I'm happy to have back from Live Nation Entertainment, Joe Berchtold, President and CFO. Joe, thanks for being here.
Thank you.
I'll start with this. When we look at the tailwinds that have driven live music for five or 10 years or longer, trends like the experience economy, social media, subscription services, global supply, do you see these trends as just as relevant today and on a go-forward basis?
Oh, 100%. I think when we talk about the macro trends in our business, I think first of all, we're very fortunate. We've got great macro demand trends, truly global demand now for our music. You've seen it in the explosion of just how much these major international acts can tour everywhere in the world now. You've also seen it because historically, regional acts, K-pop, Latin, even country, are now truly global. Because of the distribution of Spotify and Apple Music, they can get the music everywhere, the TikToks, YouTubes, Instagrams. They discover the artist, they go viral. Then on the supply side, nothing's changed in the sense that artists are making their living on the road. It's back to before recorded music was the big jump.
You put the supply and demand together, those dynamics, I think, are as strong as ever, will only get stronger over time. It's really our job to figure out how do we help bring that supply and demand together?
There's a view that work from home flexibility has increased our leisure time, and AI will compound it. Is that relevant for you? Is it easier to schedule a concert on a Thursday night if people think they don't have to-
Yeah
be in the offices on Friday?
Yeah, I don't think we have any great data on it yet, but for sure, I think that if the standard is now work from the office Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, well, that makes Thursday and Sunday night really easy, and it makes Wednesday the new Thursday. I think that you continue to have more flexibility, means more opportunities. I think, but even more importantly, what's going on with all the work from home, with digitization, with the time people spend staring at their screens, is you have only more so that need to gather, right? If I'm not gathering at the office for lunch at the water cooler during the break, where am I socially gathering? I think that live events, concerts, are amongst the highest forms of social gathering. The pure celebration, the excitement. You don't go to a concert alone.
You go to a concert with friends. You go to be social. You go to hang out, to have fun. The more time that you spend in your digital world by yourself, I think the greater the need to go have that high-level social experience. I think we fit that to a T. Again, another trend that I think is only continuing and will continue to be a tailwind for us for a long time.
Macro's been a topic at this conference, obviously as it relates to rising energy prices and the read-through to consumers. Joe, how are you seeing demand trends, and is there any update to the 107 million tickets sold that you disclosed at Q1 earnings?
Yeah. Notwithstanding some of the recent press that I think I've talked about has been very anecdotal and misleading, we're continuing to see exceptionally strong demand throughout. In the past three weeks, just to give you the updated numbers.
Sure
You have them. I don't live my life three weeks at a time, I know people like numbers. I think we're at about 119 million tickets sold so far. This year, we've sold 11.5 million tickets in the past three weeks. That's more than we sold over that three-week period last year. We're continuing to track double digits ahead in ticket sales from where we were last year. On the most macro basis, continuing to look strong. Look, we're paranoid, so we look at every single aspect of the numbers, all the more so when the press starts to report about softness, and we've looked at it just isn't there. We continue to have sell-through of our shows that's every bit as strong as it was last year. Clearly, the volume of tickets substantially exceeds where we were last year.
At this point, we're tracking double digits ahead in ticket sales in stadiums, in arenas, in amphitheaters. Consistently, for all the major venue types, we're selling tickets effectively. We're not seeing any issues at all on a macro basis, on a trend basis. Cancellation rates continue to trend in line with historical, consistent, kind of the 1%-2% that you would've seen over time. There's continued great demand for all the reasons that I just talked about. I think because at the end of the day, it's still a very affordable luxury. Again, the 2%, literally 2% of the tickets in the U.S. over $500 are the ones that get all the press.
Yeah.
The 30% under $50, the 30% more between $50 and $100. Only 10% are over $250. We're very focused on making sure that we are keeping the bulk of tickets as affordable as possible so that every fan can get in and see a show. Obviously, artists are obsessed with this as well. Our get-in price is $34, $35 on average in the U.S. across all of our shows. That's up about 18% from 2019. Well, inflation's up 30%. Again, people are saying, Oh, 40 years ago, I got a ticket for $20. Well, there's been a lot of inflation over the last 40 years. Seem to recall a few years of that period with high inflation. People, again, like using misleading headlines to fit a narrative as opposed to looking at macro facts to understand what's really going on.
Maybe just staying on demand, it'd be great to hear any updates also on how the amp season is shaping up and what you're seeing on ancillary per caps.
