Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. Stock

All right. Great. Let's get started with our next session. Thank you, everyone, for taking the time to join us today. My name is Stephen Laszczyk, and I cover entertainment here at Goldman Sachs. We are excited to welcome back to the Communacopia and Technology Conference, Joe Berchtold, the President and CFO of Live Nation. Joe, thanks for being with us.

Thanks, Stephen.

Great. It's always good, I think, to start these conversations at a high level. And as we look out on the growth outlook for the live music industry, I think it's impressive thinking back over the last number of decades, the industry has compounded at a high-single-digit growth rate for a number of years. I would just be curious to get your take at this point in time in terms of what inning of growth do you think we're in, in the industry? And as we look ahead, what are the key growth drivers you think investors should be mindful of?

Yes. I think we start with just the industry as opposed to us. I think we're absolutely still in the early innings. I think most of what we've seen in the last couple of decades is still largely U.S. Western Europe phenomenon. If you look at the drivers of how we've been growing and what there is ahead of us, every one of these factors is still as strong or if not stronger than it has been. Just starting with the globalization of both supply and demand, the shift of spend from goods to experiences, the -- where live events, concerts and sports sit in that hierarchy of priority for people to spend on experiences, all still very strong. I mean if you look at it, using us as a bit of a proxy, over half of our fans today are international markets outside the U.S.

But put the other way, right, U.S. is 5% of the global population still has half of our business. Latin America is up for us 15x in the past 10 years. It's still 1/10 the level of activity as the U.S. is. Japan, huge market is 40% of the activity level of the U.S. on a per capita basis. Even Western Europe can grow another 25%. So I think as we focus on this as a truly global business, it has tremendous runway. And at the same time, the U.S. continues to grow. U.K. continues to grow. The so-called developed markets have demonstrated very nice growth. And again, this year, it has been a great year for that. So we think that there's an extremely long runway ahead of us.

You touched on this a bit, but maybe for Live Nation, in particular, as you think about the growth opportunity for the company itself, you have a target for this year compounding AOI at double-digit rates. And as you look out over the next number of years, continuing that degree of growth, what are the few things that Live Nation can execute against specifically to put together a growth algorithm, multiyear growth algorithm at that double-digit rate?

Yes. So first is just for us, it's always continue putting on more shows for more fans, right? We'll be at around 175 million fans. This year, good growth off of last year's base towards the target we set last November of 225 million. So we're making good progress in that direction. Second is continuing to figure out how do we optimize the shows, how do we maximize the sell-through, how do we maximize the grosses of the show, deliver more for the artists, create more encouragement for them to be out there on the road, going to more markets. And then it's deploying capital on our Venue Nation strategy, which has the double benefit I know we'll get into. The double benefit in and of itself, provides attractive returns.

It also provides the infrastructure in a lot of these markets outside of the U.S. that lack a modern arena infrastructure that can deliver the grosses the artists need. So we look at the top 75 markets and 47 out of the top 75 markets internationally don't have the modern arena infrastructure don't have enough of it. And big cities. Rome, Istanbul, Frankfurt in Europe. It's Seoul, Tokyo, in Manila, in Asia. Latin America, you've got Sao Paulo, Rio, Lima. So very, very big cities. I'm not kind of trying to cherry pick these 47 cities you haven't heard of. These are big markets that lack the infrastructure. So as we look to opportunities to either acquire or build arenas, modernize them, we think that can help drive our overall growth in terms of bringing more fans, driving more sponsorship, driving our ticketing business and fueling the overall system.

Great way to set the stage. And I do want to dive deeper into a lot of those drivers. But maybe as we think about the supply side of the market, maybe to start, we talk a lot about the live music industry being a supply-driven market. We've seen artist tour at an incredibly robust clip over the last 3 to 4 years. I would just be curious to get your sense to the extent of if this is slowing at all or you see the supply side of the market continuing to scale over the next number of years?

I think you'll see -- it's the same globalization, right? It fundamentally changes the business. So there's not an artist out there who's not using the social media platforms, the TikToks, YouTubes, Instagrams, to develop their brands. They're obviously using the DSPs to democratize the distribution so you can have fans everywhere. This is far and away from the old U.S., Western Europe, U.K. dominated artists out there. #1 artist post-COVID has been Bad Bunny, selling out stadiums globally. You've got -- obviously, K-pop has been a huge phenomenon. Latin in general. #2 genre in Brazil is country music. So you're seeing the explosion of artists, what used to be a local or regional genre is now truly global.

So pre-COVID, I think 8% of our top 50 tours were by non-English-speaking artists. Today, it's 30%. I don't think we're going to be -- it's not going to be that long where I'm sitting here saying and now over half of our artists are not U.S., U.K. English-speaking artists. It's just -- it's easy for them. And I'm amazed. I look at all of our shows down in L.A. The number of artists who I've never heard of are selling out arenas, even stadiums in L.A. But if you think about it, if you're an artist of a very specific genre, you only need 0.1% of the population in L.A. to be your community, right? So really, what's happening is they're able to reach that 0.1% much more effectively than you ever could before because there's always one person in the group who's the fan, who's following the artist, who learns about the show in social media, who shares the music with their friends and brings them to the show.

It used to be much harder to cut through how do you -- with a relatively limited ad budget, how do you reach those people in a big market. I think now with the digital media platforms, that's much easier and really fueling a lot of the supply.

Maybe a near-term supply question. Investors and analysts often focus on the near-term mix and touring, the geography of that tour of the venue type year in and year out, the cadence of the mix shift. How would you characterize this year's supply side cadence and mix? And as we look into 2027, any early thoughts on how that could shape up?

Yes. Obviously, overly focused on month-to-month. Some of our folks do. It's been a great year. We've said it consistently. All of our major venue types, amps, arenas and stadiums are all up at least mid-teens globally. So we're continuing to see a very strong performance across all venue types. Notwithstanding reports to the contrary, our amphitheaters continue to do great. We've seen -- we've already sold 10% more amp tickets this year than we sold all of last year. So we're having no drop-offs, Stephen. And we're continuing to do well on the stadiums. We talked about we've figured out how to work around any of the timing or availability issues in the U.S.

So U.S. has been very strong across the board. And even with the strong U.S. performance, I'm going to probably bore people today with the comments on international, 2/3 of our growth in large venue types, those 3 has come from international markets. So that's just really where we're putting a lot of our emphasis behind driving a lot of the growth, while U.S. continues to do well. Everybody is looking for a glass half full version of those comments. Timing, again, consistently, I think 2/3 or so of our growth in fan count is coming in the second half this year. It doesn't mean anything. We don't worry about quarter-to-quarter. We're trying to continue to build -- make the full year successful, lay the foundation for the long-term growth.

Look, next year, I think we'll be having a similar conversation. I think that we're going to see a lot of the growth out of the international -- I think international markets will lead our growth. But I think that's going to start to be an irrelevant statement. 10 years ago, we had 5 arenas. Now we're operating 25 arenas, 85% of those fans are in the international market. The vast, vast majority of our Venue Nation strategy with the arenas and other large venues is in international markets. So we are very focused on that being a primary growth area for us. And I expect -- while the U.S. will be fine, it's going to be the international markets, again, that we're going to be talking about. So unfortunately, not all trackers get that. So people are going have to take with the grain of salt. But yes, no, we feel great about how the supply continues to line up.

That's great. Maybe shifting to the demand side of the equation. I feel like every year, there's a point in time where the resiliency of the U.S. consumer, the global consumer comes into focus. We're having a bit of that debate at the moment this week, things like tariffs, inflation, potentially slowdown in the job market. Just would get your -- would love to get your latest sense on what you're seeing out there on the demand side, things like ticket sell-through and per caps.

Yes. Just I mean, empirically, again, I always start with the big numbers are the best indicator. We sold over 155 million tickets. We're still up 12% year-on-year towards that 175 million number that I talked about earlier. So we've seen no deceleration whatsoever. And we have these conversations every quarter. Our sell-through rates are very consistent with our sell-through rates last year. Our cancellation rates are very consistent with our cancellation rates historically, no increases there. On-site spending, we've talked about is up in our amphitheaters, is up in our international arenas. So people are continuing to spend when they show up. I think it's -- so the numbers are all good. I think there's no doubt it sharpened everybody's focus on making sure that we keep a certain portion of the tickets affordable.

Our get-in pricing at our venues is up since 2019, about 20% versus inflation being up 30%. So artists are very cognizant of there are -- in the K-shaped world, there are fans that can only afford a certain price. So we all work together to make sure that there's a reasonable number of those tickets available. At the same time, there's a lot of great tickets that continue to be below the market value. Artists continue to get educated on basically using the pricing on the front of the house to enable them to have lower pricing on the back of the house and still get the grosses they want and not leave the money to the scalpers to come in and take the tickets and increase the price and put them on the secondary.

So I think there's a lot going on under those macro numbers that are very sensitive to the fan base and what they can afford. But we're not seeing -- again, I think that concerts remain a very high priority for people in the terms of type of experience they want to have. And we're not asking people to go 3 times a week, right? This is a couple of times a year experience and the cost can be managed to whatever level they want to spend.

Any reason to believe that strength wouldn't continue into 2027?

We've seen nothing. And again, on a global basis, I mean, we get every week, the numbers is U.S., U.K., Mexico, Latin America, we're not seeing any real issue that would say that we've got any macro problem at all.

I want to pivot a bit and touch on Venue Nation. It's an increasingly important part of the Live Nation investment narrative, the Live Nation story. Would love just at a high level, Joe, if you could maybe talk a little bit about the strategy behind Venue Nation, talk us through the opportunity that you see out there and why you think it's a good use of capital?

Yes. I think -- I mean, all this you go back a bit in time and how did we get here? We've obviously operated venues for a long time, operated clubs and theaters. We operated the amphitheater network in the U.S. And for a long time, it was fine. But I wouldn't say 10, 15 years ago, we were great operators. And we really started looking at our amphitheaters 12 or 13 years ago. I think we had a $16 per cap. It wasn't a great experience when you go there. And we got very focused on how do we create a great fan experience at our venues or at least the best that you can given where you have to spend. How do you reduce friction? How do you -- it's silly to have a 20-minute beer line. People are not going to buy the beer.

So how do you have more points of sale. Those pay for themselves in 3 shows. You have long lines of bathrooms. People don't have time during the break between artists to go to both buy a beer and wait in the bathroom line, put in more bathrooms, make the bathrooms nicer. You have people that everybody is getting the same experience. Nowhere does everybody get the same experience. How do you create more premium offers so people can have -- yes, if they want to go sit on the lawn and spend $30 and have a ticket, let them do that. If they want to spend more money, they want to have clubs, they want to have boxes, they want to have a premium experience, a reasonable population wants to do that. So over a decade or so, we got a lot better.

Now we -- our per caps are $47, $48. So we've gotten to the point where I think we're a pretty good operator. And as we've gotten to be a pretty good operator, we've seen that's enabled us to invest more in venues and drive the 20% plus returns that we've talked about. So we've got a combination of 2 things. One is, I think, our operating capability. And the other is our ability to drive utilization at the venues. If you think about the venues, they're big fixed cost assets. So one of the primary economic drivers of a return is going to be what is utilization. Because we promote so many concerts, we've got a better ability than anybody else, frankly, to make sure that utilization is higher and can generate a return, and we have a lot of confidence in understanding all the pieces of the model.

I think we've demonstrated that it works. I think if you look at our return on incremental capital as we've ramped up, it's been an attractive return. I mentioned earlier, 47 out of the top 75 markets don't have all of the arena infrastructure that it needs. That's a decade-long runway of just the top 75 markets, forget the fact that there's easily the next 75 after that. So we think it's a long-term opportunity. It grows the market. We're not -- our growth is not dependent on our taking share from somebody else. Our growth is based on expanding the global marketplace, working with more artists, bringing them to more markets, continuing to expand the opportunities for artists to connect with their fans. That's absolutely a mantra, right?

We're not -- this is not a zero sum at all. That's one of the things, again, go back to tailwinds. It's great to be in a business that has the structural supply and demand tailwinds and your opportunity is to grow the overall pie, not to just have to compete away to see who can -- what's your race to see how much money you can give to folks in competing with them. So every signal that we've seen says that the first steps of this have gone well, gives us confidence to continue to invest. And I think we'll be incrementally growing this over the course of time. We're not -- it's not going to double and triple and get bigger and bigger in terms of the capital that we outlay, but it will definitely be a continued focus over the next 5 years.

As you continue to focus on the pipeline over the next handful of years, I'd be curious just to get your sense of how you think about the incremental contribution of attendance or fan capacity over that period of time. I think this year, in particular, you called out double-digit growth for Venue Nation attendance. Is that something that could continue? And then as you think about the cadence and mix of that contribution, is there any venue type in particular that you feel like drives that added capacity?

Yes. So I mean no question, arenas or things like arenas are our #1 priority. So arenas, particularly in Europe and Asia, Latin America, you have some of these venues that are a little bit more like a studio GMP that may be a little bit more of a hybrid amphitheater stadium that work well through those markets. So that's our priority. We're also continuing to do large theaters, particularly in the U.S. and those particularly in conjunction with team owners that are looking to have a broader real estate play around their stadium or around their arena. So we're in all of those conversations, less arena opportunities in the U.S. There's a handful of them, but because of the NBA, NHL, you've got a pretty established modern arena network here.

