Thank you all for popping over at 1:00 P.M. We got about 40 minutes of slides, and then we'll do some Q&A. We've got some work to do today to get you all excited again about our long-term growth. Let's start off with the overriding slide and some of the debate last night. This is an industry where we continue to see and predict up until we put 2030 here, but onward, that this will be a great industry in terms of demand-supply. We think it's up to a $50 billion business by the time 2030. If you look at kind of the growth rates, right, historically, this has been about an 8% annual growth industry. We had always delivered close to that or a little higher.
I think we told you last year, once we get through the lumpiness post-COVID, we expect this to be a long-term continued 8% annual industry growth, and we will always somehow deliver more than the industry historically. We still believe that's the answer. We think 2025 was still a little bit of a digestion from post-COVID in terms of lots of content went out in 2024 and 2023. Some of that did not end up coming out in 2025 in our amps and arenas, just naturally through the cycle. A lot of stadium shows happen. We're sitting here today looking at our pipe for next year for stadiums, arenas, and amps, and we're very confident that next year is back to a kind of a normalized year across all of our platforms.
The artists either that haven't toured this year, because they toured a lot post-COVID, the cycle's now back to a bit more of a regular process next year. I have no doubt we'll be sitting here in a year from now with this chart reconfirming that this industry is seeing the usual 8% kind of annual growth rates across all categories. We are proud this year of our stadium business. We overdelivered against the industry by far, but we see from the data we see early right now. It looks like a good annual growth rate back to what we see as historic normal levels. There should be no fear in the market about will we grow our business, will the industry grow. This industry is going to grow. We always overdeliver against the industry.
No one should be debating whether we're going to grow the fan count on the revenue side to the normal historic numbers we've always delivered as we get into kind of what we believe now is a normalized 2026 onward post all of the other COVID stuff. That should reconfirm any long-term shareholders that growth is here for many years to come. Big part of it we talk about is globalization of the business, right? These next billion fans are not coming from Baltimore. They're coming from a global business. This is the kind of that we talk about, that 14-year-old that's living in Colombia, in Cape Town, Boston, or Milan, has a jukebox in their hand, and they know that Drake dropped a song this morning or whoever that relevant artist is of the day, and they want to go see that artist. This is new.
This is for 50, 60 years. This was a U.S., Western Europe business. That is really where you could tour. That is where the gatekeepers kind of controlled the distribution. Now that this is a globalized business, thanks to TikTok, YouTube, and a cell phone, every consumer in the world wants to be part of the cultural moment, the band that are trending around the world. These markets now are all open for business, something they were not for many years as we grew this company. If you just look at any snapshot, where are they touring? You really started to see the last two years, especially last year, where these artists are like, no, let us go now test all this. Let us get to India. As you saw us do 135,000 for Coldplay selling out in a second.
Travis Scott, we just brought through all of these markets, Dubai, India, China, selling out the largest tour in history in some of these markets. Latin America is on fire, Argentina. You name the country or the city, there is nothing off limits right now where these artists can't show up and sell a stadium out, an arena. That was an untapped market for 60 years. That was unheard of. You never thought of playing India, Korea, Pacific Rim, Latin America. Those were low-margin, vanity plays. They weren't part of what an artist would say is a real payday and hit that kind of globalization. This is the biggest reason why this industry is going to grow. If nothing else happens, those billion young consumers want to see the artists. Remember, the artists are global, right? They have, on a bad day, they got 30 million followers.
On a good day, maybe they have 300 million followers. And they know where those followers are. Artists, you know you have 10 million followers in Brazil, 22 million in the Pacific Rim, and you say to us as the tour guys, hey, I want to go, I want to play the Pacific Rim, I want to go play Latin America, I want to play India. This is why the industry is going to do well for the next foreseeable future, and we'll be able to ride that wave. One of the great advantages Live Nation has, and happened 20 years ago when I was living in London, was this idea that it's a global world and there are no borders. We as a company needed to make sure we were in all areas of the world.
It's actually, you know, in Los Angeles, you don't add a lot of value to the Los Angeles manager. He kind of knows the SoFi versus the Intuit Dome. But when you're talking to the Travis Scott or the artist about where to play in India, where to play in Latin America, where to play that's safe, who's your promoter, do you know the market well? This is our secret sauce. Having 148 offices in over 40 countries, we have local entrepreneurs. This is still a local business, although a global superstar, right? You have to execute locally, sound, light, productions, marketing, permits, understand. The significance of the market. This is why we're in a great position to capitalize on this global trend. It's really why you saw this year, why our international business was doing so well and will continue to do well.
It'll be a big part of our growth driver. We've talked about this every year. We just love making sure through our own surveys and our own data that there's no trends or nothing that's changing. Live music continues to be the top performer of all experiences. As great as that NFL game is, or how great is World Soccer, all of those are fabulous. Live entertainment always ranks number one in what a consumer wants to go see in terms of his live experience. Why a lot of consumer survey around this? It's not a preciseness to it, but some of the attributes that come out is when you look at this chart around community, around letting loose, around cultural moments, none of those other experiences have all of these elements.
Sports has a lot of it, but it's not a let loose, let your hair down for the night and have that cultural moment. That magic moment of that concert is not duplicatable. You can't see it on TV like you can the NFL game. You got to be there to get the goosebumps, to meet the girl, to have the fun, to socialize. It is a social cultural moment when we want to come together, let our hair down. You go to a Metallica show and you will see many people like yourself, the banker that put the Metallica shirt on that night and spent two hours thumping his hands up and down. He is not a banker that night. He is let loose. That's what happens in music in two hours. That's why the magic moment is special.
You know when we ask them again, all ages, if there is a pullback, if the consumer dollars are short, where will you pull back? Concerts continually rank as the last place they will pull back. We like that. I will say this because I got beat up on a kind of out of context quote. What is important for us is to make sure it is affordable. Yes, we always talk about pricing and secondary, but this is an affordable category. We have to make sure that, as Omar will talk about, this is a category where the more affordable we make that Jones Beach ticket, the more people will get in that door. Our most and most overriding motive is not to increase ticket price. It is to fill every seat in the house. 98% of shows do not sell out.
The number one way to sell that venue is to keep the price affordable for all consumers. That is our number one goal. We make all the money if the consumer walks in the door and monetizes the ancillary revenue. Not only do we have to make sure that the consumer hears about the show, we have to make sure that they realize it is still a great value and keep pricing affordable for all. That is going to make sure we keep as rated as the number one place to keep coming back to. The last piece of data is consumer. We are always obsessed with making sure that young consumer has the same passion that maybe some of us did around our youth. It overridingly continues. I have three young boys. They are in love with music. They had to go see Playboi Carti last week.