Yeah
the sample size is pretty small at this point. Just as it relates to the O&O venues, any kind of key initiatives you'd highlight for summer season?
Yeah, I think, as you said, I think we've had about 5% of our amps play off at this point, and so I'll refrain from giving any exact numbers, but just say that thus far, the per cap spending, the onsite spending is up. We have the absence of a negative. I feel fine. I feel good. There's no warning signs flashing off of that first set of shows that we've had. We're continuing to see very strong response on our premium. We're rolling out a number of vinyl rooms. We're rolling out various other premium activations at our amphitheaters. We're seeing good uptake in that. We've introduced two new food concepts that we're feeling good about in terms of giving additional choice of some good food opportunity at our amphitheaters.
Premium alcohol continues to do very well, so we're not seeing a trade-down or budget focus when people get to the amphitheaters, and I think that's consistent with what we've seen in our theaters and clubs. A little more data with them over the past four years, or sorry, four months, and again, not seeing any issues or signs of pull back in spend there.
Maybe just staying on the summer season with regards to festivals, though. There seems to be a fundamental challenge in that one or multiple strong headliners are required for financial viability to festival, but obviously there's a lot of touring options for artists, so the fees can run high and you've seen cancellations. How does Live Nation approach that issue?
Yeah, I think the festival business is very different today than it was 10 years ago. Like everything else in life, you have to embrace the change that you can't control and figure out how do you evolve your business model accordingly. There are a handful of festivals that are above who's the specific headliner in a given year because they have a soul, they have a feeling to them, they have an audience built in, independent, but that's the rare ones. Most of them, yeah, are headliner driven. The reality is, the headliners have seen that the amount of money they can make in an arena or stadium has increased over the past 10 years. Well, so is their fee to perform at a festival.
What we're seeing now is the festivals are really getting, the economics of a festival, generally speaking, are getting driven by two things. One is sponsorship, and two is your premium opportunities. Fortunately for us, that's an area we have focused a lot on investing in our capabilities. Russell and the team, I think, are absolute world-class at selling sponsorship for our festivals. They've grown that business tremendously over time. We've talked now, I don't know, for at least five years now, obsessed over premium experiences, which runs both the venues we operate as well as our festivals. We feel good about how we've evolved it, but absolutely, if you're trying to run the same playbook in festivals as you ran 10 years ago, you're going to feel like everything's gotten expensive. I can't make as much money.
Within the premium, there's always a lot of segmentation that goes on, thinking about that in different ways.
Yeah. Again, I think our job is to figure out there are different segments. There are different people that want different types of experiences, and our job is to figure out how to eliminate friction and make it easy for them to have the experience they want. Whether that's the young couple who want to just go and sit on the lawn and be able to have a cheap Saturday night out that doesn't cost more than going to dinner, that should be an option. The person who wants to spend a ton of money to spoil his wife on their anniversary and have an incredible experience at a festival, well, they should be able to do that. We're trying to figure out, historically, the music industry hasn't segmented, hasn't given those opportunities, and we're trying to do that so that we can attract more people.
Obviously, we can afford then to pay the artists more. We can put on more events. Generally expands output in the industry, and has been a successful way to do it so far.
Great. Joe, you've noted frequently that you see the majority of Live Nation's future growth is coming from international. Maybe can you spend a moment talking to the company's current position in Europe, LATAM, and APAC, and what the relative opportunity set is in these markets?
I think in general, we've done this a few times at our investor days. If you look at the penetration of attendance at concert events in the U.S. and the U.K., which would be your two most highly penetrated areas relative to the rest of the world, even Western Europe, you've got 2x, 3x, 4x growth that you can still get in those markets. We've seen tremendous expansion in Latin America over the past five or six years using OCESA as our beachhead. A lot of activity that you've read about, continuing to add to our promoter mix, to our venue mix in Latin America. We've just scratched the surface there. It's a massive population that is very orientated to music. We think tremendous growth there. I'd say Asia is, generally speaking, even less penetrated, certainly by us, in terms of what the opportunity can be.
We've made some great strides with Japan. We've brought in Kaori with the HIP acquisition. We're very focused now, and I think you'll see a lot more activity being driven into Japan. Western Europe, despite all folks saying, Well, isn't that a mature market? No, we continue to find, like the U.S. for the past decade, where we followed a hyper-local focus, we're seeing that same opportunity in Europe, which we're aggressively pursuing now.
With Venue Nation, how do you think about the international TAM, right? If music demand is truly global, does that mean any city above a certain population and lacking a viable venue is reasonable for you to expand to?