As I said, we've gone from 5, 10 years ago to 25 arenas that we're operating now globally, 85% of that fan growth coming from the international market. So I expect that to continue. I think what have we done? In that period, we've basically gone -- I think we basically doubled our operated fan count being about 75 million now. 70% of that growth has come because of the international markets, heavily driven by those arenas I talked about. So I think next year, we'll see -- I think we're going to start to unlock a lot more of the fan count from the arenas that we're just getting open, the arenas that we've announced that we're acquiring this year. So I don't think I'm going to give an exact number today. But I think that, again, next year, at this point, we'll certainly be talking about the success of those arenas and how those have driven the operated fan count for next year.

Very good. I did want to pivot to the ticketing segment for a moment. Joe, Ticketmaster in the second quarter posted some pretty impressive growth, mid-teens year-over-year. Could you unpack the drivers of the growth that we saw in the second quarter and year-to-date? How much of that activity was specific to what we've seen so far this year versus maybe more structural underlying growth in Ticketmaster that you would expect to come over the next couple of years?

Well, I mean, first and foremost, if you look back over our commentary on Ticketmaster for a while, a lot of its global growth has come because there are more concerts globally, right? So that -- and this year's tremendous performance, when I rattle off that amps, arena, stadiums are all up mid-teens plus globally, and that's going to be very beneficial to Ticketmaster. So Ticketmaster sits in a great spot with -- it's the beneficiary of the tailwinds that the concerts business is the beneficiary of. So first and foremost, it will benefit us as we grow to 175 million fans. We've also been adding more clients, particularly internationally, and we expect that to continue.

We're going to be selling tickets in Japan around the end of the year. So I give great credit to Saumil and his team. He's hired -- he's added some tremendous engineering and product folks. They're able to move a lot faster than we ever could before in terms of moving and Japan is a complicated market. It uses retail distribution. It's not just a matter of bringing in people into Ticketmaster, just drop in a marketplace, it's easy. So it's a lot more than that. You have the whole venue ERP side that has to be tailored to that market, a very different distribution. You obviously have characters and other things that complicate it. But I see continued growth in our international markets.

That will position us well as we continue to expand our concert business, not just in our own venues, but in third-party venues. Continued big investment in B2B tools. for our clients and content partners, helping them on pricing, on marketing, how do they optimize the show, how do they get better and better intelligence out of their data. We have more of the data than anybody else. We should -- we now have, I think, the capability to build the tools. So I think that will continue to be a nice growth area for Ticketmaster. And then the whole fan experience, fan marketplace, I think that I think we're as good as anyone out there in the ticketing realm.

I don't think that's necessarily saying a lot. I think there's a lot of opportunities to increase sales, reduce fan friction, support better discovery for fans while also continuing to figure out how do I make it a great ad platform that feeds our sponsorship business. So I think with the capabilities we have now with the product and tech teams there, I'm very optimistic about their ability to drive the growth of the business beyond what I would have thought a year ago.

And maybe taking that all together for this year, you have targets for Ticketmaster AOI growth of about mid-single digits. I think as you look ahead over the next couple of years, any updated view as to how fast you think Ticketmaster could grow or net new fee-bearing tickets added to the platform?

Yes. I mean I think that's sort of the base case, and I think there's upside from there if we can solve some of these B2B and B2C product issues, improve the fan experience, reduce friction, figure out how we can use some of the tools that are developing rapidly, right, the daily announcements on some of these personal agents and whatnot, and use some of them for long-tail discovery. I mean, that's moving at such a pace. And I think that -- my personal view is you think about these agents or AI tools that help with discovery, if you are selling a commodity, you have a problem because then it's just a race on price.

If you're selling unique products, unique inventory, then it helps you because it can promulgate discovery on the long tail. And if you're the only one who has the product, the ticket and the primary, then that's great because you sell that incremental ticket. And again, the pace of these tools, I think over the coming year, it's going to start to unlock.

On the secondary side, it's never been the main focus of Ticketmaster, but it still drives a notable portion of your service fee revenue. I would just love your updated thoughts on how you're thinking about the role secondary plays within the Ticketmaster platform? And then any levers that still remain out there for Ticketmaster to bring some value capture, some of the value capture that exists in the secondary market back to primary?

Yes. As we've talked about, we see secondary as a feature, not a stand-alone product. We think it's important to be in it for a couple of reasons. One is sports are very different than concerts on the secondary. Sports are a tool that are heavily used by sports teams to disaggregate season tickets, right? Most sports teams today don't have enough folks that want to go to 41 basketball games or 82 baseball games. So they sell a large portion of their tickets to brokers who then disaggregate them and put them on the secondary.

It's good for them because they get the money upfront, they get the certainty, they can budget, they can plan. They're willing to give up a little money to an intermediary to be able to do that, no different than a lot of other businesses. So it is a -- in my mind, it's a liquidity market. It's a liquidity function in sports. Concerts are very different. Nobody is -- there is no liquidity function because you're buying the concerts. So the secondary exists in concerts because people see a price arbitrage. And our philosophy is always we start by working with the artists or other content owners, what's their agenda? How do they want to see their tickets sold? If that means they want to price them closer to market value, we support that. That means they want to give value to the fans. We support that.

If they want to have it so that it's limited transfer so that it really is only their fans, then we'll support them in that. But as long as it's still legal and it's allowed, our view is as a primary marketplace, you don't want to basically send all your customers away, say you're closed for business, send them over to StubHub or SeatGeek that are going to run wild and not adhere to any of the artist demand. So we're trying to figure out and it's imperfect science on how do you balance the ability of fans to still shop for secondary tickets on the same platform.

But in terms of how it can help primary, it helps primary just because it exists. So you're telling people, hey, come and be aware, you can always get a ticket here.

It helps because we have found when you show primary and secondary together, your primary conversion goes up because you see primary tickets do still exist and will often make the price value trade-off of shifting to primary. Having it obviously gives us a lot of intelligence in terms of market value for the conversations with the artists. So we'll continue to offer it. I don't -- I've talked about, I think concert secondary now is a mid-single-digit portion of Ticketmaster's GTV. It's not going to drive our growth. And if we continue to ratchet down and it's flat or down a bit, it's also not going to impact our ability to grow the business.

That's helpful. Maybe touching on sponsorship and the long-term growth opportunity on that side of the business. I think it's still one of the more underappreciated parts of the Live Nation business model. But that business has compounded AOI low to mid-teens for the last decade. Talk a little bit more about the main drivers of that business looking ahead. I think we spent some time thinking about our large numbers. But on the Venue Nation side, it seems like there's a lot of capacity coming down the pipe.

Yes, it's been a phenomenal business. Russell and the team have done a great job figuring out how to create assets and have really led the industry in thinking about how do you unlock value for brand partners through the concert and ticketing ecosystem. Absolutely, as we look forward over the next several years, I think the #1 priority for that team is to maximize the Venue Nation opportunity, figure out with all the assets that we'll be getting in these venues that we're going to be operating, how do you -- from name and title down to the VIP rooms and everything else, there's a whole industry in just maximizing those venue sponsorships. And given the volume of venues we're going to open, given the number of fans we expect to go through those venues, we think that, that will be the #1 driver.

The other, and I alluded to it earlier when we talked about Ticketmaster benefits on this side versus the Ticketingmaster books technically, but everything that gets done on that Ticketmaster platform, that's an ad unit effectively. It's some ability to enable fans to spend more for some other related purchase is really flows through. I mean those are, again, more ads. And Saumil and that team unlocks more effectively, the products reduces friction, you're naturally going to drive more purchase and the sponsorship team will be closely involved in that, figuring out what brand partners do they bring to bear to take advantage of those ad units.

Any specific verticals or categories within the sponsorship business that you feel like are executable or high on your list in terms of penetrating deeper into?

I mean the team has done a pretty good job. Obviously, the announcement with Spotify this year is a great one. I think there's more work to be done with the DSPs in terms of growing that category globally. But in general, I wouldn't say there's any there's anything we're missing that's a big hole.

I want to touch on capital allocation and returns. But before I get to that, just on the regulatory side, we're now a few months removed from the March settlement with the DOJ and the April jury verdict. Could you just remind investors where we are in the regulatory process today and how things could play out from here?

Yes. So the first is the judge undertakes a review of the DOJ agreement. There was a public comment that just period that just ended. As you'd expect, all of our competitors came out and said, no, we'd like you to cripple them more so that we can have an easier time competing. So that was all to be expected. The judge now is going to take all that into consideration, make some decisions about what that process entails. I expect that will continue on over the next 2 or 3 months. And then in terms of the post trial with the states, we have a couple of motions in front of the judge because we don't think that on the facts, a lot of the case was proven.

We'll see what he decides on that. That will then set up the remedies trial that will take place next year. We continue to believe that we understand that the states did an effective job with a trial to win over a jury, which is different in our mind than a trial to win on the facts of the case. We think the DOJ settlement was fully responsive to the facts of the case. So we'll see how the remedy process plays out next year, but we also continue to feel very good about our position if it gets carried away on appeal.

And then just because we get this question a lot on the appeals process, if this goes next spring in an adverse way, how does the appeals process play out and sort of time lines from there?

Maybe you take it to the appellate court, that probably takes 9 months to a year, depending on what they do. And then -- and then you have an ultimate option of appealing based on that to the Supreme Court, which, again, you hope you don't have to go that far. But given that this case involves some fairly novel interpretations of antitrust law, then it might be one that could be a reasonable candidate.

Last question, Joe, just on capital allocation and potentially returns. You mentioned great underlying growth in the business. It seems like the commitment in capital towards Venue Nation is starting to plateau. Could you maybe just talk a little bit about the balance sheet, where you're comfortable with leverage? And if there is excess capital, perhaps opportunities to either continue to invest or return?

I think in the next handful of years, there's plenty of opportunities to continue to invest. I don't think -- and we also have the uncertainty associated with the trial. So I don't think we're going to rush to do anything that's going to reduce our flexibility at a time that we have a lot of opportunities to deploy the capital. Comfortable with our debt leverage. We've created with some of your colleagues, a pretty novel instrument on venue financing that allows us to pool our venue assets at a bit higher leverage and with a lower rate because of the pooling of those assets.

So I think -- the way I think about our balance sheet in my mind is a little bit bifurcated as we sort of have the synthetic VenueCo structure and then a typical capital structure with the rest of the business. So I think our leverage may fluctuate a bit as if we grow our venue business, you may actually get a bit higher leverage. But because it's -- a lot of it is in that separate vehicle, you have to kind of go level down, I think, now, looking at our leverage and not just do it at a top level. But I think I feel very comfortable with our liquidity and our ability to keep investing.

That's great, Joe. We'll have to leave it there. Thank you for your time and thoughts today.

Thank you.

Good afternoon. My name is Joe, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Live Nation's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call.

I would now like to turn the call over to Ms. Amy Yong. Thank you, Ms. Yong. You may begin.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Live Nation Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Joining us today is our President and CEO, Michael Rapino; and our President and CFO, Joe Berchtold.

We would like to remind you that this afternoon's call will contain certain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ, including statements related to the company's anticipated financial performance, business prospects, new developments and similar matters. Please refer to Live Nation's SEC filings, including the risk factors and cautionary statements included in the company's most recent filings on Forms 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K for a description of risks and uncertainties that could impact the actual results.

Live Nation will also refer to some non-GAAP measures on this call. In accordance with the SEC Regulation G, Live Nation has provided definitions of these measures and a full reconciliation to the most comparable GAAP measures in our earnings release. The release reconciliation can be found under the Financial Information section on Live Nation's website.

With that, we will now take your questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of Stephen Laszczyk with Goldman Sachs.

Maybe to kick us off, Michael, on the demand side, it seems like every year brings with it some reasons to be concerned about the durability of consumer demand. I was hoping if you could maybe just update us on what you're seeing on the demand front out there for live music globally as we head into the second half of the year. Maybe compare how the demand has been shaping up relative to some years in the past.

And then ultimately, what you think this means for your ability to sell through the remaining concert inventory you have out there on the market? It seems like a record year on the supply side. I would love just your thoughts on how that demand meets the supply in the marketplace.

Yes. We're looking, as you can see from our numbers, we've seen no consumer issues to date in terms of purchasing. Numbers are up across the board, whether it's international, America, clubs, amphitheaters, stadiums, all genres. All venues and all geographies right now, up over 10% in terms of fan count. So we're seeing consumers buy at record levels, will be another record year after multiple record years. So the comps are always tough to beat, but we're seeing the continued global growth of the concert ticket. We're seeing it on site.

Our food and beverage is up this year year-over-year across all of our owned and operated. So they're coming to the venue and they're consuming, and we're providing better menus and better options, but we're seeing no pullback there. Liquor is up year-over-year. So we're not actually seeing any of those stories about the consumer not drinking as much. They seem to look at the 2-hour night out at the concert is probably the night they're not cutting back. So we're not seeing any pullback.

The whole blue dot, we have fewer cancellations this year than ever. We're running below historic lows at 1.1% cancellations versus 1.6% average. So every now and then, the media blow up about a certain tour canceling is, again, it's the 1%, not the 99%. And we're seeing deferred record levels right now in terms of going forward. So we think '26 is going to be an absolute record year. We're going to see strong Q3 and Q4 in terms of finishing off the great touring year we're going to have. So no consumer concerns, just kind of similar World Cup in sports what we're seeing on that side of the equation.