They've got to go see the latest. Even Tyler Childers. I'm not Tyler. Whereas Tyler, the Creator, which is not Live Nation, so that's tough. They love going to shows. Our data will tell us generations. Gen Z is completely obsessed with this being one of their magic moments, whether it's just to get that Instagram or that TikTok, but that cultural moment of being at that show is wildly important to them. As we said yesterday, we think 2026, given today, not only the consumer survey data tells us more fans want to go to shows, our current what's booked for next year in the.
Confirmed and in progress is telling us next year is going to be a record year and that we see continued consumer strength, not only from a global perspective, but also from a consumer supply and demand, meaning more artists on the road, more consumers want to see those shows, and we'll put our continued fan growth and revenue growth back on the table next year, as well as our AOI. Again, you've seen this for many years. We're very proud that we've been able to monetize and deliver you on these double-digit AOI historic numbers. We see no reason, given the growth we see in the industry for the foreseeable future, on the top line that we'll be able to deliver this. Even this year, if you look, we delivered a heck of a good AOI on a smaller overall fan growth.
Next year, as we continue to grow that fan growth back to traditional levels, you know the AOI will follow. We think 2026 will continue to be a fabulous year on this calendar. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Omar, and he's going to take you through our concert business.
Thanks, Michael. You usually stole my thunder. You took all my good stats, but I'll try to wow you with some other ones. Just to give you a complete look at the scale of our business, we spent $14 billion on talent last year. The one that really always gets here is we produce a show every 10 minutes. Just think about that. While you're in this room, we'll have 10 shows that'll start somewhere around the world.
We'll continue to grow our festival portfolio, continue to grow the number of artists we work with, and ultimately that all drives our fan count. Every year, the goal that we set forth is how many more flags can we add to the charts. If you were to go back and look at last year, we've added three or four new ones and some of them at real scale, as Michael talked about with India, which is coming on increasingly quickly. If you look at that's the way that we get to 225 million fans. We'll have growth, of course, in America, which a lot of that is the unsold tickets that we have today. The explosive growth comes from our new venues in the pipeline, as well as all the countries that are now getting up to scale.
To give you an example, Imagine Dragons went to Brazil last week. Last time they were there, they played two cities. This time they played four cities. Next time they'll play four cities, but two of them will be different than two this time, which means when they go back the third time, they'll play six cities, right? We just continue to make tours longer as artists go to countries they've been to before, but you're starting to get new markets in those countries. There is more infrastructure also coming online in those places. That is how we continue to grow our fans over time. The whole thing, though, ultimately comes down to how we do on our sell-through rate. That is where we really believe, again, there's a lot more to sell. 35 million unsold concert tickets, 95% of shows don't sell out.
You see all the headlines. Yes, stadiums generally sell at 90% clip. A lot of tickets still to sell in amphitheaters. A lot of tickets still to sell in theaters. And some real marginal growth in arenas. We look at this a lot as our sort of one of our key metrics is how is our sell-through rate and what are we going to do. We'll show you in a couple of slides how we're going to start attacking these 35 million tickets. These tickets already exist. These aren't new tickets. These are 35 million tickets already in the system. It is one of our growth drivers to 225 million fans. Across every stage, we continue to see growth. Clearly, you all know we've all seen the explosive stadium growth. It's 29%. What has happened is the other venue types continue to grow as well.
What we haven't seen is any deterioration in growth in other venue types as stadiums continue to grow. The stadium growth has really become structural. If you look and see, not only is there more artists getting bigger quicker and wanting to play stadiums, generally. They do that because they can build a larger scale production, have more Instagrammable moments, and then the fans want to come to that because that's where they're getting their human connection. We're really finding stadiums being a huge growth driver, and it's now structural because you have more artists that can play stadiums and that want to play them. We really believe the stadium boom is here to stay, completely structural. As you'll see in our numbers. After a giant 2025 in stadiums, 2026 is shaping up to be just as big in America and bigger internationally.
What else are we doing? Where are the other opportunities? That comes in how we communicate with fans. That we believe are going to a show or everybody bought tickets to a show. It is a new program created, a loyalty program called All Access. Really proud by the end of the year on a launch that really just occurred in the last couple of months. We will have a million fans that have signed up. So far, we have given those fans opportunities to buy tickets, pre-sale access before tickets go to on sales. We have rewarded them with concert cash and personalized ticket deals. One of the exciting things about this is getting into this notion of personalized commerce and having the ability of a bot reaching out to you, knowing that.
You'll see this will start, knowing that you are a fan of 30 Seconds to Mars, reaches out to you immediately, says, "Hey, you're a fan," has a conversation with you, and then allows you to buy in the app. This does not replace the on sale. This is a personalized shopping experience where we're going out to fans and saying, "We know through your listening history or your buying history, something that you may want to go to," giving you a chance, a perk to get in before anybody else, and then understanding that you also like to park in a certain place as you can read and then making it very seamless in terms of the checkout. We'll use this to set up a concierge system for fans that sign up to do purchase and upsells, and as you could read, also do some personalizations.
Chat-based discussion. We think that's one of the ways to capture this opportunity that we have with these 35 million unsold tickets. Everyone wants to talk about AI and what we're doing with AI. We've really started to leverage the different providers that are out there for a couple of different ways. First and foremost, how do you optimize the tour? Are you playing in the right city on the right day of the week in the right venue? Are you scraping and looking at all the other traffic that's going on, weather patterns, homecoming games, et cetera? AI has been really helpful to get us to optimize tour routing, also optimize pricing. Optimizing pricing is the key to get to those 35 million unsold tickets because that really ultimately comes down to a price issue. We've gotten really good at optimizing the top of the house.
Now we got to get better at optimizing the unsold inventory. We will use it for marketing, as you've seen with All Access, as well as our other digital platforms and ways that we advertise. We will use AI to really get cutting edge on marketing, as well as to have a better relationship with the fan after they buy a ticket and see whether we can upsell them to something that they want at the venue. As this goes, it just continues to show all of this is all the levers that get us to our global growth. Double digits right now over last year in terms of show count and fan count already, tickets sold for next year. Planning on having an incredible stadium year. As you can see up here, we already have stadiums on sale. The Weeknd sold almost 2 million tickets for next year already.
Metallica continues this amazing run selling stadium tickets. Ariana Grande will be one of the biggest arena tours of the year already on sale. You can see the rest of them. Driving stadiums, we got our hard hats on and started in the amphitheaters earlier. Knowing that we needed more shows for next year. Next year is an interesting year because of FIFA and a lot of stadiums out. We worked with the NFL, worked really closely with NFL ownership to make sure that we were getting the shoulder of FIFA. That is why our stadium count is actually even at one point thought that maybe we would have some struggle with that, but we are actually going to exceed even our own internal optimistic thoughts on stadiums. Worked really closely with Major League Baseball. The Mets go on a 10-game road trip.
