Cameron .
Grab these guys?
Yeah.
That's always a rush from our next conference.
Oh, perfect timing.
Great. Let's get things started. I'm Cameron Mansson-Perrone, Morgan Stanley Music Live Entertainment Analyst. Before we start, I want to note that important disclosures, including my personal holdings disclosures and Morgan Stanley disclosures, all appear as a handout available on the registration area and on the Morgan Stanley public website. With that, I want to welcome back Joe Berchtold, President and Chief Financial Officer of Live Nation. Joe, welcome back.
Thanks a lot. I can tell I'm in the right room because Biff Lyons here.
Oh, yeah. Front and center. Joe, one year ago we were on stage here and you had just issued multi-year guidance for double-digit AOI growth over the next several years. Fast forward a year, 2024 in the books, I think you reported 17% constant currency AOI growth. Talk to us about what's helping drive that growth and as you look forward, what gives you confidence in sustaining that double-digit growth profile?
Sure. Hopefully you'll believe me this year. I mean, the first is just global. For us, we have a business that has no barriers. We have no tariffs. So one of the benefits, but we have no barriers, and just start with the basic numbers. The U.S. is, what, roughly 5% of the global population and it's over half of our fans. So the big transformation that we've talked about over the last 10, 15, 20 years is the artists now making all their money on the road. So they need to tour, married with the fact that these digital platforms mean that through TikTok, through Instagram, every fan, every 15-year-old girl in the world is listening to Beyoncé at the same time. They're discovering her, they're listening to her. That fan base exists. So we have global latent demand.
We've had a lot of focus, as you know, in the last five years in Latin America. We'll get more into that, but tremendous growth there has helped drive and was a big contributor last year to our growth. So on the one hand, we have global. On the other is, because of our scale, because of our global positioning, we are now positioned to do things we couldn't have done 15 years ago. When we talked at the Liberty presentation, a lot of that discussion was around venues. Well, we're now of a scale that we can have an organization that can be great at developing, designing, operating venues. We couldn't have done that 15 years ago at the scale we were as a much more U.S. business, U.S. amphitheater business.
So we've opened new avenues for profitability and we've got the global latent demand. And that puts us in a better position, I think, than ever as we look out at the next several years to say, yeah, we can continue to compound to double digits because we have the supply-demand tailwinds and we've got the new levers that we've been developing that we think can contribute in a substantial way.
You touched on the global part, but even in the U.S., we do an annual survey every year. And one of the encouraging things that we've seen and saw in this past survey is that it's not just growth here isn't just the same cohort of consumers going to more and more events. It's also a broadening out of the consumer base. And this past year we saw record highs of the number of respondents in our survey going out to an event. What do you think is happening either at the industry level or at the Live Nation level that's helping get a higher percentage of U.S. consumers to a show?
Yeah, I'll tell you one area I would have been dead wrong 10 years ago when we talked about where do we think our growth is coming from. I would have really focused then on international as well. And the extent to which we've been able to grow the U.S. fan base, I think we're 50%. I think we've gone from 40 million to 60 million over the last 10 years, something like that. It is the flip side of global. It's the hyperlocal. It's recognizing that we used to run Northern California as Northern California. Well, people on a Tuesday night are generally not driving from Santa Clara to San Francisco or vice versa to see a show. Those are different markets. In L.A., L.A. is a different market from Orange County is different from San Diego.
When you start saying for the same reasons that the fan everywhere, the fan in Orange County, not just the cool kid in North Hollywood, knows about this new artist now. Well, we can play the theater in both on Tuesday night and Wednesday night, and you're building that hyperlocal market. So I think that the fact that more people are going is a recognition that we are growing the market. We're expanding the market and building that fan base in more local areas where they can go. So it's the same underlying dynamic. And the funny thing is, one it means we can go to Buenos Aires with Coldplay, and the other it means we can go with the new alt- rock band can play in six spots between San Diego to L.A.
Yeah, a lot of that is, I think, comes to just the nature of meeting demand and supply. And when we think about the supply and how the touring ecosystem has changed, you have spoken in the past about the promotion business moving over the decades from local to then national to now more global. As that's happened and the touring industry has globalized, how has that changed the way that you run your promotion business?