That's great. And then maybe one for Joe. I was curious if you'd be willing to unpack your expectations for the Concert segment in the back half of the year, just given the timing and mix shift to the slate and how that's expected to play out for the year. It seems like revenue and fan count expected to grow quite nicely in the back half. Would just be curious to get your latest sense as well on the timing of margins and cadence of margins in 3Q and 4Q.

Sure. So as you said, I think we always start most importantly, looking at the full year given quarters move around. And I think we've stepped up our expectation now. We expect double-digit fan growth for the full year to drive then double-digit revenue and AOI growth and then ultimately, margin expansion.

So obviously, not of that for the first half. If you look at the first half, international growth has been good, but U.S. has been impacted by stadium availability for Q2 and then into the first part of Q3. So for the U.S., really all the fan growth in the U.S. will be in the second half, and we expect double-digit fan growth year-on-year in each of Q3 and Q4 for the U.S. International has had a very strong first half, and we expect that to continue again with double-digit growth in fan count for each of the third and fourth quarters internationally.

So the reason for confidence in that is that we really have -- our shows have been booked and confirmed. And if you looked at our deferred revenue, it's at a level now that gives us confidence that really tickets are in the bank. It's a matter of playing off the shows.

And then finally, just given the faster growth on operated venues or fan count and operated venues relative to third-party venues, that's really the foundation of what sets us up for margin expansion.

The next question comes from the line of Brandon Ross with LightShed Partners.

Switching gears to ticketing. It seems like things have really turned the corner there finally. How do we think about the growth algorithm from here, not just for this year, but for beyond as well? And is growth going to simply be tied to fan count? Or are there other levers? And maybe how does secondary play into that?

Sure. I'll get it started. I think we're extremely happy with the performance of Ticketmaster in the quarter and how it sets us up for the full year, increased our expectation for AOI growth for the full year to be at mid-single digits. So it certainly feels like we've turned that corner.

In terms of the growth algorithm, we've talked about in the past, we do think that the first piece that is a great tailwind to have in the business is the global concert growth. So while we're not adding a lot of new venues in the U.S., we're still growing Ticketmaster's fee-bearing ticket count by high single digits so far this year, heavily off of just more activity, more utilization in those arenas and stadiums, and we think there's a lot of room for continued growth on that.

And then internationally, you have a double or triple benefit because you have more shows that we're putting in, you have more markets that we're able to go into. Ticketmaster is very well positioned as we're going into Latin America and Asia markets as having the best technology out there. So it's able to build its share in those markets. That helps on the concert side to give confidence that they can go to those markets and have a platform to sell the tickets and get the grosses you need for those shows to make sense. And then together, we're adding more venues, which only further expands the marketplace that Ticketmaster can participate in. So all of those pieces continue, I think, to give a very good global growth story for Ticketmaster.

On the secondary, we gave you the pieces. Secondary now on a Global GTV basis is below teens. It's low double-digit portion. The concert piece that we've been very focused on trying to shift and get more tickets into the hands of fans on the first sale is continuing to be a lower part of our business. Today, it's probably 5% of our Global GTV. So we don't see that as anything that's going to be a major impediment to growth going forward.

Okay. And then on the Spotify Reserve deal that you guys announced, I was just curious how you weighed the financial contribution from that deal versus the strategic question of potentially making them the "good guy or savior in ticketing" and potentially furthering their competitive ambitions.

I'll take that. We always look at the balance. We've done it for years. We have a much more open platform than we ever get credit for. The goal has always been, as long as we own the transaction, we'll always look for other discovery signals that can help drive ticket sales. So we've done this with Facebook for years. We've done it with Snapchat. We've done it with Groupon for years, Citi, Verizon. So we always look at opportunities on, one, can we get better data, more reach for artists to sell tickets.

And then two, I think I said it a year ago the key in this one, Spotify or Amazon or super fan, a lot of that conversation that went on was making sure that we got compensated for the asset, the presale. So we looked at this just like we looked at a Verizon deal or a Citi deal. If Spotify was willing to compensate us properly for access to some presale tickets, we think it's a great win-win for both sides. It's a very small allocation on a global basis. So they're not going to be solving the onsale problems on an Ariana Grande tour at that scale. No one can solve it. But we had a great rollout with a role model tour, sold a certain allocation towards their dedicated fans.

So we think it's a good win-win. We think they've been a great partner. We like working with them on the overall music business. And I think any time we can find new partners that can help us talk to super fans direct, it helps us in our ongoing quest to find better ways to battle the bots.

The next question comes from the line of David Karnovsky with JPMorgan.

On the amphitheaters, can you comment on expected attendance trends relative to prior years? And is it still your expectation to generate 70% of the fan growth there in Q3? And Michael touched upon some of the per cap demand so far this year, but if you can give any color on the key initiatives driving that, it would be great.

Yes. Amps are doing great this year. We've said they're up double digits in terms of the attendance through the first half. We continue to expect it, yes, to be mainly back half, 70% focused in terms of the growth for the year. The per caps, as Michael said earlier, per caps on-site spending is up. It's up across the board. We're seeing continued uptake in liquor categories, high-performing on ready-to-drink, the shaker cups. So it's continuing to be the big night out. We've also introduced a number of new products, some things that we've kind of built up our own brand on. Those are getting very high marks from fans in terms of the quality. We've introduced more sort of economy, lower cost offerings on both food and beverage. Those are doing well.

So we're seeing across the board performance, ticket buying. Premium is doing very well. Premium is up this year. As we noted in the release, a couple of the new amphitheaters are performing very well, showing if we build quality premium product, the audience is out there. So overall, I think this is a great year for the amphitheaters, best year we've had.

Okay. And then with some of the recent arena acquisitions you've announced, can you just update on what's completed versus what's pending? And then how we should think about when these start to fully contribute relative to any interim investment period?

Sure. So we've completed the acquisition of 3 arenas so far this year, the Impact Arena in Bangkok, ForumNet in Milan and Movistar in Buenos Aires. We expect a few more before the end of 2027, probably 4 or 5 in that period, which is on track for adding capacity for about 15 million fans between what we're building and buying between '26 and '27.

In terms of the cadence, generally speaking, we'll get pretty quickly up to speed on things that we buy. So if we buy something this year, next year, it should be pretty up to speed in terms of the bookings and the fan count. Sponsorship may take a bit longer, depending on what deals they have in place and how long it takes for them to roll off. For the venues that we're building, I generally think of it taking a couple of years from the year that you completed in to get fully ramped up and those performing with the full fan count and sponsorship levels.

The next question comes from the line of Cameron Mansson-Perrone with Morgan Stanley.

Two follow-ups on Ticketmaster. First, a growing proportion of the ticket wins seem to be coming from international. You touched on it earlier, but I'm curious, is that growth being driven by just the growth in touring globally? Or is it more of an intentional focus kind of operationally at Ticketmaster, reflecting maybe what you see as more attractive market dynamics internationally? And then I have one other one.

Yes. As I said, I think it's a couple of things going on. First, as we enter new markets, we are finding that our platform is extremely attractive and quickly gets established as best-in-class. So as we've -- we're now in 6 Latin America markets, 6 Asia Pacific markets, and we're finding it to be an attractive area to be able to go and get new customers.

Second is that the venues are being added in those markets. So that's naturally a place for us to be adding new customers. And then across globally, international is benefiting along with the U.S. in terms of just more concert activity going on globally.

So yes, but we see international -- and we've talked about international. I think we're truly delivering international now. You can see that in the numbers on every segment through the first half. And we think, again, the runway is tremendous for many years on all of these pieces.

Yes, that's coming through. And then on Spotify Reserve, I wanted to follow up. Just any color on how you expect that partnership to grow over time or potential for it to scale from kind of the starting point? And Michael, you touched on kind of the desire to be good stewards of tickets and how this facilitates that. What other avenues exist for you to help kind of drive towards that aim?

Listen, our goal is we've got an incredible global platform of TM. Time and time again, we can show clients and artists that we're the best probably placed as a first stop for someone to look for a concert ticket or a sports ticket. But everyone has partners, and we always want to make sure that we're reaching as many avenues as we can for new distribution. So we don't look at Spotify as a ticketing competitor just as we don't look at Verizon as a ticketing competitor. Not saying they can't enter that space. But in this kind of deal, this is a traditional deal where someone has paid us for some of our inventory, and we've weighed those pros and cons of is a presale and monetizing the presale a good strategic move for our business and when we can get a partner that we think has good reach like a Verizon, a Citi or a Spotify and get monetized for it, it's a win-win. That's the way we look at it.

So the scale on their side is no different than we look at will Verizon scale their presale program. The answer is yes, if they want to pay us a lot more. So that's the way we look at it. We have this incredible asset we buy called the ticket. Our job is to sell every one of them. And we look at sponsors as a great distribution partner to accomplish that goal, maybe not on the ones that sell out in 3 seconds. But as we know, 90% of shows don't sell out. So we're always looking for help in distribution and new consumers to help us on those 90% of shows that don't sell.

The next question comes from the line of Peter Supino with Wolfe Research.

Following up on Joe's comments on Venue Nation and the time to -- the journey from opening to full revenue productivity, I wondered about the path from breaking ground to generating revenue. Should the increase in CapEx from $600 million or so in '24 to $1 billion in '25, should that have the most impact in the summer of '27? Or is that more of a '28 event in terms of shifting from construction to sales?

And then a question for Michael on Japan. I wondered if you'd discuss the growth opportunity there. And do you think about, say, on a 5-year horizon, that opportunity is being measured in the tens of millions or the hundreds of millions of AOI?

Yes. Just in terms of timing, I think the build for an arena or a large theater is generally 2 to 3 years. And then as I said, it's probably between about 2 years after you complete the building. So when we're talking about the increases in '24 to '25, obviously, a chunk of that we have been spending. And so some of those venues will get completed. Others aren't going to get completed until '26, '27. So I think it's probably '28 before we really start seeing the impact of that increase in CapEx.

But what we focused on along the way to continue to deliver growth is why we're also augmenting it with some acquisitions. So as I just said, we've acquired 3 arenas. That will provide more of the growth catalyst in '27. We're using that to move forward more quickly.

As far as Japan, it's one of the great markets in the world. It's a $1 billion-plus live business. We have a very small market share today. So we think over time, we can grow our market share and capture a good percentage of that global business that is in there. So 90% of the business is local, Japanese business. So critical, we finally found the right partner. So with our global tours as well as building our local business, venues, ticketing, all of the pieces we bring to the table, we think it's a very good business over the next 5 years.

And the next question comes from the line of Batya Levi with UBS.

On the ticketing side, can you generally talk about where we are in terms of some of the new investments you've been making on the platform, use of AI and the progress you've been making towards unsold tickets? And just a quick follow-up on the Spotify sponsorship. Did that kick in at the end of May? Or is it a 3Q event?

Sure. First on TM, I think we've been extremely happy with the progress we've been making under Saumil over the past 9 months or so under his leadership. I think he has continued to make a lot of strides in terms of the platform and now has a clear road map for how we're going to continue to improve the product, both online as well as with the mobile app.

AI, it gets broad term gets integrated into it in a lot of ways. We're obviously working with AI platforms because we think it's a great opportunity to unlock more long-tail discovery of what TM has when people are looking for events. At the same time, we're using AI to help power our coding and development at Ticketmaster. And then we're also looking to integrate it more in the direct fan experience while they're on-site or in the app to continue to have discovery.

I think that selling unsold tickets will be an ongoing proposition, helping fans discover the shows, helping make sure we have the right information on how to price the tickets, how to market the tickets, what promotions make sense. So that will be an ongoing effort. I think we continue to make good progress in terms of how we use the data and lay the opportunities out in front of the fan, and that's in part being borne out by continued very strong ticket sales, and that will continue over the next while.

We launched Spotify in May with role model as their first reserved.

The next question comes from the line of Peter Henderson with Bank of America.

As artist conversations and venue bookings for 2027 develop, how does the early touring pipeline compare with '26 across stadiums, arenas and amps? And then also, how should we think about like the key growth levers, additional supply, international, new venue capacity for next year?

Well, I mean, on the key growth, I assume you've been to our Investor Day, we've been pretty consistent year after year on how we're going to grow this global business, a global platform out there, lots of untapped markets for us, and we're going to keep expanding and building our business on a global basis. And that alone will drive our show count, which ultimately drives all of the other pieces.

'27 looks like a strong year. We already have a big percentage of our bookings in for next year. We see another strong global year of both stadiums, arenas and amphitheaters. Still early, but very encouraging from what we see booked in the calendar so far.

The next question comes from the line of Robert Fishman with MoffettNathanson.

Two questions, please. As you think about all the success you've seen in Latin America, can you just help us think about or how you characterize the growth from here? Maybe what inning you think you're in and what the key markets to drive that growth even higher?

And then maybe just a follow-up on Venue Nation. As you think about the ramp and the updated CapEx guide for full year '26, any early way to think about or update for the '27 now that you've given us the pipeline on the larger venues?

In Latin America, we're still in early innings. We're very underdeveloped in Brazil, which is kind of like Japan is a big market. But the other markets we announced this morning an arena in Sao Paulo, Brazil. We've announced a couple of other arenas in the Latin market, but those are still far from being operated. So we're in the second kind of inning of the 9-inning game on a multibillion-dollar business in Latin America.