We used to put three shows in when they're gone for 10 days. Now we can get seven or eight shows in. We are also starting to utilize these brand new MLS stadiums, including one in Nashville. That we'll do a concert series at next year. All of that drives stadiums getting started earlier on amphitheaters to get us back to those 2024 numbers that we all liked on Fountain. Grow off that number. We are having a magical start to arenas as well. Double digit. That's both global and domestic. You add all those things up, and that's driving us towards our next goal of 225 million tickets. Some of those tickets will come from Jordan Zachary, who's helping us build new venues. I'll bring him up here now to walk you through. How he's going to help me help him. Help you.
Thank you. Afternoon, everybody. I'm excited to be here. I'll walk you through our Venue Nation business and part of our growth strategy, which we've been building over the last few years. To begin, just a reminder on our portfolio. We are the leading diverse and global portfolio. I think portfolio is most important here as you think about our strategy going forward. We've got arenas and stadiums and amphitheaters all over the world, theaters and clubs servicing 65 million fans. That's generating $2 billion of our revenue at our venues alone. That's all serviced by a really incredible team of 34,500 employees at peak season. We can't say enough about, to Michael's point, locally, there's not another platform in the world like that.
We're proud we've developed a team of 60 professionals who are really focused on building new venues, which is critical to our growth, as Omar mentioned. Turning to that, growth, really successful 2025, adding some major venues, which you can see at the top of the slide. 2026 will continue a number of large ground-up developments opening, including large amphitheaters, significant AOI contributors, and large indoor venues, which we think is a tremendous opportunity in the U.S. and around the world. In 2027 and beyond, you'll see a lot of international buildings come online, including arenas. If you notice here, 28 of the 48 venues that we talk about in our pipeline for large venues are international. I think it's an incredible statement. Last year, we talked about 35 venues in the pipeline.
That'll tell you that this is an evolving strategy, a growing strategy, and that there are so many global markets out there that do not have concert infrastructure, which we are now building. We believe these venues will deliver about 30 million fans. You can see 29 on the slide as they come online. That will represent $600 million of AOI across all of our businesses, again, contributing significantly to our growth. We are very focused on structuring this capital spend on a 20%-ish, greater than 20% portfolio-wide IRR on a portfolio basis. This capital program represents about $5.2 billion in spend, and that is funded through a combination of cash on hand, project and corporate debt, as well as partner funding. Quickly turning to our food and beverage strategy, which is a really big focus for our margin and growth.
We're really proud we've seen continued increase in per caps. Right now, quarter our strategy is a bit obvious, but just to say it simply, it's delivering products that fans want. And that's new for our industry, to be candid. We've got a fan segmentation analysis and a data analytics team that looks show by show, venue by venue, at what that consumer is going to want to eat or drink. Our goal is to deliver that. It's not just about price, right? I mean, obviously, per caps need to go up, but value is critical. This year, we launched a value program here in the U.S. $2 hot dogs. I don't know if any of you had any. They were actually pretty good. $5 beers. We saw no cannibalization of our high-end sausage or our premium beers. We saw growth.
We sold 600,000 value products as well. Again, as Michael said, it's about hitting both ends of the spectrum and making sure this is an affordable night or day at the concert. We've got scale. With $1 billion of revenue, we can build and own our own brands. On the slide, you'll see Rebel Hand, Mosh Burger, Ziggy's. These are food products we developed in-house, adjacent to our venues. They replace licensed products. This year, in their first year at scale, they outperformed all of the licensed products. That's about quality and knowing our customer. Back to that fan segmentation strategy, we really apply that to beverages. Beverages are a hot topic. Obviously, consumption trends are changing by every generation. We look at this very closely. We've seen growth.
We've seen growth in our TDs on the alcohol side, which were exciting this year. And then on the non-alcohol side, which is continually important, we've seen growth across our own brand refreshers, Liquid Death, which is a really important partnership of ours, as well as soda offerings. Similarly, premiumization is a term we used last year and we're really focused on. We believe that for the right experience, fans will continue to invest. We've been designing and building premium clubs and lounges at scale, modular at scale. Depending on the global market, if it's an indoor venue, an outdoor venue, a stadium, an arena, we have a product that works. For example, you'll see here, this is a rendering of the Vinyl Room, which is a product we're building at scale. This is Nashville. It's actually an indoor venue with a terrace.
You can see the skyline. This product is also going to be introduced this quarter in two international arenas, which we already own. This is, again, new builds and then portfolio enhancements. We believe there is a demand for this. If we can keep building the right products, there is much more margin in the premium experience. With that, turn it over to Russell Wallach.
Thanks, Jordan. It is great to follow venues. As you can imagine, venue strategy will be a huge driver of sponsorship growth. These new products that Jordan is creating, the Vinyl Room or others, are just more sponsorship opportunities that we can go to market with. From a brand perspective, globally, the 1,300 brands that we work with, wide range of brands, some of those are local, regional, national, global. The real secret sauce is our strategic partners.
Those are multi-year, multi-million dollar programs that we're working with brands on a global basis. The key for that is that, again, three to five years, that's where the lion's share of our revenue comes. We're upselling those 1,300 into strategics, as well as uncovering new brands every day. Eyeballs. We've got eyeballs online. We've got eyeballs on site. We're continuing to work on a variety of strategies to kind of build our eyeballs on a global basis so we can talk to more brands and more markets. One of the key drivers for us, you'll see in a couple of slides, are renewals, because that gives us guaranteed income for years to come. Our NPS scores are really high, meaning our sponsors renew with us at a very, very high number, and we're also able to upsell them because they're very happy.
From an AOI standpoint. We've been delivering you double-digit growth. We'll continue to deliver that double-digit growth. From a sponsorship standpoint, these are categories that are not just specific to Live Nation or music. These are the biggest categories for sports, entertainment, and general. We do great there. A variety of different partners we work with. We can work with bank partners and credit card partners in different territories all over the world, beverage partners in different territories all over the world. Now we're really focused on these future growth categories. Travel is a big one for us. All of our data, all of our research, our fans are traveling in huge numbers. Our fans are moving economies to the extent that they're actually traveling to both our concerts and our festivals.
We're really focused on emerging categories and these big categories where historically we haven't seen as much revenue, and we're now starting to see really great revenue from a lot of new categories. Airbnb is a great example. I just mentioned travel. This is a global partnership across multiple festivals, again, around the world. What we were able to do with this partnership is to start with the launch of it. We actually launched as Airbnb was launching their experiences, new product. We were able to work with them. We're actually selling Airbnb experiences to our fans on site at a variety of our festivals, all sold out. That's happening on site. We then took that to their super hosts. They're now able to actually host their super hosts with great experiences on site at our events.