Yeah, we run it with very much of a global perspective now because of that. Particularly coming out of COVID, we invested much more in a central team that's really responsible for working with the artist and saying, we can talk about the 40 shows in North America, okay, but really let's talk about the three-year plan. Let's talk about your, because we have the U.S., North America run, the Latin America run, the Asia run, the Europe run, the festival run in the US, the festival run in Europe. Let's map out the next three years. When do you want to work? You have kids, you want to take summers off. You don't have kids, right? You want to take this off, you want to do that. How do we sequence it? When are you releasing new music? How do we integrate that in?
So the conversations now are over an entire cycle that the artist wants to figure out how am I going out, how am I reaching fans, where's my established base, where am I developing new fans? So it's a much more strategic long-term discussion because we've built that organization centrally that has that capability. We've got a marketing organization. We have the marketing science behind it that understands exactly what can that artist do. So it's a substantially more professionalized, disciplined, analytical-based conversation than 10 years ago you would have been more on the reactive, oh, you want to go out for 40 days, here's our bid.
Yeah, and I think we're seeing the results from all of that effort. One of the more striking data points from your investor day in November was 20% growth over the past 10 years for top tours, up to 107 shows now. As you just mentioned, you're divvying up tours, so that's not necessarily an annual number, but that's still a lot of stops. How do you think about helping artists in terms of growing that going forward?
Yeah, again, so the focus is we know we have global latent demand. So our obsession is how do we expand the marketplace? How do we get more fans? We don't spend our time saying, oh, how do we go, we have to beat this other promoter to do this. It's all for us about how do you expand the marketplace? So to expand the marketplace, how do we bring new and greater value to the artists? How do we help use the data to give them insights on where they can tour, what they can do, come up with new ideas, residencies, festival tours, co-branded festivals? What are the ideas that make sense for that artist and how do we bring real value to them so that they have the desire to go out and see more of their fans? Pricing analytics, how do we help them make the most of what they want to do?
When you think about the international opportunity or aspect of growing that business and show count, how does your approach vary if it does from when you're maybe establishing yourself in a new market or how may your approach vary to cater to local preferences? What are the considerations there?
Latin America is a great case study of this, right? Because if you look over the past six or seven years, how we've approached that market, growing from two million fans to 15 million fans over that time period. First, we went in and we did a deal with Rock in Rio to get established in Brazil, to have a real brand presence with one of the top festivals in the world. Then over the course of a handful of years, we bought local promoters in Argentina, Colombia, Chile, and then we bought OCESA. So we bought brands, we bought local feet on the ground that would understand, hey, if I bring Coldplay, what markets, what cities can I bring Coldplay to? How many shows can they do in this city, that city?
And then with OCESA, you have the integrated super professional top executives in the world that help us understand what is the Mexican market and then how do we translate that further into Latin America more broadly. So we look at that, great success grown from 2 to 15. But again, if you look, step back, macro population of Mexico, Latin America is 500 million, 1.5x the population of the U.S. and still 1/5 the fan base of shows we're doing now. So going back to your first question, how do you keep growing?
Yeah.
You use macroeconomic numbers like that and you can say, well, I'm going to haircut it, this, that, fine. You're haircutting it, but you're still got a factor of 7.5 or 8 differential between the two that shows you have a lot of room to build those markets.
You threw out 2-15 for the audience. Are those less familiar? In Latin America, Live Nation grew from 2 million fans to 15 million fans over the last five years. OCESA, obviously, big business helped accelerate that. Do you think that that was just a vehicle through which you kind of pulled through scaling the business or do you think that it structurally changed your ability to execute in Latin America?
Absolutely structurally changed our ability. It gave us the foundation and we now have the ability between Mexico and the rest of South America to send our tours down there. We've got great capabilities to help us think through our strategy in all the markets down there. So no, OCESA has fundamentally changed our position in those markets.
Latin America has also given you a bigger footprint through which to grow Venue Nation, your operated venue portfolio. Let's focus on that for a little bit. Specifically, how should we think about the impact that has on your third-party business? Is there going to be some amount of shifting fans from third-party venues into your operated portfolio or do you see Venue Nation fan growth as being more fully incremental?
It's really 90% incremental. It's growing the market because our focus is we want to go to where the market isn't. We're not going to go compete in the U.S. and try to build an arena and compete against the billionaire NBA owners, right? We want to go where the demand exists, but the buildings don't exist. So we're building the building down in Colombia. It's a bit of a Estadio GNP- type building. But then look globally at what we're doing. We're renovating with OVG a building in Hamilton. That's going to create new high-end, great capacity in a market that's different than Toronto. Again, for the hyperlocal reasons that I was talking about, we're building a new building in Cardiff. We're doing that on our own, right? We bought a building in Lisbon, which needs a lot of renovation.
