Welcome to our day back live. It's been a couple years since we've seen you. Appreciate all your patience through the last couple years. Today we're gonna take you through what we think is probably a story you know well. Our strategy for the last 10 years has been fairly consistent. It's just been about execution against what we think is an incredible industry, and I think we learned that the last couple years. We've talked lots before COVID about the experience economy, how important live is to the customer. It ranks continually pre-COVID and now after COVID as one of the top entertainment options, experience options. Ask anyone, this always ranks in the top three of things they wanna do this year. It's memory-making.
We're glad coming out of COVID, it's bigger than ever, and consumers are dying to get back to that show and have a social moment with their friends. I think you heard us talk about it yesterday, and the numbers are proving that we're gonna see a very big 2022. Even though we're kind of not open for business as of January 1, it took a few months to get through around the world, but starting in the springtime, we will be open pretty much everywhere in the world. Australia, a little bit of the Pacific Rim still lagging behind. Obviously the U.S., Europe being the big businesses for us, the U.K., Canada. Latin America, we start a show, a Coldplay tour, stadium tour, March 18th.
That one we're thrilled that that's on plan for Costa Rica and onward. We think we have a fully open business by the summertime on a global basis. We used to talk this slide all the time about this is just a good industry. It's got incredible global tailwinds. This is an industry that has been growing at 8% compounded annually for many years. We think obviously the next two years, three years are gonna have a much higher growth rate. Regardless of how that bubble kinda works itself out, we think this is an ongoing 8%-10% compounded business. As long as we're growing with that growth, we think we can continue to have incredible earnings. Again, this is a business why we talk about its global growth.
Still a business that's underpenetrated in most of Latin America, most of Eastern Europe, most of Pacific Rim. They're still just building arenas. The Drake is just starting to go to those markets. Why we've always said that this is a global business, an incredible global opportunity, and we think this will continually be an 8%-10% compounded annual growth business that we'll be able to capture. I think you've seen the flywheel for many years. We've talked about it. We think our secret sauce is our concert flywheel, one of the largest flywheels in the business. That flywheel then lets us get into three other huge TAMs. We think the combined TAM is about $150 billion. We'll take you through each of these now. The most important business that we're in is the concert business.
It's the heart and soul to what we do. It's those 42 countries where we put 40,000 shows a year on that make the machine work. That's the secret sauce. That's the hard part of the business. Having 30,000 employees in 40 countries, 100 offices. It's a local, national, and global business. Sometimes you're buying a tour on a global basis. Lots of your business is on a local basis. Lots of execution happens local. You buy Drake, but you gotta have boots and hands on in Milan to Cape Town to Singapore. We think it's a very unique model we built over the last 15 years, assembling all of these pieces, all of the festivals, the employees, the production, the lighting, the marketing and expertise on a global basis is what makes us very unique.
Obviously, the $6.5 billion we spend with artists annually makes us one of the largest financiers for the artist community. They're our core customer, and we spend our days figuring out how to continually be in business with them, whether it's the existing Rolling Stones and U2's to the Olivia Rodrigo's. Our job is to continually, from 500 seats to stadiums, put artists in on that stage. We think this business continues to grow $25 billion TAM today. As I outlined, 8%-10% annual growth. Lots of global opportunity. Continues to be a great industry, growing up to $40 billion in the next potential foreseeable future. Obviously, if we're at 100 million, we're gonna get to 125 million fans as our next lever, and then we'll continue to grow from there.
This chart is Amy's chart. We think this is so powerful. You know, we get asked all the time, inflation, ticket prices, where's the ticket price going? Do you have any opportunity left in the ticket price? Concerts are still one of the most underpriced, greatest assets on the market. Our first slide told you it's the number one consumer experience that they wanna attend, but it's priced below what others are on that chart. You look at obviously the best priced ticket against sports, completely underpriced. You know, Knicks, there's you know, 40, 60 home games a year. There's only one Billie Eilish show every maybe three years in the Garden. Scarcity is incredible. Not to mention you're paying that much for the Knicks. Y ou know, we think obviously this is a business that is underpriced.
Secondary business continually shows us even when we continually elevate the Platinum, the VIP, and push the P1s, the secondary market is still commanding a high premium for those tickets and experiences. This says two things. One, we got at least $100 million in opportunity on our side. It's a billion dollars from an artist perspective in terms of the gross. The more we wake up every day and have artists price it better price the front of the house, the P1s, the Platinums, the better obviously it is for the artist and the better it is for us. We talked yesterday about secondary, and our goal isn't to figure out how to sell a BTS secondary ticket. Our real goal is to figure out how to get BTS to price the Platinum and the premium to be more efficient.
We do believe, obviously, with all the pricing tools we have now, the transparency in the marketplace, artists are going to, and content, are going to continually strive to be more efficient and price it at a higher price to capture those dollars for themselves, not someone else. Huge opportunity over the next, many, many years is to get a more efficient market, price the product better, put more dollars into our side of the ledger. You read about the VIPs last year, obviously, Metaverse, blockchain ticketing, NFTs, merch drops. This is a slide that just says we have, kind of separate departments working on all of these products. We look at the show ongoing as how can we expand it, whether it was VIP Nation we launched a few years ago.
We've got incredible, one of the largest merchandise companies in entertainment, that's dropping artists, ongoing merch bundles, tour merch, retail merch, taking advantage of that business. We got Live Stubs. We just launched an NFT product. Actually pretty excited about this. Every time you get a concert ticket, you're now gonna get a visual ticket stub versus an email. Y ou can save this, you can share this, and it becomes an instant NFT in a gallery. We think we can start adding value to that NFT experience. The more stubs, the more concert tickets you keep in your wallet, the more value we can start to provide to you. It's a baseline NFT program that we think could be a powerful loyalty program over time.