Finally, we can actually integrate booking into it so that our fans can then stay at Airbnbs when they're traveling to the event. This is just a great example of multi-territories, one great travel partner that we feel really great about and will be able to grow over years. As we look to 2026, we're right now about 65% of our confirmed business already for 2026. You can kind of see here the list of brands. These are global brands. When we talk about a Coca-Cola or a Bacardi or a Kraft Heinz, many of these brands, they're not just working with us in the U.S. They're working with us around the world. We're seeing more and more when we announce a new partnership in the U.S., we start to get calls from the brand in the U.K.
and Mexico saying, "Hey, we'd love to be able to do what you're doing with our partners in the U.S." Again, we're seeing the global business more than ever with all of these brands that are not just working with us in the U.S. or one market in the U.K., but in anywhere from 5-10 other countries around the world. With that, I'm going to three days in, my new great friend, Saumil, will talk about Ticketmaster.
All right. Hello. My name is Saumil. I'm the new President of Ticketmaster, and it is my third day. Be nice. Nonetheless, I'm thrilled to represent the work of the team and talk to you a little bit about Ticketmaster. Okay. You all know Ticketmaster has always been global in its outlook. We are now ticketing in 39 countries.
We are the undisputed leader with 11,500 enterprise clients, 643 million tickets sold, and nearly $60 billion in ticket volume processed. The international growth that we are showing here that Michael and Omar also talked about are going to give us multiple years of runway into the future to continue growing Ticketmaster and help support Live Nation's growth. Here's an example. You can see that in 2025, year to date, we've added 27 million net new tickets. 70% of those are outside of North America. This demonstrates the trajectory of where we are headed and how we can continue growing Ticketmaster for many, many years to come. Here's a couple of example data points. Paris La Défense with 300,000 tickets, very exciting venue, marquee venue. In addition to that.
The venues New South Wales with 2 million tickets that has been with another vendor for a long time and is now on Ticketmaster, just started ticketing with us just a few days ago, which is a very, very exciting development. We are thrilled about the global growth and excited to continue this work. I'm now going to tell you a little bit about AI. Some of you know this. I was most recently the Chief Product Officer for Square. Over the last six months, I've spent my time mostly learning AI tools myself, just beginner's mind. Meeting with founders that are at the bleeding edge of the entrepreneurial journey with this new macro wave of AI, and really thinking about what sorts of problems we could solve with this new capability and technology at Ticketmaster.
One of the core problems that Omar and Michael touched upon is that 30% of concert and sports tickets go unsold, or that 98% of shows are not fully sold out. We should be able to help here with AI. Our goal with AI and commerce is twofold. First, we want to make sure that wherever fans are, we can meet them where they are, and we can ensure that they can discover, search, and if appropriate, also transact on another surface with AI to continue ticket growth and continue selling out tickets. Here is a concrete example. You can see in a chat surface of your choice, and we will announce concrete announcements in Q1. Google is going live in Google AI mode with Gemini in the next two weeks.
You can see that the consumer can quickly search and transact in real time on a chat surface, which can be really powerful, especially for long-tail discovery, and especially for consumers that are spending a lot of their time on ChatGPT or other chat surfaces. In the distant future, you can also imagine as AI expands and becomes more pervasive, you could imagine ticket purchasing as an impulse buy in a wearable context, for example, several years away. We are going to lean in pretty hard here. That's not just all. I mean, think about our owned and operated experiences, whether it's on our app or our website. Our website has hundreds of millions of consumers engaging with it every month. Our app has tens of millions of consumers in the U.S. itself and is one of the largest apps in the App Store.
What if we could drive discovery through the app? What if we could do last-minute sales through the app? What if we could do long-tail ticketing sales through the app? Here's an example. You can see that the consumer can come to our chat concierge and just say, "What do I see in New York this month?" Based upon their preferences, based upon their past purchases, based upon great personalization, we should be able to enable commerce in real time with just a few clicks in a user interface that they are very used to based upon the changing paradigms of search and discovery. Now, let's switch gears and talk about accessibility and how we are fighting fraud and bad actors. Ticketmaster has always been a leader in this area, and we intend to continue our investments both in technology and in human support.
We were the first to ban spec ticketing. We were the first to limit one seller account per broker. We are the best at fighting bots on primary tickets. You can see that compared to the rest of the industry, we are going to be far ahead, and we are going to stay far ahead. This is an area that I'm personally very excited about, having come from Square. As you all may know, fintech has been at the bleeding edge of identity verification, ML-based risk models, and fraud fighting at scale. This is something that Square, Cash App, Chime, and other players have been really good at. I'm really excited to personally dig in and contribute based upon my 10 years in fintech. Let's talk briefly about bots. There's been a lot of talk about bots since 2022.
In 2022, we were blocking about 1 billion bots a month. In September and October of this year, it's 20 billion a month, almost 20 billion. That tells you that the scale of the problem is nearly 20 times the size. The good news is that our defenses have kept up and are doing great. We continue to invest here, and we continue to keep working at this, and we will. In addition to bot blocking, which we're better at than everybody else, I should also mention that we've started to do things like identity verification. Most recently, we blocked 1 million high-risk accounts, only 3% of which passed subsequent identity verification. I'll show you an example of how that actually works in the consumer experience.
This is also stuff that we did a lot of in fintech, and I'm excited to do more of. In a recent high-demand on sale, we took 9,000 tickets back and made them available to fans. That's a concrete example of how we are driving accessibility to the average fan and making sure that the tickets fall into their hands ahead of bad actors. Here's a quick example of identity verification. You can actually do this right in the app. It's extremely convenient. You can start your security check. You can confirm that you are a human being, not a bot, not a bad actor, by a selfie that happens right in the app. You can upload a photo ID, and we can quickly revert back to you and ensure that you are human. We're doing this over the app. We're also doing this via email.
We're excited to continue down this journey and ensure that tickets go to the right people at the right time. Thank you. Hand it to Joe.
Thanks, Saumil. You don't need to take a picture of this. You can get it from Amy. Don't worry. You guys were worried we weren't going to have this slide. Let's just walk through the levers. To give you guys a little more concrete why it is we have confidence we're going to be able to continue to compound AOI in the business at double-digit rates. First of all, growing to 225 million fans. Yes, we increased that from 200 million that we were at last year, driven by a couple of things.
One is, as you saw from Jordan, the strong pipeline of venues under development, knowing that we were going to be bringing on close to 30 million fans from venues that were out there developing, acquiring, bringing online. Also, as you heard from Omar, just the strength of how robust the pipeline is as we look structurally at stadiums. The bigger and bigger role they are playing in our industry, along with the continued build-out of new amps. Adding fans at every venue type. Optimizing show performance first and foremost, figuring out how to better price and market the tickets that are not selling, lowering those prices, continuing to optimize the entire house. Venue Nation growth. That is what you got from Jordan in terms of what are we doing to build out new venues, to continue to enhance our food and beverage, to continue to enhance our premium opportunities.