Now, they'll shift technically a little bit because some of the shows that used to be in a third party are now in ours, but we're going to dramatically increase the number of shows because we're going to have a great new building. We take over the lease in Helsinki, right? A building that's been in limbo for three years because it was owned by a Russian oligarch. He had to turn that over to a trust. We took a 20-year lease on it. We just announced the other day, right? So we'll now grow that market. That market hasn't had shows because that arena has been shut down. So we're looking all over and we're building up four amphitheaters that we're building in Richmond, Birmingham, Minneapolis, places that don't have amphitheaters.
So we're really focused on how do we grow the market overall. That's ultimately, that's how everybody wins. Right. That's how the artist wins because they have more they can go to. It's how the fans win because that fan in Minneapolis who's now going to have 30 amphitheater shows didn't have that last year. Big win for the fans. And obviously, we look at it as a win for our shareholders as we continue to grow our business and drive more AOI.
You call out a bunch of individual examples in terms of where you're making investments and historically you've talked to a 20% hurdle rate or return profile for those investments. Do you see any risk over time that those levels of returns attract more capital, more competition?
I think that we are in many respects a natural owner-operator of venues. You put outside the major sports ones. Because if you think about what are the key characteristics of the, what drives the economics of those buildings? I think we can operate it as well as anybody from a cost to operate it, from how good are we at food and beverage and inside execution. I think we're getting to be very good at the design and how do you integrate premium. But where we really have an impact that differentiates us from the financial investor or the person outside the industry is we can help drive utilization, right? Utilization is going to be your number one flex variable, if you will, around the economics of a venue.
So when we go in and we're operating a venue in Helsinki or we're operating a venue in Cardiff or Lisbon, as we're working with the artist on what are my 30 stops in Europe, once you get past the key stops, they're not particularly worried about is it Lisbon or Munich or is it Cardiff or Cork, is it, right? So we're able to drive utilization to those venues in ways that a financial player simply can't. And when we make the investment, we have a confidence in our ability to do that. And again, if you're a financial investor, how can you have that confidence knowing that you don't have the same input over where that content, where the artists are going to end up?
You've taken a lot of different approaches in terms of the exact business model across that portfolio from owning venues outright to exclusive bookings arrangements to leasing. When you think about that option set, is your all else equal preference owning outright or how do you think about the trade-offs of those different models as you're growing your portfolio?
Absolutely. Our preferred would be to own outright, but most of the time you're given a situation. Again, go back to the ones I used. Helsinki, the building exists. There's not going to be a second arena built in Helsinki. It's not a big enough market. The politics behind how that went from an oligarch to a trust meant the opportunity there is a long-term lease, and in that long-term lease, again, we'll count the beer money and the parking and so on. So that's what we're there. Lisbon, again, there was an opportunity to buy a building. So we're going to buy it. We're not going to build it from scratch. Oak View Group identified the opportunity in Hamilton, brought us in, so we did it jointly with them. Minneapolis was a local person, identified the opportunity, had the land, we did it with him.
Cardiff, we're doing on our own. Kansas City Amphitheater, we're doing with the city. So usually don't, we're not just a retail outlet that's going in and saying, oh, I'm just going to go pick how I want to do it. I'm not Walmart and I say I can either buy the land or go someplace else in the city. We usually have an opportunity set defined by the market. Now, the good news is in every one of those cases that I described, they know we're in business. So we're now the first call. We used to be, they'd call a developer, they'd call a financial institution, and then three years later they'd call us and say, can I get some show? Now, because everybody knows we're in the business, we're getting the first call. And so we're able to move in every instance two or three steps up the food chain and get all of the pieces rather than just the promoter piece at the end.
Makes sense. The last year also, I think, introduced a new model, which was unprecedented at least to me in the residency that Adele did in, I think it was Munich, 80,000 capacity venue. I think it was five weeks, 10 shows per Pollstar. I'm guessing that's a model that only really works for a select subgroup of high-profile artists. But how do you view that as an opportunity and is there room to scale that model?
Yeah, certainly the specifics of that with one artist and 800,000 fans, we could all count on one hand the number of artists in the world that could do that. But if you look at it a little more broadly, you look at the venue that was built. The venue matches somewhat. I'll call it a music-driven stadium: 50,000 capacity building, semi-amphitheater shaped, very much what we have with the Estadio GNP Seguros in Mexico City. It's very much what we're building in Colombia right now. It's what we're building in Toronto, and just between Toronto and Colombia this year, we expect to have a million fans in those buildings. So I think there's a great opportunity as we look at markets that don't have the infrastructure, have the weather in particular that would let you have a fair bit of the year.