And then in terms of the CapEx next year, obviously, we're still early stages of the planning process, so I can't get too specific. But I think what you can see is this is a largely organic incremental effort. We're just up a bit more this year than we were last year. It will be framed by the opportunities for next year, and it's a little bit lumpy based on the timing of the builds. But it will be incremental to what we have now, not being -- we're not doubling, tripling, we're not leaping. I think we're continuing to be very focused on finding the right projects that are going to deliver the returns we're looking for and turning down a lot of projects that don't, that will continue to be our MO.

The next question comes from the line of Steven Cahall with Wells Fargo & Company.

A couple on Venue Nation. Just first, as investors, I think, look to understand the investments a little better. The guidance is for Venue Nation fans to grow faster than third party. Is that just because there's more third-party venues? Or is there something sort of structurally superior about the Venue Nation portfolio where you would expect the growth rate longer term to be higher there than it is for kind of the mix of third-party assets?

And then relatedly, with the 15 million fans run rate you're looking to add by the end of next year, I mean, I think that would imply unless the venues come online very late in the year that you'll have another kind of double-digit year for fan growth in '27. I was wondering if that's something you'd be willing to comment on at this point.

In terms of the fan growth this year, first of all, there's way more third-party venues than there are Live Nation-operated venues. We run a small minority of venues. The growth is because we operate them. We've got a lot of effort put into continuing to build the show count. And at the same time, we're adding some new venues. So we have the double benefit of both focusing on filling the buildings we have and adding new buildings, whereas with third party, you're focused on incremental show count.

So just you have more pieces that you're working with on your operated. And I think it's premature to talk specifically about next year and how that 15 million run rate flows in.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the question-and-answer session, and I'd like to hand the call back over to Michael Rapino for closing remarks.

Thank you, everyone. Have a great summer. Hope to see you at the show. Talk to you soon.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and enjoy the rest of your day.

Okay. 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. So when we look at the tailwinds that have driven live music for 5 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?

100%. I think when we talk about the macro trends in our business, 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, country are now truly global. So because of the distribution of Spotify and Apple Music, they can get the music everywhere, the TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, they discover the artists, they go viral.

And then on the supply side, nothing's changed in the sense that artists are making their living on the road. It's back before recorded music was the big jump. So you put the supply-and-demand together, those dynamics, I think, are as strong as ever, will only get stronger over time. And 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 be in the offices on Friday?

Yes. 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. So I think that you continue to have more flexibility means more opportunities. I think 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? And 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 concert with friends. You go to be social. You got to hang out to have fun. So 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. And I think we fit that to a tee. Again, another trend that I think is only continuing and will continue to be a tailwind for us for a long time.

So macro has 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?

Yes. We're -- notwithstanding some of the recent press that I've talked about has been very anecdotal and misleading. We're continuing to see exceptionally strong demand throughout -- in the past 3 weeks, just to give you the updated numbers, so you have them. I don't live my life 3 weeks at a time, but I know people like numbers. So I think we're at about 119 million tickets sold so far. This year, we've sold 11.5 million tickets in the past 3 weeks. That's more than we sold over that 3-week period last year.

So we're continuing to track double-digits ahead in ticket sales from where we were last year. So on the most macro basis, continuing to look strong. But 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, 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, and amphitheaters. So consistently for all the major venue types, we're selling tickets effectively. So 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 the 1% to 2% that you would have seen over time. So there's continued great demand for all the reasons that I just talked about.

And I think 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. The 30% under $50, the 30% more between $50 and $100, only 10% are over $250. We're very, 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. And obviously, artists 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, while inflation is up 30%. So again, people like 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. So 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 would be great to hear any updates also on how the Amp season is shaping up, what you're seeing on ancillary per caps. I know the sample size is pretty small at this point. And then just as it relates to the O&O venues, any key initiatives you'd highlight for summer season?

Yes. I think, as you said, I think we've had about 5% of our Amps play off at this point. So I'll refrain from giving any exact numbers, but just say that thus far, the per-cap spending, the on-site spending is up. So 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 idle rooms, rolling out various other premium activations at our amphitheaters. We're seeing good uptake in that. We've introduced a couple of new food concepts that we're feeling good about in terms of giving additional choice, have 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 over the -- a little more data with them over the past 4 years -- or sorry, 4 months. And again, not seeing any issues or signs of pullback 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?

Yes. I think the festival business is very different today than it was 10 years ago. And 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 are headliner-driven. And the reality is the headliners have seen that the amount of money they can make in an arena or a stadium has increased over the past 10 years. Well, so is their fee to perform at a festival. So what we're seeing now is the festivals are really getting -- the economics of a festival, generally speaking, are getting driven by 2 things. One is sponsorship. And two is your premium opportunities.

And fortunately, for us, that's an area we have focused a lot on investing in our capabilities. Russell and the team, are absolute world-class at selling sponsorship for our festivals. They've grown that business tremendously over time. And we've talked now, I don't know, at least 5 years now obsessed over premium experiences, which runs both the venues we operate as well as our festivals. So 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 has gotten expensive, I can't make as much money.

And within the premium, right? There's always a lot of segmentation that goes on, thinking about that in different ways.

Yes. 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. And whether that's the young couple who want to just go and sit on the lawn and being 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 and they should be able to do that. So 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 them 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?

Yes. 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. to be your 2 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 5 or 6 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.

But we've just scratched the surface there. And that's -- 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. And 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 hyperlocal focus, we're seeing that same opportunity in Europe, which we're aggressively pursuing now.

And then 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 of ways that we think about it. One is just 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 underpenetrated. It could be a huge market that could easily handle a couple of them. So that's your starting opportunity, right? I mean, again, that's just your top 75, which I think we probably go to the top couple of hundred. So -- but that gives you a focused list to say, all right, let's -- those are going to be your biggest, easiest markets in the sense that you know you'll have a fan base.

So 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 secured 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, we really -- the hyperlocal in Mexico. we're not really just Mexico City. There is enough that we can structurally look at 9 other cities in Mexico. We just putting a venue into Guadalajara.

What are the opportunities that we have to go to all of those markets to put in venues. So it's a tremendous global opportunity for venues. I think we talk in terms with our strategic plan on 5-, 6-year periods. But even as we accelerate over the next several years on our venue strategy, I have no problems. We're still going to be standing here 5 years from now saying, 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, run through the playbook there. And then I guess if you look at your various regions, how much room is there to partner with existing real estate owners or sports teams that need capital and concert for their venues?

Yes. Estadio GNP, 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. So it's just -- it's an incredible venue. And the renovation came down, I think, primarily to a couple of things, premium and sponsorship. 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 pay for itself within a couple of years to do that.

Now it's a better venue, more profitable and a fast return on that. I mean, broadly speaking, we love the opportunity of partnering with folks who have the real estate to get the venues. Every sports team in the U.S. is now focused on how do I create that entertainment district around my stadium arena, they don't come to us because they need capital. These are some of the richest people in the country.

But 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. So they know what do we need in that market, what capacity, how do we build it? What's the design look like? So -- and then -- and 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. And then internationally, any time we can do an Atletico de Madrid 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 how -- 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. And 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.

And then 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?

Yes. I think it's just -- 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. And certainly, probably about 10 of them would be at the large arena, amphitheater arena level. So I think as we continue to build the team, we now have a development team in U.S., Latin America, Asia, Europe.

So 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. We want to make sure we're going to go into a situation that the market needs and wants that expansion. But as we continue to build the team, we'll incrementally take on more. It's not the thing you're going to leap and add 10 in 1 year, but you're going to add a few a year.

We're using M&A to acquire some things that give us -- to help us move faster. Different time lines, you can tend to build faster in Latin America than in Canada, Europe or U.S. So we tend to just try to layer and say, how do we have this as a ramp. So 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. So in some regions like Brazil or Japan, where you've built a physical presence, Ticketmaster is still pretty nascent. So how big is the opportunity to establish more robust ticketing operations in these markets?

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 that the Ticketmaster business. So 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.

And then 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 presales to establish the business, build it out from there. So as we look over the next several years at the opportunity for Ticketmaster, you hit the 2 key ones exactly, Latin America and Asia.

And then 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?

Yes, you're right. We have someone now who has a technology and product focus, history, skill set. So he's obsessed with product. Number one is continuing to improve the fan experience. And 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. And 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.

And so it's a back and forth thing, but 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, and he's moving pretty fast on that. Continue to develop new tools for the venues, the sports teams, the artists. Again, he's just -- he's got a product mindset. So he's continuing to ask what are the pain points of all of those providers. And then on a broader platform basis, he's moving much faster in terms of getting the Ticketmaster platform deployed in new markets.

So as I said, historically, in Japan, Japan would be, let's talk about our 3-year plan to get there. And he said, no, we have 1 year. We're selling tickets by the end of the year. Maybe it won't be perfect. Maybe it will be limited to these things, but we're selling tickets in a year. And 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. But I think you'll see a lot more faster now.

So staying on Ticketing at 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.

Yes. I'm going to -- I'm probably going to hesitate to give every weekly updates on ticket sales. But as goes concerts, so goes tickets. So your 2 drivers of Ticketing growth at the end of the day are what are the new clients you're adding and 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 -- because your sports volume is -- it can grow a bit based on tournaments. It will grow a bit as leagues expand, but it's not fundamentally changing generally the number of games that people are playing.

So 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, but I would say that the concerts and sports make up the bulk of the business. And again, so they're off to a great start this year because 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 and 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. So for all you guys are trying to model, right? It's just a timing of when that profitability gets recognized.

So ticketing AOI was up 1% in Q1. There were some bespoke items 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.

Yes. And you left out our high-20s growth in deferred revenue representing over $5 billion of GTV. I mean -- so 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 onetime 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.

But 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 our -- we lay out every year our kind of 5-year plan that shows that we expect kind of as a base case, continued at least mid-single-digit growth at Ticketmaster as we expand globally. So 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. But 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 are there adjustments that need to be made on your part?

Yes. As you said, it's the most boring business in the world when I sit here in May and say, "Hey, we're 85% to 90% sold for the year. So don't worry. 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 5 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 presales technology firms. I think that they have laid the foundation and built the relationships with such a massive set of tremendous brands.

And 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 5 years will come from the venue expansion because there are so many sponsorable assets from the naming rights to the clubs, to a number of pieces throughout the venue, and that will tie in with the premium experiences. So they'll reinforce each other. But no question, a lot of that is going to come from whether in Latin America, Europe will come from the venue side. Estadio GNP is a great example, right? That's a foundational piece of what we did in Mexico City with the old Foro Sol.

Got it. So 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 nonexclusive contracts, Ticketmaster offering venues a back-end system. So can you speak to the potential impact from the changes here? And what would that look like from a consumer?

Yes. I think that 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. And 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. So we said, you know what, let's let the market decide. We're fine with that. So we will relax that exclusivity. We'll push to have some nonexclusivity.

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. So 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. But if the others are right who think that we've been controlling it, we'll find that out as well. And our focus is really going to be on let's build the best product there is.

And 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% to 30% of tickets unsold on a typical event. So what really matters to us is how do we sell more of those tickets. And I think 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.

And then 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?

Yes. 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? I mean when we were $16 per cap different it is very different than when you're in your $46 per cap business. So a large portion of the economics of the amphitheaters is now coming from operating the venues. So opening the venues and having third-party promoters will -- may reduce a bit the number of shows that we do on the concert side, but it will obviously directly benefit our amphitheater operations where we'll make a lot of money on an incremental basis.

So we're confident that opening them makes sense. We've said publicly before, we think that we were 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. Then we decided, okay, as part of the settlement, we'll do that. We're comfortable that it makes sense for the industry, and it will be fine for us.

And to be clear, the reduction would be on the promotion side, but the buildings themselves would come back positive. Joe, with that, we're about out of time. Thanks so much for being here.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

All right. Thank you, everyone, for being here. We are very excited to have Live Nation here for the first time at our conference. So -- thank you.

Thank you.

Joe, for being here, President and CFO.

So, Joe, there's a lot to unpack right now going on in your business, both from the operations side and of course, the legal updates following the recent verdict. But before we go there, let's start with the big picture. Stepping back first, if you can just talk -- what are you most excited about? I mean there's been a lot going on over the past few years. We've obviously come out of the pandemic very strong. Live Nation's position continues to improve within that. So as you think about the broader live entertainment ecosystem, talk to us about where Live Nation sits today.

Yes. I think what's amazing about our business is just every day, it's more and more global, right? This is something that is universal, right? Music, going to concerts is truly universal, and we're now at a point that's accelerated post-COVID, both the supply and the demand operating on a global basis. So the first thing you always love in any business that you operate in is do I have structural headwinds or tailwinds? What am I working with to start out here?

And we have long had tailwinds in our business in terms of just the continued focus on experiences as opposed to goods and it's driven a lot of growth in North America and in Europe over the past years. But I think one of the fortunate things when Michael started the business 20 years ago, he was focused from day 1, on -- I want to be as global as we can be. And I think that's just paid off massive dividends now over the past 5 years post-COVID.

On both the supply and the demand side, you've seen an acceleration of globalization. The fans are learning about music from social media platforms, TikTok, YouTube. They're consuming the music on the Spotify's, Apple Music platforms. So that demand is there, global latent demand. And the supply came out of COVID, I think, more informed really understanding the global nature of the demand, and we saw some early big successes with the K-pop, the BTSs who opened the door for the next 20 K-pops. The Bad Bunny, who's been one of our most active artists over the past 3 or 4 years, but it's not just Bad Bunny. Again, he's opened the door for the next Karol Gs and Peso Plumas and everybody else.