Russell, in terms of sponsorship, both as we add new fans as well as as we continue to build out the different services that he offers. And then we continue to add fee-bearing tickets, and then very excited with a lot of what Saumil brings to the table in terms of continuing to build new products, non-service fee revenue sources for Ticketmaster. So collectively, we have different people that you've all met this afternoon. We're working on all of these different areas to make sure that we're going to continue to drive profitability of the business over the next several years, compounding at those double-digit rates. That's the presentation. With that, Michael, everybody else, we can take questions for anybody on the team.
Amy, how do you want to raise your hand? Amy, I'll bring you a microphone.
If you could just introduce yourself and your firm. Yep. Yes, Michael.
Hi, thank you. Mark Mahaney with Evercore ISI. Maybe talking a little bit more about Venue Nation and the on-site spend. I think for years we've been acc ustomed to seeing the growth and strength over there. Yesterday at earnings, you laid out a slew of very positive data points in terms of the strength that you're seeing. I want to see if there's any more you could share in terms of the trends that you expect at on-site spends at Venue Nation going forward.
Yeah, sure. I know we've talked a little bit just now about really fan segmentation, which we've got a we think we've got a few years of runway back to just the simplicity of delivering fans what they want. Food is a nice category, but it's still mainly a wet business. In terms of the majority, we think that'll shift.
We are still seeing real diversity around beverage. It is a little bit of everything. We are excited about the food product, and we are excited about non-alcoholic as growth drivers. And premium. On the premium side outside of food and beverage. To Michael's point, premium drives a whole new angle around food and beverage when you give people a place to be.
It is a good point.
That would be our biggest opportunity, right? When we look at on-site, it is taking that earlier number we have given you. Our amps are 3% premium. Our new ones we built are 25%-30%. Whether you are building them new and making sure you have a proper premium product or adding Vinyl Rooms, St. Louis was our test this year. We rolled out two new clubs there. Give them quick.
Yeah, St. Louis, I would say we prem iumized.
Two new clubs, a backyard and a Vinyl Room. We also took the main concourse and made it nicer. We saw growth for the GA audience as well as the premium. We are doing that across a number of amphitheaters this summer.
Hey, thanks for taking the question. Stephen Laszczyk from Goldman Sachs. Michael, on the supply side, I was wondering if you would speak a little bit more about some of the trends you are seeing at the artist level. I think we are clearly seeing artists level up into stadiums. You are seeing artists want to tour internationally more. Be curious your take on trends and the reasons for why artists that currently play at the club level, the theater level, could potentially level up into the amp and arena footprint. I think there is some debate on the supply dynamic on that front.
I would just be curious your take on what gives you confidence that that can recover over the course of the next couple of years.
Yeah, I mean, you saw the history of the growth. You'll see our projected growth. The slide showed you there on all our different venues. We look at our 8,000 club shows we did this year. We look at that business to be growing. That's not declining at all. We wouldn't be investing in theaters and clubs if we didn't think that that venue segment was not a growth segment. I mean, Brooklyn Paramount, 5,000 seats on fire. I wish I had 20 more of those. That's truly development mid-range to low range. The truth, we just opened in Nashville. Great venues, big markets.
We see, again, if you look at the supply demand, what has really happened on the consumer side and the artist side is when the gatekeepers were kind of eliminated, everybody now is a fan and has access to the same information, no matter where you live. Every artist now doesn't need to get a record deal, so-called the old model where a few artists went to Irving Plath and hoped the label signed them that night. There are artists all over the world on a computer uploading music to any platform right now. We actually see the supply of artists. We always make sure we look at this data. Is the pie growing? We don't want to just tell you it's growing because the pricing is going up. Are there more actual artists on the road at all levels? Absolutely, yes.
The pie is growing every year on a global basis from the club to the stadium. That is why we always say supply. And a lot of it is, again, going to go international, right? You can be an artist in any country now and upload a song, get access, and be playing the Hollywood Bowl or the Paramount. That did not happen before. Most of the world was a British, U.S. found, got signed by a label, and toured those markets. Now you can be an artist in India, in any market in the world, as K-pop taught us. It is globalization of the artist. There are more artists on the road and in their bedroom on a computer wanting to be an artist than ever before, as well as more fans. That is why we believe that it is a double or 8% annual growth in this industry.
That's driven by more artists on the road.
Maybe I'll ask a follow-up to that question. There was a slide that showed the growth by venues in 2019. I was surprised to see kind of amps had grown, but it underpays some of the other kind of venue types. I'm curious what's driven that dynamic and then how you think about elevating the growth at amphitheaters, if that is a goal, or if you're content to see some of that growth maybe trickle into arenas and stadiums.
What was your first point? You said you were.
Referencing the slide that showed growth by venues in 2019. Yeah.
Yeah. Your question is what? Just will amphitheaters grow? Sure. The ongoing question. Yes. We wouldn't have built three amphitheaters this year in Kansas City and Minneapolis if we didn't think that they were not great, great venues.
They're high-margin venues. Consumers, when you do surveys, where do you want to see a band? The consumer will tell you the first place he wants to see them is a small club. I don't want to see the Rolling Stones in the Troubadour. Second is I want to see them outside. We know that the outdoor experience on the lawn, under the stars. Jones Beach, you can't replicate that. It's a very different experience than playing Barclays or MSG. It's got a great sweet spot for the artist base. We think amphitheaters, we've been doing this for 20 years. Some years you have an up year. Some years there's more country artists. Some years there's less country artists. There's more. We don't look at it as anything structural. We think amphitheaters are going to continue to have a great growth business for long-term to come.
Hey, Brian from Morgan Stanley, hopefully this is a being nice to you question. But some really interesting stuff on how you're leveraging AI on discoverability and the upselling front through the platform or plan to. I'm curious if you have anything to add on just the on-sale experience itself and whether there's an opportunity to make that a little bit more fluid, a little bit more fan-friendly.
Yeah, thank you. I wish I had mentioned that in the presentation itself, but it's a great question. Yeah, I mean, once you think about a fan in the Ticketmaster experience, whether app or site, once that fan is fully identity verified, which we're working on, and once that fan has interacted with our agent on our own site, it is a logical extension from there to helping that fan actually participate in the on-sale by virtue of their agent.
It is a logical extension that in the distant future, the fan can participate in the on-sale, but they do not have to show up with their desktop at the office at 9:00 A.M., 10:00 A.M., and their agent acts on their behalf. Under parameters that they have specified ahead of time, paired with all the personalization that we can bring to the table because we have years of data on purchases and preferences and genres that are adjacent. With that, we should be able to make on-sales more pleasant for fans as well by just parameterizing it and making it AI-friendly.
Thanks. To give him more credit than just the three days, we signed a deal a few months ago, so him and I have many conversations. I have been wildly impressed since the day we met as him and I text every night. He is online.