At minimum, it takes what used to be a great ticket stub, which turned into an email, takes us back to a beautiful ticket, visual piece of art that can be shared on Instagram, help us promote and brag about our experience and add that badge or that trading card to the experience again. We think it's an interesting piece we're dabbling in. We got Metaverse ideas. We'll launch as everyone else has. We'll launch venues in the Metaverse. We'll continue to dabble in all those ways. All of these are just extensions to what we think is the real important piece is those two hours of magic that happen physically. That isn't changing. We think that's spectacular. It's not duplicatable. We learned that through COVID.
As great as streaming is, you don't get goosebumps when you're sitting at home on a screen. The two hours of magic is spectacular. It's the hard part. All of these products we think are great extensions. They add flavor to our core business, and we'll continue to make sure we're active and innovative in them. Venue Nation. Talked about this in our last earnings call. We have a portfolio of about 320 venues. As you can see from 2015, it's been growing. We add somewhere between 20 and 25 festivals a year or venues a year. Most of them are operating leases. Someone's building something somewhere and has a 2,000, a 5,000, a 7,000, wants a, an operator like us to come in, take over, and power the building.
We're seeing obviously a boom. We're kind of the new movie theater tenant. Every developer around the world right now is calling us saying, "I'm building my retail environment and I need a live venue. I want a 500-seat. I want an amphitheater. I want a 2,000-seat." We have a full-time design development team that's got over 75 projects right now that we would be meeting with different developers, RFPs, opportunistic ideas around the world. It's fabulous to see live entertainment being so important to any development. You've seen lots of equity. You've seen lots of capital go into this business. We happen to have the secret sauce, though. The hard part about buildings isn't building these, isn't designing them, it's programming them.
We have a great portfolio of brands, as you see on the side there. We're gonna continue to expand opportunistically where we can put a Fillmore, a Brooklyn Bowl, a House of Blues, an amphitheater. We do that because out of those 98 million people that went to a Live Nation show, about 41 million walked in a Live Nation owned or operated amphitheater, theater, club, venue, arena. It's obvious we have a much higher return when you walk in my building than someone else's. You get to capture all the revenue, all the sponsorship, parking, food, the beverage. We see it as a great return on capital if we're managing that building where all the entertainment activity is happening. We're capturing not just the ticket, but all of the ancillary revenues that power that experience, VIP, et cetera.
We see when we take over any building, existing buildings that are in the marketplace that come up available for sale, for lease, for operating, when we take over, when we take our efficiency, our scale, our concert booking, our purchasing power, we can incrementally deliver a much higher return in that building, plugging it into our venue network. We're continually on the prowl on a global basis. We look at it. There's 100 cities in the world that matter. Every one of them is looking probably outside of America for a spectacular arena because they don't have an NBA or NHL team. We see those developments happening all over the world. We're looking at all those kind of markets. Everyone's looking for an amphitheater. Everyone's looking for a 2,000-seat. Every developer is looking for a 5,000-seat.
Real, real advantage for us. We're at the table at all those meetings and deciding which ones make sense for us to keep building out our global platform. One of the key parts of this business is obviously you gotta fill the building. That's our sweet secret sauce. The second is then you gotta maximize revenue when they walk in the door. That's been the heart and soul of what my venue operations team has done for 15 years now. When you walk in Jones Beach or you walk in the Fillmore or the Irving Plaza, the goal is, one, put the show on to get you in the door, be spectacular at marketing and figuring out how to get the building filled. When you walk in that door, how do I monetize you?
How do we make sure we maximize our revenue, hospitality, food and beverage, VIP, bundles, all those ways that we've been able to grow on an annual basis, $2 per year. We still think the industry is underserved compared to the sports and nightclub business. That just says to you, we think we have a long runway of a $2 per year doing a better job monetizing those customers that walk in our buildings. That's the concert business. Now, Ticketmaster. Again, incredible story on this brand. I think we're very proud of the turnaround since we took this over 10 years ago and the rebuild of this business to become this global, strong brand. 36 countries. I think we were in maybe 14 when we took over or 12. With multiple platforms. I think we had 14 platforms at the time.
We've been working hard to get a single global platform and globally expand 500 million tickets. It was a huge GTV, and our app has exploded as the business moved from online to mobile, and we've been able to make that transition. You look at the global business, it's about a $100 billion business. Again, this is because this slide looks a little bigger 'cause sports is such a big part of ticketing versus music. On a global basis, it's a $100 billion business if you look at all in arts, theaters, sports, small festivals, big festivals, and music venues on a global basis. We think this is our biggest opportunity. Outside of America, we have huge growth opportunities.
There's some markets that we're in where we might have just entered the markets, like Germany and Italy and other markets like the U.K. and Canada, where we haven't upgraded our software or haven't been as aggressive as we've been in America in rolling out our features and products. We think between entering new markets, building on existing markets, we have a $100 million opportunity alone just on rolling out this global brand, on a global basis. Obviously, every time we add a new ticket to our concert pipeline, it's a Ticketmaster benefit, extra ticket of 25 million fans at 75 million AOI. The more we scale our flywheel, Ticketmaster gets the direct benefit. We'll talk about why do we get. Why does Ticketmaster continue to excel?