So you've got all the artists see all the other artists operating on a truly global basis. So now we look at the business, I think, very differently than even 7 or 8 years ago because we're not obsessed with, "Oh, you have to make this town in the U.S. work." We're looking at it as, no, we just -- we did the deal in Milan. We did the deal in Paris. We did the deal in Guadalajara, right? So we're looking at this and saying, what matters is the market, but it's the 200, 300 markets globally that matter, not looking narrowly at the U.S.

Okay. That's a helpful setup. So when you talk about the secular demand, nice tailwind behind you. How much do you attribute to just the overall live experience and especially when you think about the younger demographics and where they're deciding to spend their money?

Yes. Well, I think that -- I don't think it's a younger demographic thing in the sense that you go back music -- gathering around live music has been around since caveman days. Like this is one of the most durable experiences that has -- we've ever known as civilization. So I think it continues. I think one of the things that absolutely helps us is we are the antidote to technology, right? For as much time as you guys are all staring at your screens even right now, at some point, people are social animals. People need to gather socially. And I think that concerts and probably sports are the two things that we come together and there are as much social gatherings and tribal as they are just going to that event.

When you go to a concert, you don't go alone, right? You go with your wife, you take your kids, you go with your buddies. You're going there to have a good time socially. The artist matters a lot. You're going to listen to music tonight. I'm going to see Bruce Springsteen tonight, right? I love the music, but I'm going with some buddies. And that's an important part of this. And I think the more you spend time on screens, the more you need that alternative that, again, were another tailwind for us.

Okay. There's been a lot of press and discussion around this Blue Dot fever recently. So maybe just help us in terms of bringing that secular tailwinds. What are you seeing today in terms of the overall live demand? And maybe talk about cancellations -- that.

Sure. Yes. I mean I give credit to the scalpers. It's a good marketing program they have. We'll get into it a bit more, but I think it's heavily driven by scalpers who are frustrated by the fact that artists are much more effectively pricing tours and they want to try to scare them that if they continue to price their tours efficiently, oh, you're not going to sell tickets, it's going to be embarrassing.

I saw one of the news reports the other day was talking about Blue Dot fever, 6 shows have canceled. Well, we did 50-odd thousand shows last year. So everybody likes the headline, nobody likes the context. The reality is that our cancellation rates this year are running probably same or a little better than last year, which are in line with historical numbers. You always have a few shows that ultimately get canceled. There is absolutely no data that supports any issues. We've sold more tickets. We talked about that. We sold double digits more tickets at this point. Deferred revenue on both concerts and ticketing, which are just signs of how well our ticket selling and Ticketmaster says that for all live events, not just concerts, are pacing north of 20% up. Our sell-through rates, when I look at whether it's amphitheaters, arenas, stadiums, sell-through rate, which is so what percent of your tickets versus available tickets have sold, they're all doing as well as they were last year when we were having none of this discussion.

So -- no, we're not -- we have no concern at all. Again, it's a nice catchy phrase that is absolutely devoid of facts.

Okay. You talked at the beginning about this worldwide phenomenon that's going on. And you've provided us this longer-term target of the 225 million fan count. So any updates on how to think about that from a regional basis? Or how the economics really differ between North America and outside of the U.S.?

Well, the #1 driver of our economics is going to be where are we operating the venues, right? Because when we're operating the venues, we're not just the promoter with the promoter margin. We're also selling you the beer and getting parking and doing a whole host of other activities that let us make that money that way as well. So that's -- it's not an international North America question.

I think that if you look at this year, it's kind of a good indicator where we're at. The U.S. has added more fans, but international is growing faster. And it's just because of the relative size of the market. So I would expect over the next 5 years, absolutely, the majority of our growth comes from international markets. We look at the how underpenetrated we are globally. And just -- I think Mexico is a great example. Last year, we did stadium dates with [indiscernible] 20-odd stadium dates. That ended up being in 8 different cities. And so I think even for our OCESA guys who are world-class, they said, "Wow, there's actually a lot more demand, not just in Mexico City, but in all of these other markets."

So now they're very focused on, "Okay, how do we now activate those 8 other markets in a way that they can be ongoing destinations for tours," which led to our Guadalajara venue, right? So we're looking at all of these markets and saying the number of -- what are the number of cities with 5 million-plus people throughout Latin America, throughout Asia, throughout even parts of Europe that we haven't gotten into. Let alone, maybe not in 5 years, meaningful, but certainly, as we think strategically about the business, Africa, India, huge swaths of the population are relatively untapped, certainly massive underpenetrated relative to North America. So I expect that's really where the bulk of the fan growth over the next 5 years will come from.

Okay. You started to mention some of the trends that you were highlighting on the earnings call. So let's go a little bit deeper to this year. There was a lot of worry coming into the year about what the World Cup impact was going to be. And again, it sounds like we're in better shape than at least those initial fears. So maybe just help us understand how much of this year gap filling, if you will, is onetime in nature versus are there lessons learned that you've built around this World Cup that can translate into better performance for the years to come?

Yes. Everybody is always, well 1 year. Well, next year can't be like this year, right? I have been hearing that for at least 5 years. No, I think what -- I think the learning is simply that start -- if you start early and you get things in place and then you have time, there's still -- there's plenty of supply. There's as much supply as almost we have time to work with to figure out how to schedule how to route, how to make happen, right? Where we ended up this year because we were so paranoid on the World Cup, we got started very early and very focused on, okay, how do we do things before they take over the stadiums -- after they take over the stadiums, how do we do a big run right after they're gone? How do we do more in soccer stadiums, how do we do more in baseball?

So there was an early obsession, and then we got -- so we got ahead of the curve and we did well. But then because those teams got started earlier, then they had more time to say, okay, now let's also make sure we're going deep on arenas and deep on amphitheaters. I certainly didn't enter this year frankly, or maybe 6 months ago, wasn't thinking, wow, we're going to be up in all 3 of those categories while I'm sitting here in May.

So no, we're delighted. But I don't think there's anything structural with our learnings so much as let's get going early and make sure we're getting all of the artists who want to be out there touring that we've worked through with them. What's the right geography? Which markets do you want to go to? What's the routing? How do you make it all happen?

Okay. Just on that geography point, you talked about fan attendance expected to grow high single digits. So is there a geographical breakdown that you can help frame for us in terms of North America with the World Cup versus everything going on outside?

Yes, they'll both be strong. I mean it's going to be strong globally. As I said, we got ahead of it in the U.S., that helped. Latin America is doing great. Europe, fantastic. So it will be all of those.

Okay. And so a lot of what you guys have disclosed on the last earnings call is already essentially booked for this year. Help us think about like what some of these unknowns could be as we think about the second half of the year. Is that potential upside as we think about this in terms of where we are today? Or are there risks on the table that we should be factoring in?

Well, the biggest unknown sitting here in mid-May is always just what's going to happen on site. What are the per caps going to be -- we've done a lot on figuring out how we merchandise the different shows based on the audience. So you have a different mix of alcohol you're selling for the country versus the more female skewed, younger, older. So we've done a lot of work there. We've rolled out additional premium opportunities. But until you get into the year, again, no issues. The first shows are all fine. But that -- I'd say that's the unknown. And then the other unknown is just what other tours we can still pull out for the remainder of this year. So we talk about being close to done in terms of our bookings across now all of our stadiums, arenas and amphitheaters. But certainly, the upside opportunity is if we find a few artists that we can get a back half tour in with, then that's additional activity, additional growth.

Okay. You also alluded to at the beginning, the whole idea of Venue Nation. And I think that's something that we've spent a lot of time focusing on. I know investors clearly see that as a unique opportunity for your company. So as part of earnings, you talked about there were more shows than expected at some of your initial venues. Can you help us understand the conservatism baked into that 20% IRR? I know it's -- you don't want to have those public negotiations...

No, no, no. 20% is a threshold. It's not an expected outcome. It's not -- oftentimes, you hope to get better. So that's -- when we model, we don't like to fail. So [Technical Difficulty]

and we want to hold people accountable for delivering what they say they're going to deliver. So yes, I think that in general, we've been more likely to outperform than underperform as we've seen those venue opportunities. I think we've talked a lot, the venue opportunity has exploded post-COVID for two reasons. One being what we've talked about just the supply-demand dynamic. Just there's more activity, there's a lot more activity out there, even independent of us, right? I think we've enabled a lot of that additional activity because we're the primary funder of the risk capital in the industry, right, over $16 billion effective of liquidity that enables the shows take place because we're guaranteeing the artist. So it's a combination of that additional activity and then our continued improved performance on site of monetizing the fan experience by doing a better job of giving them what they want, eliminating friction.

So those two things together have resulted in a more venue opportunities because you're -- the revenue side is unlocked further, but it also has led to more upside surprises because we didn't model in this continued level of growth in activity. nor the continued improvement in our on-site performance. So as those play out, and I think there's a good chance they continue to play out, that just gives us upside from our venue strategy.

Okay. You've also been pretty helpful and specific in terms of some of these longer-term targets around Venue Nation. So 48 venues in 5 years, $600 million AOI run rate by 2032. So just help us think about how much of all of that is under your control, the company's control versus what's subject to these macro pressures.

I don't think -- I'm not worried about macro pressures. It all comes down to execution and just what's enabled in what markets and what time frames, right? I mean the reality of building anything substantial in the U.S. or in most of Europe is it's not easy. And so there's a time frame and a process to build things. Now that's part of why you see us building in other markets, right? Latin America, you can build a lot faster. It tends to be less expensive. It's also why you're seeing us acquire right now, right? So when we acquire a Paris [indiscernible] we acquire other things. So those complement. And then we're building Madrid, and we're building Munich.

So I look at it as there's a portfolio of build and buy, there's a portfolio of different markets. There's not a macro that's, I believe, that's going to impact that on a global basis. Does one project stall out because of something in a given city? Sure. But we're taking a portfolio approach and you have a high volume of these opportunities. There's way more than 48 opportunities out there. It's not like I got to go 48 for 48, I got to go like 48 for 100 in order to get that level of activity. And then it's just our organization ability to go and drive it all. We've got great teams now. We have a North America team, a South America team, a Europe team, an Asia team. But we're still -- we're doing a lot. And so we'll continue to build those teams, but that becomes a piece of it as well.

Okay. And when we think about the premium hospitality piece within this, I know it's small to start, but it seems to be a growing focus as some of these other venues start to roll out, and that goes back to your build versus buy, right?

Yes. I mean premium is a multiyear activity. We'll figure out exactly what the people are going to want. And we're deploying a number of vinyl rooms this year. We'll see what's working in which markets, what isn't working, continue to adjust. By the way, it doesn't stay static. What works today, is not going to work 5 years from now. But it's just -- it's all part of our fundamental view that if you think about the fans attending, there's a real segment of fans that are looking for a differentiated experience, want to spend the money for that differentiated experience. Our job is to eliminate friction in the ecosystem that keeps them from spending the money they want for the experience they have. That's all premium is to me.

So you got to figure out -- and it means different things in different settings. AMPs are different than arenas, different than stadiums, different than a 5,000 capacity theater. So I think we still have we're very early days, I think, in a structural premium offering. We've got some great ideas now with things like the vinyl room, but it's still pretty early in the process.

Okay. That was a good segue for what's to come. Shifting over to Ticketmaster and just overall consumer dynamics. So as we think about the balance between the artist monetization and then this obvious consumer perception of the higher prices on these bigger global tours. How much do you think about the ticket affordability as a political issue, political visibility versus that monetization lever that you're trying to pull?

Well, I think from our perspective, whatever version of K-shape or just different segments, I mean that is our reality today across any, call it, retailer or service provider. You need to think about there are going to be different fans that are looking to have a different trade-off in spend versus experience, that's the reality. It's -- and that's going to continue, maybe increase, it's not going to decrease.

So if you're an artist or you're the promoter who's taking the risk on the show. What you want to do is you want to figure out how do I make sure I have a high number of tickets that are affordable for any fan to be able to come and enjoy the show. And how do I take the best tickets and make sure that the artist is the one benefiting from the value of that seat instead of scalpers coming in and taking that arbitrage and making the money off of it.

And then it's the accumulation of that back and forth with the artist on, okay, how much money do you need to make on the show that covers the cost of your trucks and all your people that you have out on the road with you, what's that number? And then that just translates into an aggregate set of ticket prices, right? Because it's just math from a guarantee down to a ticket price. So everybody is obsessed with making sure that every fan can afford to get in. But again, our artists are similarly focused on. I don't want the scalper to make all the money off my show. So you're seeing higher prices and those tickets are still selling. Maybe they don't sell at the on sale, but they're still selling, right?

And then what happens is you get the bad press on either the high price or the bad press that I see a lot of times is the artist gets blamed for the price in the secondary, which is truly just shows how little they understand it, right? But the reality is, for us, our get in price, so the average price to buy an entry-level ticket is up less than 3% this year, less than inflation. If you go back to 2019, it's up dramatically less than inflation since 2019. So we and the artists have been very focused. And it's not political. It's just -- it's practical. It's you want your fans to show up and be there. And we're like everybody else, right? We had this concert week sale over the past couple of weeks or concert weeks now maybe, right? $30 all-in ticket, we're like every other retailer, right?