He's a customer complaint. I mean, he's obsessed with how do I make a mark and elevate the experience online and the friction. That's a big part of what attracted us from day one. We ought to make sure that's first and foremost. We obviously wanted to find someone with incredible technical background that can truly translate that and drive the teams to the right agenda. The fact he didn't mention it's amazing because that's all him and I are on these exchanges every night about his ideas. I'm really, really energized about it.
I had one follow-up for Omar. In the past, you guys have talked about kind of when you look at grosses region to region, them being fairly comparable to the kind of legacy North America, Europe markets. Is that holding true as the business continues to expand into more and more geographies?
Or what kind of dynamics are you seeing there?
Yeah, it's actually closing. I mean, if you look at the average gross for the weekend in Europe and the U.K. is now generally on par where we were in America. Your average ticket price in India is $100 US for the big shows. That's grown incredibly quickly compared to other markets that we've seen develop. The average ticket price in Australia and Asia already outpaces what you get in the U.S. I think we're feeling really confident about that. We're starting to see markets that we were doing shows in, but they were subsidized by the Middle East market, subsidized by the now you have Coldplay rolling in, selling out four stadiums, getting a real ticket price. Travis Scott rolls in, gets a real ticket price.
We're starting to see less subsidies in those markets, which is then driving a real true commercialized music business. We'll see that last frontier in the Middle East will be Saudi Arabia, where there's a lot of activity, a lot of its government subsidy where you're trying to get is commercialization. I'm confident we'll see the ticket price there. No, we are starting to see, specifically in Europe and big Western European countries, in the U.K., they've absolutely caught up with America on average gross, which is really fantastic.
Hey, how are you? A couple of follow-up questions. First, on David's question about amphitheaters and some of the new ones that you have coming online. I noticed that it seems like it's only a North America phenomenon to have amphitheaters. I was wondering why.
There wouldn't be an opportunity for that in Europe or elsewhere abroad. It's a lower-cost building. Michael referenced earlier about fans wanting to see concerts under the stars. Just curious about that.
Yeah, we would love that. Historically, the market in America versus Europe was Europe was a very big festival market. You kind of had your soccer stadium and tons of festivals. Festivals really were the way artists thought about playing Europe because they didn't have an arena market. In America, early on, the promoters started building the Jones Beach. That's all evolved now. We would look at building an amphitheater in any market around the world. It's a great product. Most of Europe's challenge is always just land, finding land where you could actually do it and not being 100 miles outside of the main city.
Now we look at these markets in Europe and go, if we found land that was good. Let's build an arena versus an amp just because it would have a higher usage, not because we wouldn't like to build one there. We are looking. In the southern, we've looked around Italy. We looked at Australia. We look everywhere, and you'll see some of that come to life. The market and the product is just as viable in any city in the world. Just a matter of do we have the land opportunity? If we do, is it an arena or an amp that we put the shovel in the ground for?
In Latin America, what you're seeing is we're calling them stadiums, but they really are a hybrid amphitheater stadium.
Saudi OGMP in Mexico City is the number one stadium in the world in terms of the number of fans hosted. If you look at the design of it, it is more of kind of a massive amphitheater, with stage meets grandstands. Viva Claro down in Bogotá is similar. I think for the Latin American markets where you have the weather and you can build those super-sized amphitheater meets stadium is a massive opportunity that we're pursuing.
Just quickly, follow up for some on the AI stuff that you were talking about before. Two areas that you didn't mention maybe are using AI for better pricing of primary tickets, perhaps. Also, on the cost side, I know that's not generally probably the first focus, but is there a cost opportunity for using AI to kind of drive margins a little bit in Ticketmaster?
Yeah, absolutely on both fronts, right? I mean, maybe kind of a foundational principle is that it's not always about the model. It's actually more about proprietary data connected with models. Models are accessible to everybody. Proprietary data is not. The fact that Ticketmaster has all of this amazing data going back many, many years tied to different types of venues, tied to different types of events, that's something that we're obviously utilizing and are going to get significantly better at utilizing with the advent of AI. Pricing certainly is an area of core interest, even to me, just given some of the work we've done at Square. This is just an incredible pricing opportunity with AI, especially given the data that we have access to and the personalization we can bring to bear. That's one.
I think on the cost side of the equation, we are absolutely pursuing the relevant effort. If you think about fan support, if you think about operational support, if you think about workflow optimization in a way that we can deploy internal agents to kind of reduce or remove manual repetitive processes, whether it's in finance or HR or anywhere else in the organization, we're absolutely doing that. Obviously, I just started, but this is going to be a core focus for me to figure out every single area, every single function, where are we today, where do we need to get to, and how can we be as nimble as an AI-native startup? If you talk to AI-native startups, I did a lot of this over the last six months, you see that they are completely different. They're architected completely differently. They build things differently.
They have different team composition. They have different ways in which they do finance, HR, recruiting. And obviously, every at-scale organization is trying to figure out what of this can I borrow and copy and what of this does not work at my scale. That is the bridge that we are on, which is how do we employ as many AI-native practices as possible at our scale.
Thank you. It is David Joyce at Seaport Research. Question on Venue Nation. When thinking about the IRRs and the global opportunities that are there, how much variability by market is there around that IRR? Or are the revenue opportunities pretty much commensurate with the investment required? Just on the incremental food and beverage strategy, has that already been embedded in your thinking and broad disclosure on the 20%+ IRRs?
Sure. I will take it. I think the short answer is yes.
I think generally speaking, especially in emerging markets, luckily, construction costs are commensurate with profitability. That is working in our favor. What I would say is, in terms of the food and beverage strategy, we're not being wildly aggressive in markets about where things are going. The 20% really incorporates a conservative model where we understand show count, we understand what the market will do, we understand what the venue can be sponsored at, and that's what we're underwriting. We'd like to outperform. Construction costs in a lot of these markets are working in our favor and financing as well.
I have Robert Fishman from Moffett Nathanson. Just following up on the AI pricing, you guys talked about the 1 million All Access fans. How much does the premium play into this optimization on pricing overall?
Maybe if you can just help us think about this 35 million of the untapped opportunity for tickets. Any sense of timing, like how quickly are we talking about capturing some of this opportunity?
I'll start. The main goal of the All Access is we've been asked for years, you have a membership program, a subscription program, how do you monetize, how do you understand your customers? This has been the main goal. LiveNation.com historically has existed and looks like a MeToo website. We wanted to change that and start building our own direct relationships with the customer. Although we have them in purchase data, we had not really gone to that next level, especially when you get into data around who showed up at the venue versus who bought the ticket.