Why is it having its boom right now in the last couple of years in terms of signing clients, accelerating its global, just client list? Two reasons. One, it has the best enterprise product in the market. The number one strategy you gotta do is deliver a great enterprise platform for the client. Whether it's a 500-seat venue, a festival, an arena, GA or reserved, it's a complicated stack to deliver. It's easy to deliver a GA ticket. It's easy to deliver a secondary ticket. The hard part is delivering a global ticket, high demand, 10 A.M. to a reserved customer in an arena. High demand customers, lots of features and functions they want, lots of customization needed to handle.
Being able to deliver them a GA and a reserve ticket on a global basis and handle that demand at 10 A.M. when BTS has millions and billions of bots coming at you, being able to deliver that ticket, delivering it end-to-end, delivering it, on an analytical perspective, giving CRM all the tools that these clients demand now, we've been able to deliver and build that over the last decade. By far, full stack solution to give it a Salesforce. If you're a client and you're a venue and you need a full enterprise platform to manage all of your ticketing needs, charity, single tickets, multiple tickets, season tickets. Now, my season tickets have to turn into single tickets, have to analyze and flex ticketing by the minute, have to deliver.
Now we got a new product called an end aisle seat is different than a single seat. A presale is different than an Amex presale. I gotta integrate it now with all my other CRM partners, all of my API capability. I'm proud that the team has worked hard over the last decade to make this platform very versatile on a global basis. The second great success we've had is when we separated Ticketmaster into enterprise and marketplace, is really focusing on both ends that are important. It is again what makes Ticketmaster unique. It can power your client needs, and it can be the best place to sell the ticket. Our marketplace, by far, is the number one marketplace in ticketing on a global basis.
It delivers the most tickets, the most GTV, the most conversion. It does that because it's incredible end-to-end. You can buy your ticket today. You can discover your ticket, you can purchase it, see 3D seats, all the different technology and innovation features you'll want to figure out what seats to get. You can transfer it, you can resell it, you can pay for it over time, all of the payment options we've added. Obviously, when you enter, it's an access point. You can have it upgrade, all the things you need end-to-end. This is really the only end-to-end reserve GA app in the business marketplace that can deliver both pre, during, and after, primary and secondary. You know, we're just continually elevating this business.
We're adding new features, ongoing insurance, bundling, hotels, all the ways you can think about how you would add value to that experience of I want to go to a show, I'm going to the show, I'm at the show, I'm leaving the show. All the ways we're integrating partners into that value chain and that cycle is how we think we'll continually add AOI to this experience. One of the things that I think has probably been the most paramount to our strategy over the last 10 years was opening our platform. Ticketmaster, for many years before we arrived, was a closed platform. We've been an open platform for many years. Customers want us to be their enterprise platform. They want us to sell tickets at ticketmaster.com, but they also say, "I have other partners that I have to satisfy, and I wanna allocate tickets to them.
Can you power that?" We do that every day of the week. It does two great things. One, it every day reconfirms how powerful Ticketmaster is because a lot of people think they have an audience, but an audience doesn't translate to the way you buy a concert ticket. That's helpful to us because every day when a client says, "Let me put some tickets over here," we say, "Great." They see the conversion at Ticketmaster versus there. It's a great validation of how important it is when you buy tickets. Tickets aren't an impulse decision, so you don't actually. It's not the checkout line, and you think, "I want two BTS tickets while I'm walking out the door. I hadn't thought of that." Ticketing is usually a two-week process, lots of involvement.
Gotta ask your friends, gotta make sure everyone got the night off, gotta make sure what kind of tickets they want. It's kind of a research and development project. Consumers tend to go to the ticket sites that have the most access, dig into those deep to figure out what they want. On many cases, a lot of these partners, like Snapchat, Bandsintown, absolutely bring us incremental customers that can help us deliver, incremental eyeballs to the show and are incredible marketing assets for free in theory because they're just taking our ticket value proposition and delivering it to a wider audience.
We wake up every day, whether it's our Live Nation customer, whether it's the NFL, whether it's the Madison Square Garden, whatever their latest sponsors, their partners, whatever their needs are, we can open up API and deliver those tickets on a seamless transaction flow to them to help them deliver bigger eyeballs, more ticket sales. The last big part of our business is the sponsorship division. Again, another incredible business. We're probably, I guess, in theory, the largest entertainment agency, if you looked at it that way. Over 1,000 sponsor brand partners signed up to Live Nation, and see. Why? Because we have a very unique proposition. We have incredible on-site scale, physical reach, captive audience. As you know, brands today are struggling. How do I connect with my customer? Digital has its advantages, but it's fairly neutral.
Brands look at us and say, "You have a captive audience for two hours, sometimes two days on a festival. You know who they are, what type of age, demographics. I can reach them. I wanna look at those 5 billion impressions that you can deliver to me on-site on a consistent basis, night after night, market after market. O bviously, because of your digital reach, I can amplify that on a digital platform too and buy and access your digital reach." We think we have a very unique proposition. We're the NFL, if you wanna call it, for live. If you're a brand and you figured out some sports strategies, you're doing your NFL deal, your NBA deal, then you say, "I want some music. I wanna understand the customer. I wanna reach 19 to 29 year olds." I go to the Live Nation.
They're the NFL of the music business that will help us deliver scale, credibility, results, and analytics. We've shown that over the last multiple years, this continues to be a double-digit growth business. We still are under-serviced. The music business is always kind of a smaller piece of the business compared to sports. Even the music pie of a $6 billion TAM, we can still keep delivering better products, upgrading our experiences, and growing at double digits for years to come. Once we obviously have that big audience, it's just about developing new ad products, and that's really what we've been able to do continually. Continue new ad units online, so we're continually reinventing our app, our in-app and web experience and adding those units that matter there.