When you have more tickets and shows are going to happen and they're either going to be full or not, let's see if we can't sell tickets to that casual fan who wasn't sure if they wanted to go or not. So we'll continue to be very focused at getting better at pricing. We unabashedly believe that the artist deserves as much of the value of their show as they want. They're the one -- it's their art. They're the ones that are doing it. and we'll continue to evolve that. But I think being very mindful of both the entry level and the top tickets is critical.

Okay. Just following up, you mentioned the scalper activity. And clearly, you guys have been focused on reducing that. So just help us understand what the long-term vision is for the secondary market for Live Nation.

Well, so secondary market, you got to first split. They're sports and concerts, and they're very different businesses. Sports is a distribution model that's the disaggregation of the season tickets since most people aren't going to 40 Knicks games anymore, right? So Knicks are bad example because Jim really hates the brokers coming in and getting the season tickets. But most other teams are using brokers to disaggregate the season tickets and putting them on secondary. So it's a liquidity issue.

In concerts, most of the activity is not liquidity, it's price arbitrage. So what we are just trying to do is to say to every artist, we have tools that can help you reduce that price arbitrage to the extent you want to use these tools, great. If you don't want to use these tools and you're happy for some brokers to end up with some tickets, that's fine, too. That, again, to us is the artist decision, and we've developed and tried to continue to improve things like our face value exchange for those artists that are very focused on reducing the broker activity and are willing to accept some friction for their fans in order to get more of them tickets. So our job is to create the tools to educate them and let them decide how they want to manage it. But I think over time, you're seeing the backlash now, right? A lot of the most egregious activity, the spec ticket selling. There are now a number of bills going on with that. All-in pricing is now generally required. You're seeing some markets talking about price caps, which are just a reaction, right, to the frustration of the abuses that have taken place in some of the secondary markets.

Okay. So when we think about Ticketmaster's growth overall, there's a lot going on, on the product road map side. So maybe just help us understand a couple of features that you're most excited about or do you think that can move the needle over the next year or 2?

Yes. I think -- so first is the fan experience, the on-sale -- the high demand on-sale. I think we've been making progress to try to get more tickets to fans, some of the artists sign up, some of the tools we're using to try to identify more bots. There's more to be done there. It's still frustrating for the fan, and I understand it. I log in at 9:30, sales is going to start at 10:00 am. I'm [ 167th ] in line. There's no way I'm getting tickets. And so I'm kind of going, okay, well, is it better to tell you you're 167th or just say, you have a long ways to go. Is transparency better, but then they get pissed off of transparency? Or is it general. But in any case, we need to figure out how we can continue to have tools that provide transparency and do a better and better job of putting fans at the front of the queue versus brokers and bots. And believe me, there's billions of dollars at stake. So the scalpers -- it's worth it for them to invest in tools that try to fool us to think they're fans, right? They have a lot of money at stake. So it's a back and forth perpetual battle. We try to identify and they try to stay hidden. So there's more to be done there.

There's more on the B2B side, the tools for teams, for artists, helping them by having better packaged tools to understand pricing, to think about marketing how they can more effectively sell tickets and get the best price for their tickets. It's still a universal need to continue to do better, and we're focused on tools to do that.

And then the other area that we're very focused on and is a big area, obviously, we're using AI extensively in our development now is figuring out how to get faster and faster deploying to new international markets. A huge amount of the growth for Ticketmaster in the next 5 years is going to be from international markets, which shouldn't be surprising as we talked earlier about the concert growth coming from international markets. So it's natural that you expect that.

So we'll be selling our first tickets in Japan this year on Ticketmaster. Japan is obviously, it's a totally different alphabet. It's a very different way that people buy tickets, tickets are distributed. It ties in with retail. This is something that would have taken 3 years historically. Some will come in figuring out, I'm going to change our product development processes, how we organize to do it and use AI tools. You need both of those. Otherwise, it just -- it would have been more of the same, and we're getting this done in a year would have previously taken 3 years.

Okay. That was going to my AI question, but you hit on it.

Yes. I mean -- by the way, using AI tools to try to help identify bots and identify humans. We did that. Recently, we had some -- we had an on-sale -- the high demand on-sale. And for some situations where we thought it might be a bot instead of a person, we pop up this ID, you got to turn on your camera. You got to hold up your ID. You got to prove you're a person. Very effective, right? So it's -- there are tools throughout the chain that we're deploying AI. And [ Samuel ] has been fantastic with really changing the culture and getting much more aggressive at Ticketmaster in terms of changing how we operate and changing the mindset in terms of what we need to do and just do it fast, try it out, keep moving, don't have a long cumbersome development process.

Okay. So we've gotten this far without talking about any legal update, but let's go there. So obviously, after the jury verdict, the judge made some additional rulings last week since you reported. So -- if you could share with all of us updated thoughts and really more about the timing impact.

Yes. He clarified the process now we'll be following. So it's a relatively sequential process, which we think is the right way to do it. First, he's going to rule on our -- we have a couple of motions having to do with one of the experts and having to do with the level of evidence provided. First, he's going to rule on those, which we think is right because before you start talking about whether or not the DOJ settlement is in the public interest or whatever remedies there might be, you got to figure out and define what's the scope of really what happened at the trial.

And then there's a process to review and confirm that the Department of Justice settlement is in the public's best interest. We absolutely believe it is. It substantively addresses the two issues that the two issues really in the trial are the exclusivity and ticketing and the fact that our AMPs were closed to rival promoters. The DOJ settlement on the nose addresses those two issues. Now we live in a very politicized era. And we've, for some reason, become a little bit of the first step of -- and then we have Nexstar and Paramount right behind us, but we've become the poster child in the short term of some attacks for political reasons. So everybody should expect that for the same political reasons, there will be a lot of cries. You got to break them up. You got to break them into 8 pieces. You got to do this, you got to do that. There's going to be a lot of political noise I expect through that process. We'll see what happens. And then there is a trial and assessment of the remedies. Now the good news is the judge has publicly stated that he thinks the DOJ settlement is a good framework. So we'll see what happens. Again, we're not naive. We know political pressures impact everybody. So we'll see what happens. But that's then the next step. And then following that, if we don't think that it's ultimately been a fair resolution, then we have the option for appeals.

Right. I was going to ask, I mean, sitting here today is the likelihood of this appeal process just continuing to grow or really need to see how the next couple of months shake out then first?

Look, we knew when there was a jury trial. We never -- and I think we've stated publicly, we never had any great expectations. We were going to win a jury trial. I think the jury decisions were effectively made within 15 minutes of starting, and it's big bad Ticketmaster. They've got to be guilty, right? So hopefully, the facts will play a higher portion of the decision-making over the next round. But we're also paranoid. And so we simply remain of the view appeal is our right if we don't think that it's the right balance of facts versus politics.

Okay. So shifting back to the business. Sponsorship is also has been and should continue to be one of the most consistent and important drivers as you think about, obviously, your North Star of AOI and double-digit growth there. So you've outlined the $160 million growth opportunity. Maybe just help us with either specific examples of brand conversations that you've had? Or how we should think about how the path ahead is on continuing to grow this pretty meaningful business for you guys?

Yes. Well, I think over the past several years, the growth in sponsorship has really been driven by brands wanting to connect with fans on site at the event. And fans through all the surveys we've done have largely said that they give permission to brands to be present at live events as long as the brand is doing something of value. not just slapping your name, but doing something of value. So most of the growth we've had in the sponsorship business has been on the festival and venue side because that is the true, the on-site experience. So my expectation as we look out over the next several years, that it probably will be the venue side that is the greatest driver of our sponsorship activity. And the team that we've got has gotten great at figuring out how do I engage with brands, what are the different opportunities that I can give them on site to engage with fans. So that -- and so -- that also means it will probably be increasingly global international shift more outside of the U.S. to be on a truly global basis.

Okay. You came back to -- No, Venue Nation, which is where I want to go. Another really interesting thing that came out from earnings is your first creative use of the venue securitization. So -- if you just help us understand how important is this going to be as you think about off-balance sheet financing and how much you can even accelerate the pace of venue investments with this?

Yes. And so it's not off balance sheet. But it's -- because we don't want to do a REIT structure, right? We think that, that reduces flexibility too much. But at the same time, if you think conceptually about it, there is still a little bit of a PropCo and an OpCo here, right? And so and as you think about your balance sheet, your PropCo naturally tends to have -- can have higher leverage than your OpCo. So we're effectively synthetically saying, I'm going to split up the collateral of my company.

And I'm going to take the real estate property, I'm going to bundle them and effectively securitize that, which I can do now at a higher leverage, lower interest rate because of the pool of those assets. And I can get really what it comes down to at the end of the day is lower cost funding to pursue our venue strategy, which is then a bit separate from the collateral that I deploy for the OpCo which will be more traditional leverage levels, more traditional constraints. So you'll keep that down in that 3 to 4 range. Over time, you have the flexibility, don't need to at anytime real soon, but we have the flexibility, you could go a bit higher leverage while maintaining low rates on the property side. So it's a great structure. I think it's the first time it's certainly been done in our business. And it just sets us up for the flexibility we want to have over the next several years so that when we see that great acquisition opportunity or we see the build opportunity that we're not constrained.

Okay. So I think we're slowly or quickly running out of time. But when we think about, again, everything that's happened over the past decade, with you and Michael driving this double-digit AOI growth and the whole team, turning Live Nation into this global live entertainment company. I'm curious if I could tap back into your former McKinsey self or your colleagues, what -- how would they capture -- or what -- how would you frame the opportunity ahead? Is -- are we just getting started? Or where are we in this life cycle?

I absolutely believe we're just getting started. And what's been happening over the last couple of years is just the front end of what was a U.S. European business to being truly global with structural tailwinds on demand, structural tailwinds on supply and a massive venue opportunity that brings it together for us and lets us continue to build the way -- the business in a way that delivers great value for our shareholders.

Is there one tour or artist that you want to flag for us to leave us with?

Well, you can't help but be excited. I mean, Jay-Z coming back, playing Yankee Stadium in July -- like that, that's going to be phenomenal, right? I mean pretty special shows, I'm sure he'll put on.

Hope to see you there. Awesome.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon. My name is Joe, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Live Nation's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. I would now like to turn the call over to Ms. Amy Yong. Thank you, Ms. Yong, you may begin.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Live Nation First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Joining us today is our President and CEO, Michael Rapino, and our President and CFO, Joe Berchtold. We would like to remind you that this afternoon's call will contain certain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ, including statements related to the company's anticipated financial performance, business prospects, new developments and similar matters.

Please refer to Live Nation's SEC filings, including the risk factors and cautionary statements included in the company's most recent filings on Forms 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K for a description of risks and uncertainties that could impact the actual results. Live Nation will also refer to some non-GAAP measures on this call. In accordance with the SEC Regulation G, Live Nation has provided definitions of these measures and a full reconciliation to the most comparable GAAP measures in our earnings release. The release reconciliation can be found under the Financial Information section on Live Nation's website.

With that, we will now take your questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from the line of Brandon Ross with LightShed Partners.

First, you called out timing shifts in fan count due to venue mix in the release. Can you first explain why this year looks different than most? And then how that translates to AOI phasing throughout the year?

Yes. Joe will take you through the...

Yes. Sure, Brandon. So really, what's going on with timing is because we have very strong growth globally in stadiums and strong growth in amphitheaters in the U.S. Those tend to skew more towards Q3 just from a calendar standpoint. Yes, most of the summer months are in Q3. So we were just trying to call out that as you think about the weighting of the different quarters this year, while we have strong growth across all of the pieces, that growth is really going to come in more strongly in Q3 than it would be in the previous years. That will transfer into stronger AOI for Q3. And then on the margin, also shaping up to have a very strong Q4.

Okay. And then speaking of amphitheaters, I guess the big stumble last year was in amps really on the supply side, and it seems that you've made up or more than made up for that this year. How sure are you that the demand is there on the amps to fill that supply? The leading indicators seem great, but amps are more of real-time purchase. And every time there's elevated gas prices, there's a little more worry about amphitheater and there's been some cancellations lately as there are every year, but if you could address that too.

Yes. Well, let's start with cancellations, work backwards just because I know that I saw some of those articles. This year would be no different than any other year. We always have a few cancellations. To give you a perspective, we tend to have 1% to 2% cancellation rate historically both at Ticketmaster across the industry and at Live Nation. We're tracking slightly below the industry. So we see no challenges at all in that. To give you again perspective, we have about 15,000 shows on sale, 100 will be canceled. That would be typical. So we see nothing about cancellations in '26 full calendar that would be extraordinary, always a tour 1 or 2 that doesn't work out.

Amphitheaters, as you said, we're having a strong '26, focused the team on the supply to make sure we have the show count. We definitely have that this year. And we know sitting in May, the demand side. We would know by this time of the year, how we're filling up for the summer. It's not last minute. It's on sale. And as you see from the numbers in our releases, we're tracking ahead of last year on show count, on ticket sales up over double digits. So we see a strong year in amphitheaters. We think they're a great product. Demand will always be there. They tend to be lower priced than arenas and stadiums. It's a lower cost entry point to come in. So it's a volume game. And on-site, just started. We're days into the season, but we see positive numbers so far. So our premium sales are on site and our demand is going to have a strong '26 in amps.

The next question comes from the line of Stephen Laszczyk with Goldman Sachs.