No, 100%. I'll give you a couple ways that we think about it. One is, if I look at the top 75 cities outside the U.S., 47 out of those 75 are either lacking an arena of any kind of modern form or are under-penetrated. Could be a huge market that could easily handle a couple of them. That's your starting opportunity. Again, that's just your top 75, which I think we could probably go to the top couple hundred. That gives you a focus list to say, all right, those are going to be your biggest, easiest markets in the sense that you know you'll have a fan base. Let's focus on which ones can we do something there. Another way I look at it is the experience we talked about with Mexico last year, doing 30-odd Shakira dates.
We ended up doing stadium shows in 10 cities, and I think that was a real point of awareness on even the OCESA guys going, Wow, the hyper-local in Mexico. Wow, we're not really just Mexico City. Wow, there is enough that we can structurally look at nine other cities in Mexico. We're just putting a venue into Guadalajara. What are the opportunities that we have to go to all of those markets to put in venues? It's a tremendous global opportunity for venues. I think we talk in terms with our strategic plan on five, six-year periods.
Even as we accelerate over the next several years on our venue strategy, I have no qualms we're still going to be standing here five years from now saying, Wow, look at the global TAM. We're just going to get smarter about what it is as we roll out what we have in the pipeline now.
Joe, you've had a lot of success renovating venues. It'd be great if you could spend a moment describing a location like Estadio GNP Seguros, run through the playbook there. I guess if you look at your various regions, how much room is there to partner with existing real estate owners or sports teams?
Yep
that need
Yeah
concerts for their venues?
Yeah. Estadio GNP Seguros, these guys are just world-class. It's a great venue. It is the highest attended music venue in the world. I think they'll have something like 3 million fans attended shows there last year. It's an incredible venue, and the renovation came down, I think, primarily to a couple things, premium and sponsorship.
Yeah.
What are the opportunities that you have to substantially increase the premium experience, and how is it that we can far better activate our sponsorship opportunities? That had a massive return, paid for itself within two years to do that. Now it's a better venue, more profitable, and a fast return on that. Broadly speaking, we love the opportunity of partnering with folks who have the real estate to get the venues, right? Every sports team in the U.S. is now focused on how do I create that entertainment district around my stadium or arena? They don't come to us because they need capital. These are some of the.
Yeah
richest people in the country.
I was thinking more abroad. Yeah.
What they want is they want to have a flow of concerts, so they want to partner with somebody who, a, knows how to build a venue. We've got great design team, development team now. They know what do we need in that market, what capacity, how do we build it? What's the design look like? Obviously, they care about let's then have a flow of concerts that we know, because these guys are focused and have a demonstrated track record of coming into markets, expanding the marketplace, bringing in more shows, and delivering that. We're absolutely in conversations with every owner in the U.S. who's looking at that. Internationally, anytime we can do an Atlético Madrid sort of opportunity where we can partner with somebody who has a stadium, Hey. We also want to build an arena. Let's work together.
We've got the land. We have local relationships. We'll get through the permitting process faster. We can accelerate the build. Again, they come to us because they say, You know what a music arena should look like. We take it for granted now, but it's actually a relatively rare skill to really understand that. Then again, we expect that once you have a world-class venue in Madrid, which is one of the hottest cities in the world, certainly in Europe, that you're going to be able to bring a lot of concerts to that market.
With the venue opportunity, what ultimately governs the pace at which you fill the pipeline, and how do you think about the gating factors like financing, construction delays, or just execution risk around the different projects?
Yeah. I think it's an organic growth of our capabilities. We've got 20-odd venues right now, either in construction or fully permitted and ready to go into construction. That's grown a lot over time. Certainly, probably about 10 of them would be at the large amphitheater or arena level. I think as we continue to build the team, we now have a development team in U.S., Latin America, Asia, Europe. We've got each team, as they get up to speed, as they build out their staff, as we continue to build out our design team. We say no to most projects, right? Because we have a pretty high threshold of economic return, and we want to make sure we're going to go into a situation that the market needs and wants that expansion. As we continue to build the team, we'll incrementally take on more.
It's not the sort of thing you're going to leap and add 10 in one year, but you're going to add a few a year. We're using M&A to acquire some things that help us move faster. Different timelines. You can tend to build faster in Latin America than you can in the Europe or U.S. We tend to just try to layer and say, How do we have this as a ramp? We know we're just going to have more activity each year over the next few years.
