a highly sought-after category, you're probably gonna say: You know what? Live Nation seems to be the place. I'm gonna go meet Russell and the team in New York, sit down with them, talk about my sales needs, my brand needs, my customer needs, see if they can develop a program to meet my needs. And we've had incredible repeat customers, and been able to grow this business ongoing. And one of the great, you know, side stories there in that business, called our commercials division, you know, is our Liquid Death story.
So we're also looking not just at how do we kind of have a sponsor, but, you know, Liquid Death was an example where we used to take a check for a plastic bottle of water, decided we wanted to go take a look at options, most about sustainability. And we lined up some companies that were in aluminum cans and had other offerings. Ended up meeting Liquid Death founder, gave him our business in return for a good size of equity check. I don't know, it was trading at $7.5 billion valuation. It's, I think, just recently at a $2 billion valuation.
We do look at our nine hundred product categories, and we are gonna continue to look at ways that maybe we don't take the check, but we can invest or create or co-own some of those opportunities since we have such unique distribution. You'll see some more of those ideas come to life.
That's great. Maybe just to finish it up here with a minute remaining. As you look out over the next year or two, top one or two priorities that you want the investment community to focus on, opportunities that you're most excited about executing against, and we're sitting back here next year, the investment story, looking ahead, where do you want Live Nation to be positioned?
Yeah, I think we're gonna be a business that we'll continually show that live industry is resilient, regardless of what economic challenges are going on. I think it's a very resilient industry. Our job, Joe and I, on the team, is to make sure any of the noise in the regulation side doesn't affect our business. It's business as usual, pedal, pedal down to the ground, and we're gonna grow this business aggressively as we have. And we think we'll continually be a story that over-delivers against which we've promised, given how robust this industry is.
Great. Michael, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thank you. Thank you, everyone.