It's creating a bit of a marketplace for all of these brands, these sports, to advertise on our platform. As well as we've been able to, as I mentioned, in that end-to-end experience, add and integrate incredible products, brand partners into those. Every time these brands come to us and say, "I wanna be part of that," obviously, fintech, big piece of the business right now. Crypto, will you accept crypto? Will you use my payment options? Can we use those options? Can you book a hotel while you're there? All of those integrated ideas that are AOI ideas really helps spike our business. Insurance being really the, you know, the star in our portfolio.
When we started that multiple years ago, we thought it was a neat idea that's now been a credible multimillion-dollar AOI business for us on a global basis, and we're rolling that out. The more ideas we can do like that can power that experience with brand partners that are also end up being AOI partners, we think that adds incredible opportunity on that side. The new categories are opening up every day. As you know, none of us looked at fintech and crypto like we do today couple years ago. Brand-new categories, undersold. We'll announce some of those deals over the next while as we're looking at our partnerships.
Every day, we're seeing brands looking at the music business not as a music business, but at our business as a business with a scale customer, an attractive customer. Whether it's beauty, whether it's crypto, whether it's fintech or insurance, we have that kind of 15 to 50 year old customer at scale, multiple dimensions. We can reach them in different ways. Our job is to deliver that audience to that brand and convince them why our customer can deliver against their needs. Lots of opportunity left in categories that are untapped. You put all those three pieces together and you look at our history of this management team of delivering annual AOI free cash flow growth, we think we're gonna have a continual 2022 onward path of incredible growth.
I think you've seen today, you're gonna add up a whole bunch of hundreds of millions of ways we're gonna add to our bottom line. You can add also the $200 million fixed costs we talked about coming out of COVID on how we end up delivering that piece. As we said yesterday, yes, we got some increased labor costs and we got some increased insurance costs. All of those, though, are still netted out to make sure we deliver a 200+ on top of our AOI delivery. We're excited that the industry is back.
We're excited that consumers' pent-up demand is showing everyone that this is a space that they're dying to get back to. It's a big part of life, making Kodak moments, and we think we have the machine that can continually tap into that growth on an annual basis. What are we gonna do Q&As now or Joe?
Yeah. Yeah.
I think you all know who's here with me.
I introduce the.
Yeah.
Other guys.
Hey, Chris.
All right, were you gonna do anything on the cost, insurance or part of?
Yeah. Michael talked about costs, and I know there were some questions yesterday in terms of labor costs and the AMP. I wanted to give just a little more specifics on that to frame it. I'll use a typical AMP show just to simplify and give you the numbers. For a typical AMP show, our labor for that show runs about 6% of our revenue for that show. A 5% increase in our costs of that labor, so you can do the math on whatever version you wanna do, would increase our costs by 0.3%. If you look at the revenue base for an AMP show, you increase it by 5%, that's a 0.3% increase relative to the overall revenue of the show.
When we talk about the fact that we think that it's a manageable cost and something that as we drive per caps and as we drive pricing, that we're very comfortable we're going to be able to easily cover it and continue to grow our CM per fan. I just wanted to give you guys more specifics so you have some comfort with that number. On the insurance side, again, just to frame it in the overall, insurance, yes, is higher this year. Still running in kind of the 1%-2% of our variable cost range, so it's not a major driver of our cost structure as we put on the 40,000 shows this year. That's not what we look at to drive our costs. We think it's a manageable number. We expect it to continue to be a low portion of our overall variable costs.
One, uh. Let's j ust that we have our team here with us. You know Joe. Mark Yovich runs Ticketmaster. Chris Loll runs our sponsorship. Jackie Beato is now running our concert division also.
Great.
All right. Fire away. Go ahead.
I'll take our first question.
Oh, sorry. I'm sorry. I'll let Amy do the moderating.
We'll take our first question from David Karnovsky, JP Morgan.
Hey, guys. I just have a few on Venue Nation. Can you talk a little bit about where the demand is coming from in those 75 venues? Is that from municipalities, property developers? Maybe you can speak to how the economics work. We see the press releases sometimes you're an owner, an operator, a part owner. Maybe you could walk through the various models. Then is this an opportunity primarily for North America, or, you know, is it also for the U.K. where you have a venue base or Mexico? Thanks.
I'll start, and then Joe and Jackie can jump in. I mean, I would just say the opportunity is everywhere. I say that in the sense of, you know, every major city around the world wants to be an entertainment capital. You probably have every major city looking and saying, "I don't have an arena. I'll look at an old arena." That's why you see us in São Paulo. You'd see us in Cape Town and Milan and these places where, you know, you can build an arena at a much lower cost than the NBA arena. You're not building a billion dollar luxury suite like that. You're gonna build a $300 million arena. In Holland, we have one in the Ziggo Dome. We have one in Dublin.
If you can be the only arena in town in a market, a major market, it's a great return. We see that around the world on an international basis. As far as an amphitheater of 5,000 and 2,000, similar. You know, other than maybe New York, Los Angeles, and a few of the main markets, most markets really. You know, there was that 20-year era where there wasn't live music, as you remember. It was disco. It was house music. The old live music venue kinda got faded out, and all of a sudden in the last 10 years, there's been this new resurgence. You've seen the, you know, the Webster Hall rebuild, our Irving Plaza, where live has become fabulous again. A lot of those cities, those venues weren't built, were run down, or mothballed.