Joe, with your outlook that growth will be majority driven by international, I'm just going to assume this extends to ticketing. In some regions like Brazil or Japan where you've built a physical presence, Ticketmaster is still pretty nascent. How big is the opportunity to establish more robust ticketing operations in these markets?
Oh, it's a massive opportunity. As you said, we'll follow the same playbook that we followed in Germany, which has been very successful. Which is we established the promoter business first, and then around that, we built on the sponsorship capability, we built on the ticketing business using the strength of the concerts to drive the Ticketmaster business. Doing the exact same thing. Latin America is very fragmented. We think there's the opportunity for us to come in and be a major player on the ticketing side using the strength of the concerts and the festivals down there. Similarly in Asia, again, very fragmented across the different markets. We've said we expect to be able to be in Japan before long, doing ticketing as we're doing concerts. We'll follow the playbook using the pre-sales to establish the business, build it out from there.
As we look over the next several years at the opportunity for Ticketmaster, you hit the two key ones exactly. Latin America and Asia.
You've had a new Ticketmaster president in place since late 2025. I think he brings more of a product background to the role than we've seen previously. I assume part of the focus is on the international, but what else would you highlight about where his priorities are?
Yeah, you're right. We have someone now who has the technology and product focus, history, skill set. He's obsessed with product. Number one is continuing to improve the fan experience. A lot of that is the high-demand on sale, and a lot of that is how do you continue to fight bots? How do you continue to try to make sure that you're getting every possible ticket to a fan instead of a bot who's trying to cheat? It's tough because there's a lot of money at stake, and they have a huge incentive to figure out how to cheat the system. It's a back-and-forth thing. We're rolling out globally a lot more tools to try to get more tickets in the hands of fans to make that a better experience. He's moving pretty fast on that.
Continue to develop new tools for the venues, the sports teams, the artists. Again, he's got a product mindset, so he's continuing to ask what are the pain points of all of those providers. On a broader platform basis, he's moving much faster in terms of getting the Ticketmaster platform deployed in new markets. As I said, historically, in Japan would be, Let's talk about our three-year plan to get there. He's saying, No, we have one year. We're selling tickets by the end of the year. Maybe it won't be perfect, maybe it'll be limited to these things, but we're selling tickets in a year. How are we breaking our historical approaches? He's obviously been making some changes organizationally.
He's streamlining, he's changing the way in which product development occurs, using a lot of AI tools to help break down some of those historical barriers. I think what you'll see a lot more faster now.
Okay. Staying on ticketing and earnings, you highlighted fee-bearing tickets transacted through April up 9%, GTV up 15%. Again, it'd be great to hear any update here and any associated color on concerts, family, and sports within that mix.
Yeah. I'm probably going to hesitate to give every weekly updates on ticket sales, but as goes concerts, so goes tickets. Your two drivers of ticketing growth at the end of the day are, what are the new clients you're adding? Really how are concerts, not just for us, but as we saw last year, for the industry at large, how is the concert volume of activity moving? Your sports volume can grow a bit based on tournaments. It'll grow a bit as leagues expand, but it's not fundamentally changing, generally, the number of games that people are playing. The vast majority of growth comes from concerts. You tend to have a slow growth rate of sports, particularly from the addition of new clients. Families, up and down. I would say that the concerts and sports make up the bulk of the business.
Again, they're off to a great start this year. The concert business is off to a great start. They're getting a little more complicated on some of their recognition because they defer the recognition of tickets in venues that we operate. As we operate more venues, that's going to create a little more complexity, but you'll see that in the deferred revenue. For all you guys who are trying to model, it's just a timing of when that profitability gets recognized.
Ticketing AOI was up 1% in Q1. There were some bespoke items.
Yeah
that are impacting results, changes in the secondary market, legal expenses related to the FTC case. Maybe just help us better understand the underlying growth at the moment and how some of these items are going to play out through the year.
Yeah. Oh, you left out our high 20s growth in deferred revenue representing.
Sure.
$5 billion of GTV. I think the underlying is even more robust than you're laying out there. This is going to be a strong year for Ticketmaster because it's going to be a strong year on our concert side. We've got a few one-time headwinds, changes that we made in the secondary business to tighten that down. Some of the reorganizational things that have severance that we talked about, a few legal issues. Fundamentally, I think the Ticketmaster business is in the best shape it's ever been in. It is the premier global product. We're continuing to see exceptionally high renewal rates and pace of adding new clients. I think as we lay out every year our kind of five-year plan that shows that we expect as a base case continued at least mid-single-digit growth at Ticketmaster as we expand globally. We're very bullish on the business.