Michael, maybe just to broaden out the question around supply this year. In the release, you highlighted concert bookings pacing up across stadiums, arenas and amps. Would just be curious if you could maybe talk a little bit more about how touring activity is shaping up for this year, where in the slate you're seeing the strongest inflections year-over-year in supply? And then where might there still be opportunity to add event supply as we make our way into the summer concert season here over the next couple of months?

Yes. I mean if we step back as we do in our Investor Day on supply, there are more bands on the road on a global basis. So the pie is growing. Our job is just to keep making sure we maintain our market share and grow with that expanding pie of supply. So we're seeing this global supply of artists continually grow. So that will just mean ultimately more bands on the road, and they'll be filling all levels from the club up to the stadium, which we're seeing this year. So most of the supply is just coming from the growing market on a global basis on all levels of supply. And we think that's going to happen for many years to come as this world now has been flattened and bands from all over from Latin America to K-pop to Colombia to India are now on the road and able to travel and tour in all of the different venues and festivals around the world.

So strong supply across the globe right now. We're seeing our international business strong, maybe even stronger than America in terms of growth. Latin America is on fire from small to big to festivals. So we're seeing a great global supply and demand as we predicted in our Investor Day coming to life this year.

That's great. And then, Joe, maybe on regulatory. I think this is the first time we've connected since the settlement on the federal side and then the ruling on the state case. I would just be curious if you could provide us with an update on where we stand today in that process, where you feel like your views still differ from how the ruling has played out and then how investors should expect the process to play out from here?

Yes. I think there's a day in court on Thursday where there will be a discussion on the process. So there's 3 key elements here. One is we have a few motions that we made as it related to some of the evidence and how that proceeds. So we need a ruling on that. Two is the judge determining the process for the review of the settlement with the Department of Justice. And then third is the remedies portion of the trial that just concluded. So we have views on how we think it should proceed, but the judge will decide that, and then that will define the timing and the exact pieces. So until then, we just have to -- we have to wait a minute and see how it laces out.

The next question comes from the line of David Karnovsky with JPMorgan.

Joe, in the 10-Q, there's some detail on the venue securitization transaction. I wanted to see if you could walk through the structure at a high level? And then how does this kind of play into your Venue Nation plans over the long term as far as buying or building locations?

Yes, sure. This is a great vehicle that the team developed to think about how it is we fund the venue side of the business going forward. I've talked before about how in my mind, there's a little bit of a propco/opco, 2 businesses that we have; here, and there's an opportunity with the propco to effectively have a synthetic component of the balance sheet. We're still keeping it all under one roof for the flexibility and control. But effectively thinking about it is as you have a propco that you can have more leverage on, which is collateralized by all your venue holdings. And we have an initial raise that we did of just over EUR 600 million using some of the venues as collateral.

And then as we grow the venue portfolio, we can take the venues that we add and put those in as additional collateral, which lets this component of our balance sheet continue to grow as we build out the venue portfolio that obviously being kept separate then and not being used to securitize the more opco side of the business. So this is an innovative financing that we came up with, which we think works very well with giving us the first step to really enable our funding on -- and continue to build out the venue side of the business.

Okay. And then maybe just sticking on Venue Nation. Earlier this year, you announced in Argentina an agreement with Club Atlético for certain booking and naming rights as it relates to the stadium there. I'm curious how replicable this model is, meaning partnerships with sports teams in Latin America or really even other regions where you're expanding venues where maybe there's just existing properties sitting there in need of capital or refresh that you can enter as a partner.

Yes. We love that deal. And we absolutely think on a global basis, it's something we can replicate. Lots of these stadiums around the world. These are not NFL activity kind of venues, so they don't have as much activity going on. So we're a great partner to help make sure we can put some shows in there, bring some sponsorship expertise and some capital if we have to. We have a similar arrangement in Argentina with River Stadium. So yes, we think on a global basis. We like building arenas, but we like on the stadium side, partnering with them and a little less capital intensive, but locks up a lot of the revenue streams.

The next question comes from the line of Cameron Mansson-Perrone with Morgan Stanley.

Two on the ticketing business, if I could. Michael, could you just update us on what you and Saumil are focused on from a product perspective with Ticketmaster. And then in the past, you've talked about driving ancillaries at Ticketmaster. Do you see that as an increasingly important factor for that business going forward given what seems like increased sensitivity around fees? And then one more.

I'll start and then Joe will jump in. I mean, listen, we're thrilled in general with our new hire. Saumil is just a real strong product engineer. Joe and I have ongoing dialogue with them on the product road map on a global basis, how to inject AI into the consumer side and the B2B side. So I would say our continual top priority is to make that on sale smooth, more transparent and drive as much consumer confidence as we can in the process. So he's doing a lot of work on that right now, identifying and building out our Face Value Exchange program to be much more robust for artists to use, giving them more tools in general for the on sale. That's our biggest pain point. We made great progress in the last few years with the best in the business at it. But we'll continue to make that a better and better process with more tools for artists and fans. That's the front end. Joe will fill you in on kind of the wider perspective.

Yes. And I think hitting on the back end, the biggest unlock that Saumil has been bringing is how we think about a lot of the new markets we're going into. The strategies he's been developing for Latin America, for Asia, particularly for Japan, figuring out how we're not locked into some of our legacy constraints of great platforms, but built in a time before we maybe needed the flexibility we need today. So in part using some AI tools and other just, I think, pretty innovative approaches, he's rapidly accelerating the pace at which we're moving into those markets with the ticketing solution. So that would be the big back-end piece. And then absolutely, we're continuing to be very focused on how it is we use the platform to continue to drive additional economics from the scale of what we're doing. We know that the venue clients that we have that are really keeping the bulk of the service fee will continue to keep the bulk of the service fee. And we need to continue to find ways that we can build value off the platform and keep our fair share of that.

That's helpful and interesting. My follow-up was just on headwinds you call out in terms of the mid-single-digit headwind at the Ticketing segment this year. I was wondering if you could remind me or us, what exactly is incorporated or captured in that are contemplated? And then any guidance or expectation with regard to how you see the legal expenses that are running through ticketing whether we should expect that run rate through the remainder of the year? Or just any kind of color or expectation there would be helpful.

Yes. Yes, those mid-single-digit headwinds are really talking about steps that we've taken in the secondary that we announced earlier, some pretty dramatic steps to limit the broker inventory being put on the Ticketmaster system that we said would be a step down, a structural step down that would have that level of impact. That's a onetime thing. So as we grow to offset that this year and still have hopefully some growth or expect to have some growth on Ticketmaster for the year. And then that weight, we comp and is no longer of an issue as we move forward into the future. As it related to some of the onetime expenses, I don't think we'll continue to have this level of elevated expenses. We'll continue to have some expenses on the legal side. Those will be related to the FTC and some other activities, but I think they should get moderated over the next few quarters from where they're at today.

The next question comes from the line of Peter Supino with Wolfe Research.

I think 2 for Joe, if I may. One on the velocity of new venue openings in the last 3 years ending in '25, your CapEx rose from $400 million a year to $600 million to $1 billion last year, will be equal or higher this year. And so I'm wondering about the dollar value of venues opening in '26 and '27. Are we right to assume that '27 ought to be a bigger opening year in terms of dollar value and revenue than '26 was? And then a longer-term question about your cash flow. I'm wondering if the business were not expanding capacity, what you think Live Nation could generate in terms of EBITDA -- free cash flow as a percentage of EBITDA? What do you think the free cash flow margin of this business is at steady state?

Wow, algebra tests real time. I'm not sure I'm going to try to give you exact numbers. I think that, yes, if we stopped investing this $1 billion, obviously, and stop buying venues, we're going to be able to throw off a lot of cash that if you take the 2 pieces, the Ticketmaster business today is an extremely high cash flow conversion business. We've been using a lot of that cash to drive growth on the venue side, but that would be throwing off a tremendous amount of cash. And then on the concert side, again, we give you the maintenance, maintenance capital is really only a couple of hundred million. So you'd be throwing off pretty healthy cash on the concert side as well.

Now that said, we still see a long runway of opportunities for venues. We do expect to see acceleration in their opening. Again, I'm not going to give you the exact '27 versus '28 timing on the venues that we have under construction. But these are all multiyear construction projects. So the ones that we started last year and this year will take a few years. And we're opening a couple of great amps this year. We're opening a number of other theaters and other venues, and we expect that to accelerate as we get out into '27 and '28.

The next question comes from the line of Batya Levi with UBS.

A follow-up on the ticketing side. Adjusting for that legal spend, it looks like margins were up nicely year-over-year. Can you talk about where the outperformance came from? Are you seeing benefit of these AI tools already flowing through? And same maybe on the concert side, the -- can you talk a bit about the outperformance despite tough comps that you had in LatAm? And any regions that you will call out for the rest of the year?

I'll start with the ticketing side. I mean we're giving you the volume here. The ticketing sales are up nicely. So we continue to grow the business, notwithstanding some of the headwinds on the secondary side because of the actions we've taken there. So a lot of the growth on the Ticketmaster side is coming from additional concert tickets that are being sold. And yes, that's the business operationally and its fundamentals continues to be in good shape. We're adding more clients globally. We're selling more tickets. The underlying business is all working very well and setting us up nicely as we go into the latter part of this year and into next year.

On the concert side, again, a lot of bouncing around quarter-to-quarter. This was a very good quarter in the -- in Latin America, which drove both concerts and sponsorship performance. Some festivals there that we have that did well. Going forward, we see both North America and international markets performing very strongly this year. Michael talked earlier, stadiums are up globally, up in the U.S. despite a very strong year last year, up strongly in international markets. Amphitheaters and arenas are up nicely in the U.S. So that should drive solid growth throughout North America. Latin America, you got Europe, you got parts of Asia. So we're seeing very strong global demand for the concerts, which has been translating into the sponsorship and ticketing businesses.

The next question comes from the line of Ian Moore with Bernstein Research.

The secondary ticketing business is clearly undergoing a number of changes, right, in order to further mitigate scalping and bot activity. In the past, you've sized secondary as kind of a low double-digit percent of fee-bearing GTV. But given the sustainability of primary ticketing growth, where do you see secondary share of fee-bearing GTV going as those changes play out? Is it high singles or mid-singles?

Yes. I think it's probably a gradual decline. I don't think there's anything that is -- notwithstanding some of the changes we're making this year, there will be a structural drop. I think over time, primary will win. Content will control its tickets, and it will be a slow decline. We've long said we consider this to be a feature, not a stand-alone product. It's part of -- while secondary is being offered, we want to make sure fans can come to our site for a safe exchange and get a ticket they know that they're going to have delivered. But it's there because it's part of the ecosystem, and we don't have that as a strategy to grow it. So if we're successful, it will decline into the single digits over the next several years.

The next question comes from the line of Kutgun Maral with Evercore ISI.

First, I know Live Nation is really a supply-driven business, but I did want to follow up on the demand side, just given investor focus. So maybe underneath the surface, are you seeing any differences by maybe geography, income cohort, venue type or price points? And given the broader macro and geopolitical volatility, including the disruption in the Middle East, is there anything you're seeing in either the U.S. or international markets that could affect demand, routing or fan behavior as we move throughout the year?

And maybe second, I wanted to ask about premium hospitality within Venue Nation. The release called out the ongoing rollout of the Vinyl Room, for example, with on-site spending at the Hollywood Palladium already over $100 per fan, which is highly encouraging. How applicable is that playbook across the broad venue portfolio? And as you scale these types of premium hospitality concepts globally, how meaningful can they become as a driver of per fan monetization and Venue Nation AOI over the next few years?

All right. I'll hit a few of those. I'll start with the Middle East because you brought up. It doesn't affect our business today. The Middle East is a very, very, very small touring market overall. So it would have no material effect on our business. We expect over the long term, it will be a touring region, but it does not affect routing today. we had no tours, no shows planned in that market right now. On the demand side, we have this ongoing reports we get. We understand kind of what fan demographics, all of that, that come to our shows. It's very broad, as you can imagine. Concerts kind of appeal from 12 to 90 years old, depending on who that artist is and where they're playing. So we see no slowdown in any genre, no demographic.

We see across the board, whether it's a club show, whether it's an amphitheater in Indianapolis or an expensive stadium show in New York. We've seen no demand pullback anywhere. Same thing in the rest of the world. Argentina to Milan to Singapore, don't see any pullback. Consumers still consider that live show very, very important in their social calendar for the year, whether they're going to 1, 2 or 3 shows a year, it's paramount that they get to that show. So we've seen no pullback, broad strong demand across the board on all genres and all theater sizes.

On the premium, we've talked about this at length in many investor presentations. But yes, we think in general, the music business and the venues and the festivals could do a better job of providing a better service and a better product. Historically, the concert has been about 99% GA and 1% premium. We now see that people will pay for a better experience. So I was in a building meeting this morning. We're looking at 2 new arenas we're building. And our goal there is to have up to 30% of that house premium capacity so we can have a better experience where fans want to come for the night and upgrade and sit in a better suite or sit in a box or have a better hospitality. So a lot of the CapEx we spend at our amphitheaters is doing that.

We've outfitted 3 this summer, Indianapolis and Dallas, where we took the existing business, added upscale premium offerings like a Vinyl Room that we've scaled or similar clubs, the back lot. And we're taking those amphitheaters from 1%, 2%, 5% premium up to 25% premium. So long haul to get there, easier when you're building it from scratch. But yes, we believe that there's tons of opportunity in premium and a better experience. It's not even about just being premium. It's just consumers will pay for a shorter line, better parking, better hospitality. So we're looking at that, much like sports arenas have done over the last 10, 15 years.