You can imagine a network in Latin America of a half dozen of these buildings and a number of artists who could go down and who can make a tour of doing a few shows in a number of these types of buildings. They build their production, their capacity around that sort of layout. I think it's a great opportunity for us.
Awesome. Shifting slightly to permanent stadiums. You mentioned on your earnings call the other week that you're seeing 75% sell-out for on sales at stadiums this year and touched on the success that indicates from a front-of-the-house pricing perspective specifically. One of the things that's progressed over recent years has been artist appetite to take a little bit more price in the front of the house. Is that something that has broadened out? Have artists kind of largely come to the conclusion that there's room there and that they're really capturing value from the resellers or is it still progressing?
Yeah, I think the first thing, and just to repeat the stat is what we said a couple of weeks ago is that when we look at our stadiums and our arenas, the portion of shows that sell at least 75% of their capacity within the first week is up materially versus a year ago. So that was one of a multitude of factors that we tried to give you guys that said, we're not having demand issues. I know the world has various issues. Again, we don't have tariff issues. There's no cost with that. We're not seeing any demand issues. We continue to see, I'll tie this into the pricing point, that there is an incredible memorability index with our service. I mean, go back to take the most extreme.
In the height of COVID, which most of you have blacked out on, is we had 80% of the people who had a ticket to a show that was postponed 'til God knows when kept their tickets. There's not much stronger real demand than that. So we've all forgotten that. I think it's important to remember. But the memorability of a ticket to a show is much greater than most people's alternative disposable income use for that money. So that's led to continued very strong demand. I just got numbers from the U.K. yesterday. Great demand in the U.K. So we are seeing very strong consumer demand consistently.
Now, go to your question on how the artist is approaching the building. So a lot of misunderstanding on how all of this works. It starts with what's the show? What's my strategy? How many years? When am I going to tour? What's the show I want to put together? What's that going to cost? What's that production going to cost? The massive stage, screens. How many people? I mean, we have hundreds of people between the dancers and my production crew and people on the road. How many trucks? What does that cost me to operate every week? And then I can do the math and say, okay, this is my per- show cost. And then I'm making my living here.
So how much money do I want to make? So that's now the revenue that I need on a per show basis. I'll work with the promoter and I'll understand, okay, how do we get that out of the building? Almost every artist says the same thing. I want any fan to be able to afford to get into the building, to be able to buy a ticket. That doesn't mean that they can afford to buy the front row, but it means they can buy a ticket and get in. So the increased sophistication on pricing is letting us start with what does that artist want to make and then go next to, okay, so now how are we going to price the back of the house? How many thousands of tickets? We use the example, I think Beyoncé had over 4,000 tickets at $75 and 14,000 tickets at $110 or less. So huge number of tickets made available to fans.
Okay, then how do I scale the rest of the house so I achieve my objective of what I want to make and knowing still that those tickets are giving good value to the fans? And I think the objective way of what is good value, frankly, is to then look at the secondary and say, are those tickets selling? Are they selling for more? Which is generally yes, because when they're bought and they're resold on the secondary, it's with the expectation of some profit motive. So they're saying, why on the fifth row ticket, I can sell it for $300, but I know that the scalpers are just going to figure out how to get that ticket. They're going to overwhelm you with technology. They have more of an incentive to cheat than you can possibly have to stop them just from an economic standpoint.
So I'm not going to price it at $300. I'm going to price it at $1,000 because that let me have another couple of hundred tickets at $75. So they're not looking at and just saying, how do I get the most? They're saying, how do I balance all the pieces to get what I need while still serving a lot of fans in terms of making it accessible to them?
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. As we return to more stadium activity this year, that brings with it different seasonality.
Yeah.
You talked the other week on your earnings call about growth this year being more Q2- and Q3- weighted. Any additional color you'd provide in terms of growth this year or seasonality?
Yeah, we continue to feel good overall. We've now sold over 70 million tickets for shows this year. Expectation of double-digit AOI growth continues even with the currency fluctuation. So we're feeling very good overall the year. I know you and some of your brethren and a few people in this room overly obsessed over what's Q1 versus—
That's our job.