Most cities, you look across America, they probably don't have a great 5,000-seat venue. We think that's a real sweet spot. Probably got an old 2,000-seat theater. You see us do a lot of those, take over a 2,000-seat theater, give it a facelift, put VIP in, turn it into a Fillmore. We're seeing from Sydney to Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal. Major cities, probably lots of theater, club, amphitheater development, arenas probably outside of America or Austin, which we're very proud about. That's gonna be just a home-run arena that we're doing. Again, a main market that didn't have a good arena, upgraded it there, and will deliver incredible return. Joe will take you through our own operate or lease.
Right. In terms of our models, historically, the primary model we had was you'd have a landlord, we'd go in, we'd lease the building, we'd put in a little bit of capital to just build out the building. The issue is that landlord would then take our lease, he'd go to the bank, he'd finance the entire project with almost no equity in, and then over the course of our lease, they'd end up owning the building basically off of the back of us and our commitment. We look at that in some way very simply and say, "That should be our money.
How do we extract more of those economics?" How do we figure out models where we can either in partnership with some of them or we get our fair share of the economics, or we go in earlier and we're the ones who are actually more substantially involved in the development of the building. We're the one looking at different financing opportunities using more asset-backed financing on some of those, and we're extracting those economics. That's the part of the theory on as we look at this, we can be doing more.
We can be operating more. As we operate more, we can go in earlier and extract more of the economics, either in partnership with the developer or having, or, basically being the developer ourselves, depending on the situation. We've obviously done a lot in the U.S. in partnership with Oak View, some of the major buildings like Austin and other.
If you look at Austin, this is an example of a typical arena. We're putting content in, we're getting paid the ticket fee, and maybe we're getting a partnership rebate if we put a lot of shows in a venue, but we obviously don't capture the sponsorship or the food and beverage. If you look at a place like Austin, we went in with a partnership with OVG. We're gonna operate and consolidate that business. To combine, we then took debt against that building. I think our equity checks were in the.
Yeah, low $10s of millions.
$10 million- $20 million dollar equity check. We think that building it gets built for about $320 million. We think it pays itself off in five or six years. Incredible return on that building. We will own the VIP, the sponsorship, the ticketing machine. With the low-cost debt available out there, we'll look more and more at opportunities if we can write a small equity check and own all of the revenue streams. We'll take that versus, as Joe said, what we learned over the last five or six years was the landlord wanted a higher lease from us to take that piece of paper and refinance it. In many ways, we'll look at theaters and clubs if we can maximize the revenue from our pure content that's powering that building. Then we're better off.
We're gonna take our next question from Stephen Laszczyk at Goldman Sachs.
Hi, Greg. Thanks for taking the time today. I was wondering if you'd elaborate more on the opportunity in OCESA and in Latin America more broadly. You're looking out five, 10 years from now, how large can that platform become for you in terms of attendance, maybe revenue and AOI contribution? What are the main goals and what are the key drivers there in terms of organic and maybe the opportunity for M&A?
Yeah, I mean, we'll start with one. We have a big opportunity in Latin in America, too. It's untapped. That's what you saw with our recent Bad Bunny announcement. We're excited. I would say there's a big opportunity we don't even talk about in America because we have not been very well represented in that genre. We're ramping up our Live Nation Latin division. The more shows we do also unlocks a lot of sponsorship in that space we haven't been servicing. One, Latin in America. You've seen us launch some festivals in the last few weeks. Really gonna make sure we don't fall asleep at that space. Big business here. Mexico has been a great partner, you know, third-largest promoter in the world. We love being in business with those guys.
We already have Ticketmaster Mexico that we're a minority partner in. Now they still have an old platform, so overnight we're gonna get the new platform there. We're gonna do secondary, Platinum tickets, all of the good upgrades that will make that a much more profitable business. W e think that business is well run. We think we can add our annual kinda growth numbers to Mexico, but it does open up Latin America. As you said, we've got some pieces in the pie in Latin America. We bought Rock in Rio, which was a big statement in Brazil. We have operations in most of the markets. We stand, you know, Coldplay is going to play most of those markets.
You know, I think I've said it before, we look at the business in cities, a main city like Chicago, São Paulo, Mexico City. If you have a main city, and you have a great sponsorship division, and you have a few buildings that you lease or manage, and you have a festival like Chicago, a main city like that is a $50 million AOI kind of business when you have all the pieces in a market. We look at those markets down there, and there's a five or six big cities where we have some pieces. N ow we have a huge piece of distribution through Mexico on our tours. We're now kinda legitimized.
Historically, when we buy a world tour, we'll try to bid for Latin America, but we don't really have much credentials historically. Now when you have that Mexican piece of the business and you start building out your Latin piece, you're gonna do the Coldplay Latin American tour you hadn't done before. We think Latin America is a huge opportunity. We think it's somewhere in the $75 million-$100 million business over the next few years as we continue to build it out, and spend more energy there.
It backflows back to America because the more credentials you deliver there, the more business you're in with the Bad Bunny and some of those kind of artists, you can bring them back into the U.S. and extend that relationship. Jackie has obviously been working hard in her new role in concerts, looking at all of these opportunities.
Yeah. I think there's also just the space of U.S. tours that we have over here that, you know, if you think about adding those stops through Mexico alone is a huge opportunity and a pretty quick one that we can roll out.
We'll take our next question from Stephen Glagola, Cowen.