The main goal of All Access is to have a real one-to-one relationship with the concertgoer and start delighting them and giving them value when they don't expect it. First, you hear a lot about pre-sales. You hear a lot about the super fan strategy around access to concert tickets. You hear a lot about that. We've been doing pre-sales for a long time at Live Nation. We didn't bundle it up and add much value. You didn't know we were doing it. You just got an email. First, we wanted to harvest all of those pre-sales we're already doing for Live Nation under this. Most brands are paying us tens and tens of millions to be able to say, you can go here and get a pre-sale. We already have that embedded. That's great value.
We want to put that underneath the proper brand called All Access. That is first, the main value that if you just sign up, you are going to get All Access and you are going to get access to our ongoing huge inventory of pre-sales. Second, then is we have done historically a lot of value promotion, one-off in venues, $20 concert tickets, $25, four-for-ones. This will be a big platform on how we deliver against that. As a member, you are going to start seeing lots of value, last-minute tickets to the show tonight, our summer access, ways that we can start really building that base that says, well, I really have to sign up. I am getting early access. I am getting a bunch of value and filling those venues. That is the two great places we think that we can build a great relationship with a fan, give them incredible value. Ongoing.
As you said, once you get better at the AI and the chat part of it and the agent part, yes, then I know you and I know you want to go to the show anyways because you're a fan of Dave Matthews. I can talk to you earlier. I can sell you about what show is coming, upsell you, all that great stuff now that that database is connected to our agent. We think that million will continually grow. We had tons of debates, as you can imagine, on do we charge, do not we charge, is it $9 a month, $20, $100? How do we make sure we find that sweet spot? We like this first level. We think it's a great scalable idea that will build a lot of fan base, can give them great value.
We want to overdeliver, not underdeliver against that. And then from there, it becomes our Amazon Prime. It becomes a lot of ways we get to talk to concert fans and deliver them value. On both sides.
Hey, Benjamin Sof f, Deutsche Bank. Thanks for the question. I wanted to ask about the non-service fee revenue opportunity in Ticketmaster. Could you remind us what you're working on there and what's been resonating with venues and customers? Thank you.
Yeah, there's a lot of opportunities. Obviously, insurance has been kind of a mainstay for a while. That's an extremely successful program that is already underway. Russell, obviously, is working on non-service fee revenue in the form of ads, travel, experiences, hotels, and so on as well. And then additionally, one of the core things that is underway right now is the opportunity to do upgrades and upsells. Right now.
This actually happened to a customer two days ago, which is they bought John Legend tickets, they bought VIP, they want to meet and greet, and they had to call customer service to do the upgrade. There's no reason to do that. We should be able to empower that directly for the fan in the app. And literally, the tweet was, "Take my money." I mean, essentially, it was the essence of the tweet. We talked to them, and customer service did a great job of solving it for them. For that one fan that took the effort to call, there's probably 50 others that didn't. How do we make it easy for everybody? How do we make it amazing to upgrade? How do we do seat perks?
How do we ensure that as more venues come online, we're fully aligned in the way that we can do upsells within the venue, whether it's in the form of seat perks or upgrades? Those are the things that we're actively working on.
The other half of it is services for the enterprise clients. Just take the few things we've just been talking about, which is using AI, development tools, the fact that we have a proprietary database, we can be the best out there in terms of marketing, in terms of having pricing science to help them understand if you want to go from 70% to 90%, this is how to think about some of your pricing. Those are also services that Ticketmaster can monetize. The better it gets, the more that unlocks.
Hi, I'm Peter Supino with Wolf Research. Thanks for hosting this event.
A question for Samo on technology. You are in a unique position coming from outside of the industry and having just done your own personal due diligence on Ticketmaster in deciding whether to take the job. I wonder, in that process, what did you decide about Ticketmaster's long-term technological advantages and vulnerabilities? The business has stood up competitively in a very high market share for decades. I wonder, what are the technology pillars of that? Thanks. Great question.
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, as you might imagine, I thought about this quite a bit. I think the core conclusions I drew are doing inventory at this scale is extremely difficult. I mean, you all know Block or Square. There is a reason it is a phenomenal point of sale in a lot of environments, but it does not usually find itself in high inventory retail environments.
That is because inventory is really hard. Inventory management is exceptionally difficult. To do inventory management in this environment at this scale across these many countries for these kinds of onsales is an extremely challenging act. The fact that the organization has done it technologically over and over the last three years has gone through an onsale hardening program. The onsales are more resilient and reliable and hardened better than ever before across many different markets. We see it in the data. I think that was a key factor, which is, it may look like "just selling tickets," but it is exceptionally difficult to do it at this scale with this rapidity.
I realized after conversation and my own diligence that this is a hard computer science problem that not a lot of companies have solved, nor can they solve without another 10 years of operating expenses. They may not get there after that. I think the fact that that already exists is a great foundation to build from and start from. The fact that it exists across multiple markets is also an amazing factor. On top of that, the fact that there have been three years of hardening and resilience that obviously I did not contribute to, but benefit from, is an amazing factor. The next logical question is, what do I build? What can I build on top of it? The obvious answers are, what inspirations can I take from.
The fintech industry at large, which does actually do a great job of onboarding customers rapidly in a high-risk environment because you have to onboard millions of customers a month with money movement attached, with bank accounts, debit cards, credit cards attached. To do it while managing your risk loss is not easy. Fintech has figured out how to do this, and there are multiple public companies that do this now. Can I draw inspiration from that and bring both a product and technological advantage to bear into Ticketmaster? I think the answer is yes. Second piece, obviously, AI, which we briefly talked about, and I think we can certainly bring a lot to bear on AI with our proprietary data, but also, quite frankly, just faster access to all the tools.
This is where being from San Francisco, being partially based in San Francisco is also helpful because this is the epicenter of the AI boom. There are new and interesting startups forming every three weeks that are doing really compelling work. I have already made three or four introductions to our internal teams from startups that most people here have not heard about because they are 15 months old and they are not in the headlines, but they are doing amazing work and we believe are valuable to Ticketmaster. I think that is the second piece. Maybe the third piece of inspiration from not just Square, but also fintech at large is just a heavy, heavy attention on user experience and design.
Because again, if you are taking a consumer from a traditional banking experience with a banking brand that's 50 years old, that's been around with 5,000 branches, and you have to get them to trust you with their money, which is extremely personal, extremely sensitive, you have to actually really elevate experience and design. If I can bring some of that to bear in the fan experience, but also the venue and client services experience, I think that could also be compelling. I thought that there was a lot of great foundation already done and three or four major areas where I could contribute and help out.
Hi, Ian Moore from Bernstein. Just a question on the sponsorship opportunity.
To what extent, I guess, do you see the growth opportunity there as sort of dependent on the execution and the other parts of the business, or said another way, what is the opportunity to flex that AI opportunity in isolation?
Again, I talked about double-digit growth, kind of where we are already for 2026. The venue strategy continued to be a key part of our growth. Venue sponsorship, our big deals, naming rights, official partners, founding partners in the venue business, those are multi-year, 5, 10, 15, sometimes 20-year partnerships with annual escalators. We continue to see those rise over time.