I know, I know. My job is to deliver the year, the five years. I'm more obsessed with long-term. It's funny, the world has flipped, right? My career, I'm now more obsessed with long-term shareholder value creation than a lot of the people I'm talking to. But I think Q1 is always a small quarter. It's 10% to 15% of our AOI. It's been on the higher end the last couple of years because we've had more big arena shows, more shows in our own venues drove a lot of the growth obviously last year. This year is more smaller shows, more summer based, so probably more on the lower end of the scale, which means absolutely nothing other than just the math of the timing as we still deliver double-digit growth.
So again, we're just— It's not like— I remember we did our earnings the day of or the day after Walmart and everybody was freaking out over Walmart's Q1 guidance. Well, it's because in some of those businesses, the quarter is you win or lose a quarter, then you win or lose a quarter because the customer's coming back every two or three weeks. For us, it's really as we look at the totality of the strong fan growth this year, just what's the timing of that fan growth? It's not the same. Our quarters don't matter the same as some of those other high repetition because once you lose a shopping visit, you lose it. That's not really how our business works.
I want to hit the ticketing business. In the past, you and Michael have talked about the value of acquiring Ticketmaster back in 2009, being that it brought you closer to the core fan, the core customer. Do you still see that as the biggest or the most valuable strategic benefit to owning Ticketmaster?
Yeah, I think Michael's talked a lot over the years about how much he saw, if you look at technology, how if you're just B2B, you're just going to get squeezed. You have to have that customer relationship. I would say after we bought Ticketmaster, what we figured out also was, wow, this is a great product that serves the sports teams and the venues. There's a lot more that can be done to serve the artist and the music. If you think about it, you don't have huge on sales in sports because most of the tickets are—r ight. So how do we —To have a great on sale, you need a lot of things. You need great distribution. You need great marketing. The evolution, the digital tickets, the development of the app, having the duality of primary and secondary on a site together, the pricing capabilities.
All of these things we've developed over the last 15 years because we became obsessed with how does Ticketmaster also serve the artist as well as the sports team. And a lot of the innovation has been with that obsession. So I think strategically, in hindsight, that's all mattered more to the business even than the consumer side. The consumer side was very important then. I think it's frankly less important now in the sense that the data is, because it's all digital, you can get that through contracts, right? I mean, meaning the sports teams today get data from us. They can know their fans. They don't have to operate the ticketing business to do that. So strategically, through the evolution of technology, that piece is less critical.
What's really important is making sure we put $14 point something billion of money at risk on shows last year, guaranteeing money to the artist. Our obsession is that those tickets are going to sell. Ticketmaster can maximize the number of tickets sold and the gross for that show because that's what determines our success as a promoter. So, Ticketmaster is the best—b ar none. You can empirically look at all the shows globally on a tour. It simply sells more tickets, delivers higher gross.
Separately, that's why they do well, right? They don't do well because of anything having to do with the concert business. They do well at the end of the day because they sell more tickets, deliver higher gross than any other platform. And that's what we need to make sure continues. We feel good about the roadmap that we have and where we're headed with Ticketmaster.
You touched on some of the product development, some of the innovation that you're focused on at Ticketmaster. When you think of some of your more sophisticated venue clients, what are they asking for in terms of new capabilities to make either the on sale more fluid or to make game day or the event experience better?
Certainly over the past year, the folks at Clippers, Intuit, Steve Ballmer, Gillian, that crowd has done a great job in really pushing us on what is that fan experience and what's Ticketmaster's role in the app and how do you do that? We've made tremendous leaps, I would say, in terms of what we can do. Again, it's the only building in the country, but you can believe every team we talk to, every league we talk to says, what are you getting out of that? What are you learning? First of all, the shift in the app to every person who comes has to have their own ticket. So now I have identity of everybody, not just 40% or whatever number it would have been on its own. Two is it's all digital. It's biometric. So entry is massively expedited.
You don't have lines to get in. So my dwell time is higher. Dwell time is higher. We know this from our amphitheaters and our venues. People buy more because they have more time. You get some portion of people to get the extra beer. They decide they're going to have dinner there as well because they have time before the game starts. So you drive increased dwell time. Third is you eliminate friction because now I know biometrically I can interact with you. So you as the fan, first of all, just the purchase process. If you're looking to buy food and beverage, you just walk in, pick it up, walk out. Again, you've eliminated friction. By definition in life, if you eliminate friction, you'll increase behavior.