Hi. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. I wanna ask, you know, a lot of the buckets you laid out again today, similar to last year, the Liberty Investor Day in 2020, a lot of the AOI, incremental AOI growth is coming from adding 25 million fans. I wanna get a sense of, have you ever quantified how many total fans there are on a global basis that you can go after above, you know, 125 million? Also, you know, you grew your fan growth at a CAGR, excuse me, from 2014 to 2019 at around 11%. You know, now with the focus on, you know, sort of integrating more venues into your operations or taking operational control, do you think that CAGR can, you know, go higher than what you've seen over the prior five years in terms of driving, you know, fan growth higher on an annual basis? Thanks.
Yeah, go ahead, Joe.
On a global basis, we think there's probably 400-500 million fans. It depends a lot on how you count things that happen in the small clubs, and it's hard to track in a lot of the developing markets. We also believe that there's a lot of latent demand that exists. This is a supply-driven market, so when you bring the tours that Jackie's talking about to Mexico, you're bringing the supply to match the latent demand. You're growing the market. We think it's continue to be a strong growth market from there. In terms of our expectations over the next five years, I think at this point we're saying we believe we can continue to be a double-digit growth business.
We're not trying to give you an exact model, exact numbers you can work from. Michael talked at the beginning about we think it's a high single-digit growth industry between the increase in supply-demand dynamics, a bit of increased pricing that takes place in the market as we continue to take share, and as we continue to take more of the economics up and down the value chain. All of that brings us up into a double-digit, ongoing or long-term growth rate.
Would you say that the venue growth is gonna be, you know, greater going forward than it was in the past? Has the focus changed there on your end?
Yeah, focus has changed, for sure. Absolutely. Focus has changed to do what I said, which is to extract more of the value out of the value chain and bring that to us. I just think we're not looking to give you exact long-term growth rates. Oh, it's gone from 11% to x, so over five years. We're not trying to give you exact projections. We're trying to give you an explanation on why we're a double-digit growth business.
I would say, you know, just to draw a fine line on focus. You know, part of running Live Nation since we started this is always about you're building this core business. If you listen to my presentation 15 years ago, I probably just talked about concerts and my job is to always figure out where are the, I hate to use this example, but, you know, the Amazon Prime or the Amazon Server business, right? We have big businesses within our businesses that have naturally started to grow. My job is I always try to extract those out because I know they're gonna grow better on their own if we give them better focus. Venues have always been in our business. There's nothing new to this story. We've been running, managing, leasing, sometimes writing checks for venues since we started.
Promoters started this business with Ron Delsener buying the Jones Beach Amphitheater. Promoters were smart as I was back then, that knew if you own all the revenue streams, you're gonna make more money. There's nothing new here. The newness is every now and then what I notice is if I leave my businesses running the way they were, they don't get the focus they. I've over the last few years, absolutely taken Venue Nation out of the promoter P&L, put its own P&L, put its own management team in now. We're also realizing design and building is a big part of what we do. We've been doing it forever. We've been building amphitheaters and designing them forever with Gensler and everyone else. We wanna get better at it, though.
We're proud of our collaboration with Drake in Toronto, where we took a 2,500-seat. Instead of just doing a traditional business, we went to Drake, said: "Can we make this something unique? Can we collaborate with you so we have a brand and design that's better than ever?" We love that idea. The only difference in what we're doing in adding the 20 buildings a year, lease, buy, manage, is we have a division now focused better on two things. We gotta get more innovative around design, so you're gonna see that brand and design. We gotta keep forcing all of our partners on what's the new 500-seat venue look like? What's the next 2,500-seat? What's the VIP really mean now? How do we elevate it?
Just like every new arena from, you know, arenas used to be $300 million, now you got those NBA owners building a billion dollars arenas with 17 different ways to monetize, lounges. Venues are about design, building better and more lucrative buildings, honestly. The smarter we build them, the more ways we can VIP them, get better experiences. We think that's a big opportunity. Two is we gotta run them better. We gotta be a better hospitality company, not just a factory. Why we bought Dave Grutman a few years ago and why we look at the hospitality part of our business. We think we're as an industry, we're still not great at it. Why I focus on here on building a real hospitality division within our venue division.
If you're gonna hire those kind of great people, they don't wanna work for a promoter. They wanna work for a division that's got that inherent DNA. It's why we call it Venue Nation and broke it out and have its own P&L, its own management team, and its own focus now, is to say we actually have always been in this business. We probably haven't been the best at design. We probably haven't spent enough energy being the best at hospitality. We gotta get better at that. Why we think there's such great opportunity. This new division, if you wanna call it, is a lot of the same people reconfigured with the new leadership, more focused around what is the innovative and ideas on site. How are we doing better on hospitality?
How do we make Jimmy Buffett's bar in Vegas or, again, Vegas, which is number one grossing bar in America at $52 million 'cause people buy the $14 Hurricane drink, right? I tell my team all the time: Where's our $14 Hurricane drink? How do we keep elevating the experience that Jimmy's done so well at Margaritaville? That's all. We think it's a fabulous business. It's a business that you couldn't be on your own. You don't wanna just be a venue company. Because we have all this content that is power in it, we think it's a spectacular way to make sure we get better at delivering the full experience and all the revenue streams within it.
I don't think you'll see a change in the balance sheet perspective on anything we've already been doing. You'll see us more just, you know, on a global basis, you know, taking some shots at some arenas that we haven't been as aggressive on historically, just because that seems to be a new developer. Someone asked where the demand is coming from. It's city and developer is where it starts. Every city right now wants a new venue and/or a developer is building their own, you know, the L.A. Live, right? Everyone wants a development around their sports entity, so that's where it starts. The NBA owner calls us and says, "I'm building a new arena. I've got 100 acres. I wanna build their The Battery," right? Why in The Battery? We have our 5,000-seat venue and a 200-seat.