Saumil and I have already been spending a lot of time together because all of the great products that he creates are actual opportunities for our brand partners so that we can be working actually hand in hand on that as he's making all of these great improvements, launching new products. Those all create opportunities for our brand partners.
We're going to take our last question .
Hi, Peter Henderson from Bank of America. Just on Venue Nation, it seems like there's obviously a huge international opportunity there that's going to accelerate in coming years. Are there any key differences between the domestic builds and the international builds? For instance, on the premium penetration, getting to 30%, is that the same target internationally? What are the sort of key unlocks that are maybe different internationally versus domestic?
Yeah, great question. Cost. Cost. There's so much.
Permits and cost. Yeah. What I would say is it kind of tracks where I think Michael started the meeting, which is really important to think about, is boots on the ground and local expertise. When we're building an arena in Lima, right? We in Beverly Hills are not deciding what to build in Lima. We have a team of promoters, a team of operators, of people on the ground saying, "Here's what the consumers do today, and let's build for flexibility because in the future, we think it'll look like Argentina or it'll look like Mexico City, or maybe one day it'll look like LA." We're building really music first, which is also the important piece. We do not have to get saddled with basketball or hockey, right? We're building venues that are flexible for our purpose.
Premium percentage is definitely internationally a focus, but it's not exactly what you think of at Jones Beach, right? It's flexible. It's an upsell versus maybe a membership. Premium is there. And then food and beverage has never been something in international venues they could do because they didn't have kitchens, right? They didn't actually have refrigerators. I don't know if anyone's been to a soccer stadium for a concert that's warm beer. It's very simple things where we think there's really big opportunity. Just to finish with what Michael said, which I don't want to understate, is cost, right? Cost and the ability to build quickly is really important. These markets are really looking for infrastructure.
Any—Is there, Brandon, what topics have we missed that they really want to—What topics have we missed? Secondary? Have we done a good job? Yeah.
Maybe if you want to dig into what do you—and I've asked you this and others have on calls in the past—what do you see the future of the secondary business being? Especially both within Ticketmaster as a whole, and you guys gave some guidance potentially about a smaller concert piece of it. Then for the industry launch based on some of the pricing optimizations that you guys discussed.
Right. I think there's a couple of forces going on. In general, pricing is a hot topic, right? The pricing of a tour always makes it on social media. Someone's upset about the price. Artists have their own challenges on finding that fine line. The secondary is the red herring, though, right? That is always the part. On any onsale I have, my DMs light up because of the secondary ticket, right? You let them buy tickets.
They 3,000. It is the red herring in the game. We've said it a long time. This isn't new. We've always said secondary is not our core business. Primary is. We work with the artist. Artist doesn't participate in secondary. Our main job is always to say to the artist, "What do you want to do? How do you want to price the show? At whatever price you want." Now, hopefully, because of Ticketmaster, we got better and better at saying, "If you want to price it at 160, we're going to get better at figuring out how to get that 160 to a fan, not a reseller." Our core business has always been aligned around the artist agenda, not the secondary. We do see, though, you've seen it in the last year, there's heat now from states, FTC around secondary.
It's very clear that is a place where they can start making change in ticketing. They can't tell the team or the artist what to do and how they price their product, but they certainly can start saying the secondary because most of the rest of the world has some regulations in line, right? You saw Canada doing it now. Most of the rest of the world has said, "No, it's not fair. Let's have a cap. Let's have regulation." We do see that happening. That's why we're leading this charge. We've led it originally. Now we're going to the next level and say, "No, we want to absolutely be aligned to the artist agenda." Sports is separate. Artist agenda on how do we figure out how to price it the way you want an artist and deliver it to a fan.
We're very proud of Face Value Exchange. I think that's a huge tool. We're getting great response from artists who look at us and go, "So you're going to think about Face Value Exchange. You buy a ticket on Ticketmaster for an artist. You can't go to the show. All the reasons that the scalpers use, the claim that it has to be transferable. You can sell the ticket at Ticketmaster with no fees. Don't charge you a fee. Not a second fee." Now I bought the ticket. I can't go. I can resell it, get my face value, no fees. That is a good consumer product. We're going to continue to go all in on that. We think that's the true answer to helping the artist that says, "I care about where my ticket goes," as we did with Ariana, as you're going to see many others.
Our long-term strategy has always been about making sure the primary ticket's protected. Secondary is a feature, not a business. We've always said we think feature has a shorter lifespan over time than primary because it is the place the content will always attack. I'm seeing more and more artists and then regulators start saying, "This doesn't seem like the fair part. It's a complicated business on an onsale on a good day, but this one piece seems to be something we should and can start regulating." We like that. We think that's great.
We're not worried that if we put this next level of one-to-one that we lose a few pieces of inventory, all that is irrelevant to our long-term growth. It will help us more than it will hurt the secondary industry, being the leader of it and changing the dynamics that say secondary should be regulated and/or we should all have responsibility around how we make sure that onsale operates. We're actually loving this position we're in. We're actually the good guy in this position. We are leading the charge on bots. We just now led and said, "Fine, FTC, if you want to take this new version of life on defining it and we're the easy goat, great." We'll still use that opportunity to say, "Okay, we'll even get next level in terms of how the accounts are defined." If we lose some inventory, short-term, it's irrelevant.
We wouldn't be playing this if we thought that the wider industry isn't going to all have to align to this new way of thinking. We see that absolutely coming to life, and there'll be less inventory overall in concerts because it'll be regulated, capped, and/or artists will start saying, "Where's my face-to-face exchange? I want to transfer it," or, "I want to have some. Plays in it." That is kind of been our long-term strategy. This has kind of just helped us excel. We actually looked at this as a great opportunity to lead the industry with a great consumer product that is bulletproof.
Two quick follow-ups. One is, do you think that, sorry, that price caps are necessary in the U.S. on secondary? Number two is, for the face-to-face exchange, do you see that really starting to.
Become a really utilized method of secondary in 2026, or do you think that's a longer-dated thing?
I think like most of the states, you're going to have. Caps will happen within states, right? You see it's always a state battle versus a federal battle. I think you're going to see like there already are some states that have bills on the table around it. I think it'll happen in some states. I think the face-to-face will be highly used in 2026 and onward. We haven't done a good job as we don't do at times delivering the message. We've been on a big crusade recently with a lot of artists, and they're shocked if they didn't know about it. They're like, "Of course. Why yes." We take them through what we did with Billy, what we did with Ariana. The reception is amazing.
They're shocked. No fees? Oh, a lot. Leading with great product, I think, is going to really, really help our business and change that dynamic around it. Anything else that we've missed? I appreciate you all coming out and appreciate all your support, and we'll, I'm sure, talk ongoing. Thank you all. Appreciate it.