And then secondly, when you have a new building like that and you've thought through what are all the different premium spaces, as we talk a lot about how do we get to a 30% premium? Well, now I can upsell you those much more easily because I have interaction with every individual. And because I've got your face and your credit card, anything you want to do, I can just put up a sign, come in the club. It's going to cost you 20 bucks, but come in the club and you do it and you have no friction. So we're still in early days because this is the first season. We'll learn some things work better, some things didn't work. We'll have to add some things. But they've been a great partner in pushing us to do better.
And we're looking at now and saying, Wow, this has transformed the fan experience. You walk like you're going to a friend's house. You walk in the building, you walk over, you grab a beer, you grab a hot dog, you go to your seats, you want to go to the club. It absolutely revolutionizes the experience, the data, and the relationship.
Is that made easier by the fact that you have a large percentage of attendees who are season ticket holders, or is that something that you could replicate across your operated venue?
Yeah, well, it certainly makes the effort to sign up easier when you're a season ticket holder, but we're using the same thing for all of our concerts. So even if you're just going to one concert, people are going through that same process. One of the things we're figuring out is how do we make it highly efficient for the person, right? You don't want to create a 15-minute load on somebody to get one ticket to go to one show. So we have to figure out how do we continue to streamline, make it really easy for each person to do that, even if they're just going to a single show. Again, but that's— I don't worry about that because we'll figure that out, right? We'll get better and better at that over time.
You can imagine we were working pretty hard just to get to mid-August to get this thing to work. And you need to have a roadmap that says, okay, what's the two-minute signup? I'm sending you a ticket to go to a show with me tonight. You need to be able to really quickly go, okay, add my Apple Wallet, credit card, use my ID—o kay, done. You need the two-minute signup. We'll get there.
Yeah. One of the other interesting and encouraging things about Ticketmaster that comes up in our survey work is not only is it the most used platform, but it also actually scores the best in terms of consumer preference, which I think might strike some people as surprising given the wealth of negative headlines that Ticketmaster can sometimes generate. But what is that? How do you feel about Ticketmaster's brand equity, its brand positioning, and what can you do to kind of continue to push that forward?
Yeah, I think that, first of all, Ticketmaster is a functional brand. It's not an emotional brand. So the highest praise is that you're highly functional. I mean, Amazon is the world leader in a functional brand. You're not wearing an Amazon hat on the weekend, right? But you probably visit Amazon more than anything else. So that would be the gold star if you say Ticketmaster is highly functional. Now, what do we need to do to get there? Part of it is to increase transparency and make ticket buying a better fan experience.
It hasn't been great. It's been opaque. We have all-in pricing here in California now. It's rolling out for the FTC in mid-May, nationally. But the fact we haven't had all-in pricing, we introduced it two years ago in our amphitheaters to lead the way. That makes for a worse fan experience. They don't really understand primary, secondary. There's a lot of things that they don't understand. There's a lot of things that bad players in the secondary try to further obfuscate so that they can paint Ticketmaster as the bad guy. So I think if we advocate for the reforms that we've been advocating for, if we provide a great technological fan experience, then we'll be seen as a great functional brand.
We're at time, but I'm going to sneak one last one in. There's been some recent news announcements around Ticketmaster partnering with some of the DSPs. You announced a deal with SoundCloud, an upcoming partnership with Alexa+ , in talks with Spotify currently. What's the value that you see when these partnerships are?
I think all of these statements are a validation of how critically important the ticket is. If everybody in the ecosystem says, well, how am I going to add value to whatever my fan base is? Well, it has to do with the ticket. Well, that's a pretty strong statement in today's world that a very diverse technology media companies are focused on the value of the ticket. And the reality is in the U.S., right? Those tickets are controlled somewhere between the venue and Ticketmaster by default and the promoter and Ticketmaster by default. So it puts Ticketmaster in a great spot. Nobody's coming and grabbing those tickets. Go back to Amazon, right?
Five years ago, everybody was scared to death when Amazon tried to hire one person in ticketing. Oh, they're coming. They realized, no, this is all a lot harder, right? It's the venue ERP system. It's the building the shows. It's the pricing. It's all of the things that you don't see behind the scenes. It's not just the marketplace. So when people say we want tickets, we say, that's great. We'd love to talk to you. We have a sponsorship business. Russell Wallach runs a world-class sponsorship business that's been growing tremendously. And if you want access to some tickets, we'd be delighted to talk to you.
Hi, Russell, and apologies for not getting to sponsorship, but I hope he'll forgive me. That takes us to time. Joe, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you. Appreciate it.