Everyone wants that model. Every developer, billionaire, sports developer calls us and says, "I got a plot. I'm gonna have restaurants, bowling alleys, and I need live venues. Can you come in? Do you wanna build it? I'll build it. You build it. What's the deal you want? We need you. It'll drive traffic." Now instead of walking in, going, "Great, you go build it, charge us a crazy lease number, but we fill your building." I say, "We'll put $12 million in. We'll build it. We'll have a low-cost lease, and we'll have a much better return." Those are different examples of kinda how it comes to life.
We'll take our next question from David Karnovsky.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. You indicated earlier about the differential between primary ticketing and secondary ticketing. Intuitively, that primary should have a relatively high ceiling by virtue of that. Can you just talk about how high and how you capture that ceiling is and how the calculus between primary and secondary?
Yeah.
You know, as you see it.
I feel bad that I'm just taking over here. Michael Wichser, who runs Ticketmaster, and Joe, please lead, and I'll give you the hot one right away.
There we go. Jump right into it. Thanks for the question. I mean, listen, I think first and foremost, right on the primary side, our job as a ticketing company, right, is to provide more and more tools and access to the content owner, right, to price their ticket more effectively, right? As Michael said, you know, we don't wake up every day trying to sell a secondary ticket or maximize revenue on the secondary business, right? Where we're trying to price our tickets for our content partners, right, in the most effective way possible, right? Ultimately.
Michael, just a question. You as you say that, I think in a lot of the clients you're renewing every day, I don't think anyone leads with, how do I get more secondary money? They lead with: How do I sell more tickets? How do I get more primary, and how do I capture more of the secondary? Then I know I can't capture it all, so yes, then tell me how I can be part of it. It is the tail on the dog, not the dog.
Yes.
In every client conversation.
Exactly right. Right? What we're waking up every day is trying to think about better tools, right, and better services to help our clients price, right? That's ultimately what it is. How do we further deepen that relationship between the content partner, right, and their fans. That's Michael mentioned earlier, right? Different premium products and upsells and insurance, et cetera, that we're gonna monetize and merchandise through our marketplace, right? That's all part of the pot that goes into this, and it's all about, you know, we have a flywheel at Live Nation, right? You think about sort of the ticket experience, right, and that purchase experience, right, as part of an overall strategy, right, that we're in partnership with our clients, right, and pricing is just one of those tools.
Yeah, just to be specific, right, the Platinum tool is one that we have used and has continued to grow and frankly has grown very rapidly over the past couple years. That's the idea that you take a number of the best tickets, or even the best tickets in each section, and you market price those, and you dynamically shift the pricing as you're watching the demand and anticipating the demand for that show. A large part of the reason the stats I gave yesterday on the top 10 tours of this year versus the top 10 tours in 2019, and why that pricing is up, is because we have substantially increased the allocation of tickets to Platinum. I think as we move more and it's still high single digits or mid- to high single digits at this point.
There's still a ways to go in terms of working with the artists and getting more of those tickets to market-based pricing, which by the way, it's not truly secondary pricing even in those instances, but it is more market based, is going to be a tool that has a lot of room to grow and we'll continue to use with artists.
Okay. Let's take our next question from Mark Kelley, LightShed.
Thanks, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Just a couple for us. First on Ticketmaster. It's been about a year or so since executive changes at Ticketmaster and the beginning of the globalization process. Would love to hear from the Ticketmaster team just broadly on success thus far, and maybe expand on some of the near-term revenue and cost impacts beyond what was said in the slides. Then more broadly on ticketing, just what do you believe the pace of ticket prices increases will be going forward or could be?
Take the first. On the first, let's say, I mean, thanks for noticing. Certainly excited to be here today. This has been a lot of fun, right? I just had around, you know, a year to 18 months ago, we made some changes, not just to the executive team, but really the overall structure, right? That was to go from being basically mostly a regional and very local-focused organization to one that's focused first globally, then regionally, and also locally, right? Just like a Live Nation, right, you have to continue to focus on those three levers, right? Balancing those is gonna be something that we continue to struggle with, right? To try to make the most of opportunities on a daily basis, right?
What this is all about, honestly, is about running our core operations more efficiently, right? Which is what every smart company in the world is trying to do, right? We can funnel more money and more investment into technology, product and investment, right? We're trying to become a more nimble, more dynamic company, right? On behalf of fans and our client partners, right? Be that artists, promoters, sports clients, et cetera, sports leagues. It's really what this has all been about, and so that's incredibly exciting, right? Our job, like every day, right, is to wake up and figure out how can I amortize, right, more of my investment dollars across more tickets, right? Globally, right? You reduce your fixed cost base to start with, right? That's the simple part, right? Then it's, you know, what am I gonna prioritize?
How am I gonna innovate? How am I gonna invest in the future, right? And how can I do that in a way that I can deploy, right, new products and features globally on a faster basis, right? That's what this structure has been all about, and it's been incredibly exciting, I would say, and motivating for our team. On the second piece.
Yeah, on the pricing, I mean, to us, we look at it simply. At the end of the day, the price that content should get is the market clearing price for the ticket, which is currently defined by secondary. We're not gonna get there overnight. Over time, we've seen a lot of progress moving many hundreds of millions of dollars from the secondary ledger onto the content side of the ledger, both sports and concerts. All the tools that Michael talked about, not just in the U.S., but on a global basis, we're making available to our clients, and they're deciding the balance they wanna strike between getting all of that money and having a lower cost for whatever agenda they have for their fans and how they wanna service their fans. Ultimately, it's just timing in terms of the content we believe will ultimately extract those economics.