We continue to think it's the best in class.
Joe, it's probably a credit to Russell Wallach and his team that everyone puts sponsorship at the end of these conference Q&As. Maybe I'll try to be unique here, tying this back to international and Venue Nation. Does that change the growth drivers of sponsorship relative to the past and there are adjustments that need to be made on your part?
As you said, it's the most boring business in the world when I sit here in May and say, Hey, we're 85%-90% sold for the year, so don't worry.
Yeah.
Russell and that team have done a magnificent job of just year in, year out, delivering double-digit growth. I think for sure over the next five years, you'll see an evolution of where that growth comes from. They've done a great job with festivals over the last 10 years, done a great job on the checkout, the credit card companies, the pre-sales, technology firms. I think that they've laid the foundation and built the relationships with such a massive set of tremendous brands that now as we really focus on the venue side, that puts them in a great position when we're talking about how are we getting the sponsorship and monetizing the venues.
A lot of our growth in the next five years will come from the venue expansion because there's so many sponsorable assets from the naming rights to the clubs to a number of pieces throughout the venue, and that'll tie in with the premium experiences. They'll reinforce each other, but no question, a lot of that's going to come from, whether you're Latin America, Europe, will come from the venue side. Estadio GNP Seguros is a great example, right? That's a foundational piece of what we did in Mexico City with the old Foro Sol.
Got it. Joe, last week, you updated on the process as it relates to the antitrust trial. Unless there's been any changes, I don't think we need to necessarily rehash it unless you want to. I did want to ask about your settlement with the DOJ and some of the items that were published in the term sheet. There are some potentially new market dynamics around non-exclusive contracts, Ticketmaster offering venues a back-end system. Can you speak to the potential impact from the changes here and what would that look like from a consumer?
I think the changes to Ticketmaster are grounded in a fundamentally different point of view that we have versus the Department of Justice had in terms of why has Ticketmaster been so successful. Our view has been, well, it's the best ticketing platform, it's the most effective one to sell tickets, and venues want exclusivity. They want to deal with the simplicity of a single provider, particularly if that single provider is the best one in the industry at doing what they do. They thought, No, you lock out competition. You have these exclusive contracts. You're not fair. We said, You know what? Let's let the market decide. We're fine with that. We will relax that exclusivity.
We'll push to have some non-exclusivity, and then the venues will be in a place and we'll make it super easy from a technology standpoint so that if another ticketing provider is distributing tickets, we'll validate those tickets. We'll use our back end to make it simple. We'll find out who's right. We continue to believe that most venues are going to want exclusivity, and they're going to want that exclusivity to be with us. If the others are right, who think that we've been controlling it, we'll find that out as well. Our focus is really going to be on let's build the best product there is. We think that on a global basis, we will continue to be very effective by just building the best product there is. That's what's going to drive it, right?
You continue to have 20% - 30% of tickets unsold on a typical event. What really matters to us is how do we sell more of those tickets? I think if we sell more of those tickets, whether or not we have some venues decide that they want to have some of their tickets go through other primary ticketing marketplaces, that's not going to be the determinant of our success.
Got it. With regards to certain O&O amps, you've agreed to open those up to other promoters. Those promoters can in turn utilize outside ticket vendors up to, I think, 50% of the inventory. This is more of a 2027 event, but how could this potentially impact the utilization of your buildings?
I think the great news is that Jordan and the team have been so effective in the last decade of driving our per caps, right? We always say when we were $16 per cap different is very different than when you're a $46 per cap business. A large portion of the economics of the amphitheaters is now coming from operating the venues. Opening the venues and having third-party promoters may reduce a bit the number of shows that we do on the concert side, but it'll obviously directly benefit our amphitheater operations, where we'll make a lot of money on an incremental basis. We're confident that opening them makes sense.
We've said publicly before, we think that we were sort of on a path and considering it, but then we got caught up in the last couple of years of legal morass, so we never really went deep into it to figure it out. We decided, okay, as part of the settlement, we'll do that. We're comfortable that it makes sense for the industry and it'll be fine for us.
To be clear, the reduction would be on the promotion side, but the buildings themselves.
Would come out net positive.
come out net positive.
Yeah.
Right. Got it. Joe, with that, we're about out of time. Thanks so much for being here.
Oh, thank you. Appreciate it.