Great. Thanks. Just a quick one on the relationship between artists and fans going forward. Artists are increasingly favoring direct-to-consumer models and, you know, utilizing things like crypto and NFTs. We're just curious what your view is of the future of that artist-fan relationship and how you guys are gonna go about helping to enable that future.
Yeah, I think, you know, as a promoter, I said this many years ago, you know, the artists lived in a world for many years where everyone was in front of them. The gatekeepers, as they call it, the label, the MTV, the radio stations. Artists, over time now have figured out they wanna be in front. We always believed that we had a great advantage because the promoter has always been behind the artist. We're not in front. We don't have seven-year contracts. That's not the nature of our business. We gotta wake up every day and fight for the tour, and then we put them on tour, and they make, as we all know, 90%+ of the door. We don't have those same challenges that the labels and Spotify get caught in all the time on.
They're in front of the fan or in front of the artist, and they're making so much of the money. Artist is making all the money on stage. Kanye, Miami last night, whoever it is, they're driving the business. We're powering them to help them get on stage, globally tour, and let them monetize their art. We've always been behind them. We believe that. You are right. The artist is a direct-to-consumer business, much different than, you know, athletes or actors. I think the Kardashians have proven that very well. You can be a great brand direct, have a big audience, and people like Rihanna, the success she's having with her fashion business. The artist is a direct-to-consumer business.
They have 20-200 million fans, and they will seek partners who are helping them deliver their art and commerce direct to their fans. We think we have been doing that for years. We do it with our merch division, we do it with our ticket division, we do it with our concert division. We power a lot of their businesses, and we'll continue to do that for them. We think those are the companies that will succeed in the future are those that are powering the artist direct relationship.
Before we conclude today's event, we should hit on ESG and some of the health and safety questions that I know a lot of you have been asking us on.
Yep. Thanks, Amy. You know, this is a little bit of a discussion similar to what Michael said about venues. As a company, we've always been very progressive on ESG issues. It's something that we've always cared about. Our artists care about it, our employees care about it. S ustainability is something we've been in the game through the Green Nation Charter for a long time. Diversity, even before there was requirements, you can see our board has always had diversity. We've been very progressive on a lot of these things.
One of the things that we've really focused in the past year is pulling that out of the decentralized way we manage it and really creating an ESG SteerCo, where all these great things that we've already been implementing on the field, we can make sure that we're actually doing it across the entire company, and learning from these things. We have Schneider Electric coming in to help us with our carbon kind of baselining and getting those targets reset. We have a lot of work on the waste side that we've done at certain festivals. Liquid Death is a big, you know, kind of push toward you know, reducing waste, trying to get that rolled out uniformly across the company.
Same story on diversity, health and safety, et cetera. Just a confirmation to everybody, you know, we really do take this seriously and are now in the process of formalizing a lot of the stuff that we've already had the groundwork and have been doing. Specifically on kind of the health and safety part of it, Joe has been doing a lot of work on the security front.
Yeah. We in fact here last week had two days. We had everybody from our concert businesses globally, U.S. teams, Europe, Asia, and Australia, even brought in the new team from Mexico, spend two days just on what's the health and safety protocols of our business? How are we making sure we have all of the right processes in place? How are we thinking about the use of technology to enhance, safety and security at our shows? And how do we really continue to think about, on a global basis, how we can consistently execute, to a new standard on, making sure we've got a great environment for all of our fans to come.
Clearly, an area of a lot of investment and focus going forward. I'm personally leading the effort, and we'll be spending a chunk of my time this year making sure we get that advanced. Sorry, before we go, I mean, you gotta let Bazinet ask a question. You can't let him think you're mad at him. G ive him his question. Come on.
All right. Our last question comes from Jason Bazinet, Citi.
It's a finance question, so I apologize to the broader group. Stock-based compensation, I think, was, like, $290 million or something last year, up a lot, at least relative to what we were expecting. Is that something related to the pandemic, where you moved cash-based comp into equity to sort of reduce the burn?
100%.
Can you talk a little bit about is that temporary? Is it permanent? Like, can you just frame that for us?
We absolutely, as we've talked a lot, been in a cash-focused position from 2020 and 2021. We cut $1.5 billion of cash in 2020 and over a billion dollar of cash in 2021. As part of that, we shifted a substantial portion of compensation from cash compensation, both on the salary level as well as the bonus level for all of our employees over the course of both years. M ost of our fixed cost is compensation-based. That number still accounts to, what, 6% or 7% of our total employee costs.
It was, in the scheme of things, relatively limited, but it was 100% focused on, during the pandemic, reducing our cash-based compensation, replacing it with some stock to get us through and leave us where we're at now, which is in a very strong liquidity position. I think we'll continue to assess what's the right balance of cash and equity going forward, so we may shift the bonus a bit, but it's not gonna be anything like what you've seen. I also think you gotta look at it over a couple-year basis because technically the timing of when we made the grants in 2020 versus 2021, I wouldn't look at all that as a 2021 cost. I know technically accounting you do, but I'd look at it spread a bit more than that. Yeah, no, it was very deep in the employee base that we did that.
Okay. Well, thank you so much for everyone's time and interest in Live Nation. This concludes our event, and I look forward to catching up with a lot of you over the coming weeks. Thank you again.