And the next question comes from the line of Jason Bazinet with Citi.

I remember I think it was back in November when you guys gave the Venue Nation fan count of 5 million, and it sort of disappointed folks. And I think in the release today, you took that number up. And I didn't know if that was just sort of M&A is happening a bit more rapidly or building is happening more rapidly. And if we should sort of take the 2029, 2030 numbers up or it's more just a function of front-loading the Venue Nation fan count relative to what you said in November?

Well, I think what we said is we're expecting to grow the Venue Nation fan count this year by double digits, right?

Yes. Yes. I think previously it was 5 million, on 65 million.

Yes. That's exactly where I was going. So 65 million. So that tells you it's going to be somewhat more. It's probably pretty evenly distributed between just increased performance at our existing venues that we're operating and what we've been adding. So we feel good about this year. I don't think we're ready quite yet to start contemplating exactly what we're going to add to that in '27, '28, '29. But we think this year is a great demonstration of the power of what we're doing with the venue strategy.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the question-and-answer session. And I'd like to turn the call back to Michael Rapino for closing remarks.

Thank you, everyone, for your support. We're looking forward to a great summer, and we will talk to you in August.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and we thank you for your participation.

Good afternoon. My name is John, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Live Nation's Full Year and Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. I would now like to turn the call over to Ms. Yong. Thank you, Ms. Young. You may begin your conference.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Live Nation Full Year and Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Joining us today is our President and CEO, Michael Rapino and our President and CFO, Joe Berchtold. We would like to remind you that this afternoon's call will contain certain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ, including statements related to the company's anticipated financial performance, business prospects, new developments and similar matters.

Please refer to Live Nation's SEC filings, including the risk factors and cautionary statements included in the company's most recent filings our Forms 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K for a description of risks and uncertainties that could impact the actual results. Live Nation will also refer to some non-GAAP measures on this call. In accordance with the SEC Regulation G, Live Nation has provided definitions of these measures and a full reconciliation to the most comparable GAAP measures in our earnings release.

The release reconciliation can be found under the Financial Information section on Live Nation's website and with that, we will now take your questions. Operator?

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from the line of Stephen Laszczyk with Goldman Sachs.

Maybe to kick it off on the outlook for Joe. I wanted to see if you'd be willing to talk a little bit more about the building blocks to the outlook for double-digit AOI growth in 2026. Just curious if you could talk a little bit more about the puts and takes investors should be keeping in mind as in the segment contribution this year.

And ultimately, just at a high level, what's giving you confidence as you sit here today looking at the business, ahead for the next 12 months or so to guide for double-digit growth despite some of the headwinds. I think we're seeing Ticketmaster and then the preopening expense at tenuation on the back of some investment there, just the confidence in the double-digit guide despite some of those factors?

Sure. Happy to give you that guidance. So let's just take it by division. So sponsorship straightforward, expected to continue to be up double digits AOI this year were over 70% booked and running double digits ahead. So I think we've got a pretty good visibility into the pipeline there to give us that confidence.

On ticketing, I'd say we're not expecting a lot out of it this year. We've got some underlying mid-single-digit growth we've got some onetime headwinds on secondary and we'll let somebody else ask the question on that, we go into more detail on it. But -- so we're not expecting a lot there even with some underlying health and improvement on the fundamentals. And then it really comes down to concerts, getting some double-digit solid growth out of that, which, as we look to our supply-demand dynamics, we lay a lot of them out in the earnings release on the demand side, where we continue to see extremely robust demand on all aspects of the business globally.

On the supply side, we gave you that the large venues were up. AMs are up versus '24 and '25. We got about 80% of our shows booked -- so we're optimistic that we can maintain staying ahead of '24 and '25. Arenas are up double digits in terms of our show count now, which is largely U.S. driven. Last year, it was really international driven. This year, you got more U.S. driven.

And then stadiums are up double digits. We've managed because of the forward planning to get the U.S. to be up a bit, but it's really driven by international being well up on stadiums even after a banner growth last year. U.K. and Europe, in particular, really seeing strong growth in our stadium business.

That's helpful. And then maybe just as a follow-up, Michael, if you could put a finer point on the outlook for supply in 2026, and Joe mentioned up double digits across a number of different verticals there, but just as you think about the quality of that supply and maybe some of the early demand indicators you're seeing across the footprint, other that stadium amps or arenas, domestic versus internationally? Any trends or ways to compare what you're seeing play out today looking ahead for 2026, how that might have compared to where you were 12 months ago looking ahead to '25?

Yes. I think we're continuing on our theme we've seen for multiple years now. It's a global business and continuing markets are growing. So that will be an ongoing theme for many years to come, new markets. extended markets around the world doing more shows, more demand from the consumer from all corners of the globe.

#2, you see it on all venue segments from my club business. to stadium. It's all doing more business, more tickets, more shows. So the pie is growing on the complete supply side to fill the pipe and multiple pipes as I said, from top to bottom. So we don't see any new trend that we haven't kind of stated for the last few years that we think this is a continual growth industry on a global basis high single digits on an industry-wide and hopefully, we'll continue to beat that because we do believe that both the supply of the artists, more bands on the road and more fans want to see those artists -- those 2 will continue to drive all segments, all geographies over time.

The next question comes from the line of Brandon Ross with Lightshed Partners.

Maybe switching gears to the DOJ. Yesterday, the judge partially granted your motion on the summary judgment dismissing claims that you're a monopoly and promotion and booking. I guess you're still going to proceed to trial on venue facing, ticketing and Amstime. But can you tell us your opinion on what the dismissal means for a potential breakup of the company and other structural or behavioral remedies?

Thanks, Brandon. Yes, we were obviously very pleasantly surprised. We never expected to get much of anything on that ruling, but pleasantly surprised that they're seeing the facts laid out on the table. As you said, the first thing that they determined was that the promotion and booking services are not a monopoly. It's not an accurate market definition, which in our minds, really takes away the breakup of the company argument because the breakup of the company argument was founded on some notion of mutually reinforcing monopolies.

And they just found that the promotion and booking side isn't. So we think that, that is critical element takes away that edge risk that some folks had. And then the other key thing that they decided was that the national consumer monopoly market was also dismissed. And so what that means on a practical basis is they need to demonstrate that Ticketmaster's so-called monopoly harms the venues, not that they can just say at harm's fans, which would be a more emotional topic. So we think that also makes the case somewhat more difficult for them. So we're very pleased with yesterday.

Okay. And switching agencies to the FTC. It's been several months, since the FTC Hoopla started and you took a bunch of steps aimed at bad secondary market behavior. You reiterated in your answer to Stephen's question that it's having a real impact on Ticketmaster's secondary business. But can you tell us your view of the impact that your initiatives are having on the broader industry? And then maybe in the wake of the Senate hearing and the secondary price cap legislation that we're seeing. How you see the future of the secondary industry playing out in general?

Sure, I'll take the first part and I'll let Michael take the back part. In terms of what we're doing, I would put it in 2 buckets, what we're doing. 1 is -- as it relates to allowing brokers to sell tickets on our platform, we took some immediate action shortly after the FTC lawsuit that dramatically restricts the brokers, who have tickets from selling them on our platform, limiting them to 1 broker account per tax ID and the number of tickets being sold needing to stay within the limits.

So the impact of that has been to substantially reduce roughly cut in half the number of tickets that are being listed by brokers for concerts on our platform. Now we think a lot of those are still being sold on the other platforms at this point, pending them taking similar steps. But the -- but we're also taking additional steps to stop the scalpers from getting the tickets in the first place.

So we have ramped up our efforts starting with account creation and using identity verification more in account creation. We are increasing the use of various tools, including identity verification for artist sign up and for QES to try to give real fans a better chance than the brokers in terms of buying the tickets we're increasing our use of face value exchange.

All of these tools, we think, have been effective in helping shrink the overall industry and keeping the artists with more control over tickets and their relationship with their fans.

I don't know, Michael, if you want to comment on legislation.

I guess, legislation is, obviously, a lot of it's going on a state-by-state level. We've been very clear that we're supportive of giving more control of the artists we're in support of price gaps because we don't seem to be getting more nuanced solutions to give the artists that control, and we'll continue to support that artist agenda.

And just to jump in on Joe, on where the -- the Canadian and say where the puck is going. We clearly -- we've been saying this for a few years. There is a momentum in the air around secondary in general on the consumer side. and then from the artist. So we like that. We -- we're doing over that we can to build tools for the artists. We just launched something with Noacon this week to do a better job. It's not perfect, but it's much better identifying -- we've rolled out a program with Kid Rock, worked hard with kid to figure out how we can help him. I think we have over 100 artists now using face value exchange.

So we're liking where this is headed. We believe that artists will continue to gain more control want to find better ways to limit secondary and the company that has more of the tools will win in the end. And ultimately, I think legislation will creep in as it is state-by-state to aid in their fight against secondary?

and the next question comes from the line of David Karnovsky with JPMorgan.

I guess, first for Joe, it'd be kind of helpful if you could dig in a bit more on the demand side of what you're seeing in terms of the indicators you could parse that by regions or venues or consumer segments, that would be helpful. And then for Michael, you've been quite active in arena acquisitions in Europe over the past few months. So I wanted to see if you can a bit more to the playbook there in terms of kind of the investments you're making into those venues and then just how it plays into your broader goals across the continent.

Sure. On the demand side, we're continuing to see very strong consistent demand. We gave you on the earnings release, a number of specific points on just the volume of fans that are showing up for artists how tremendously popular they continue to be. It also flows through to festivals. We continue to see strength of demand at the club and theater level.

I think the thing to continue to remind ourselves to continue to remind you guys is, if you look at the U.S., 75% of the tickets are under $100 are acutely aware of the need to have all of their fans be able to afford to buy a ticket, maybe not the front row, but to buy a ticket and they're very focused on keeping it affordable. So we're not seeing any pullback, any issues whatsoever in demand for any budget conscious dance.

Sorry, Michael, you're on mute, if you want to...

Sorry, I was just jumping in on answering your venue nation question. You've seen some announcements we're thrilled with the progress we're making. We outlined in our Investor Day, we have a large pipe around the world in arenas, some amphitheaters, 5,000 seats key markets around the world where we can add into our portfolio. So we're thrilled that division is growing on a global basis, hitting all of our benchmarks, the returns we're looking for and much more to come.

And the next question comes from the line of Cameron Mansson-Perrone with Morgan Stanley.

Two, if I could. On ticketing GTV growth, I know there was some lighter sports and third-party activity in the first half of the year. But curious how that subcategory grew in the second half of the year and just any kind of forward indications of how those kind of 2 areas of the ticketing business are pacing looking ahead to 26. And then separately, Spotify, the other week reported facilitating about $1 billion, and I think it was over $1 billion in ticket purchase activity through the platform. I'm curious your thoughts on -- do you think that integration is growing the industry overall? Or is it just shifting the point of discovery. Any kind of feedback on how you view that integration success would be helpful.

Yes. Just Ticketmaster in terms of the GTV. So we ended the year with GTV growing about 6%, which was driven by concerts, really fully 9% increase in concerts with a 1% decline in sports and other third party. So as we look to this year, we expect to see that probably accelerate a bit.

I think we'll see some come back on the other pieces over the course of the year. You need to see it play out, but we feel good about the runway that Ticketmaster's on on an operational basis. We didn't take the majority of it will come from concerts, but it won't be overwhelming as it was this year.

On distribution, Cameron, there's almost 2 businesses. There's a the superstar stuff that has incredible reach tends to sell out on its own. And we don't need much help on that the artist has such a medium and efficiency. But a lot of the stuff that doesn't sell out around the globe, we love all of our distribution partners, Spotify, the Facebooks, Verizon. We've had lots of different partners, who help us reach bands and some of those shows that the [ Taeho ] in Indianapolis that hasn't sold out, we'll take all of the reach we can to help get to those customers.

And the next question comes from the line of Robert Fishman with MoffettNathanson.

2 for Michael or Joe, please. First, I appreciate the extra disclosure on Venunation. Just given the preopening costs ramping up in 2016, can you help us think about the overall ramp and trajectory for Venunation on a total portfolio AOI basis to reach that run rate in '28 and '29, that you called out? And then separately, when you think about the longer-term menu Nation opportunity, how big of a contributor is international versus U.S. when you're thinking about that going forward?

God, you've got a bit of a ramp-up costs as we build out menu nation and some of those ramp-up costs are going to be large as a percentage of the benefit in your first few years. So you're seeing that $25 million cost this year, ramping up to -- sorry, last year, ramping up to $50 million this year. I don't expect it to continue increasing at that level as we get to more of a steady state. And then we start to get the full mature when the buildings have been open 2 to 3 years.

So I would expect we give you the fan count for both buildings that we opened last year in buildings that we're opening this year and how that is going to a steady state. We've given you the profitability per fan in different forms.

I mean you can probably model out how you see the increases. But and then look at that in the context of the Investor Day and what we gave you over the multiyear in terms of the venunation potential. So that should help you triangulate on the rate of increase.

And just when you think about international.

Yes, in terms of long term, clearly, international is a huge focus for us, both Latin America, Europe Asia, all areas, really, I don't think about it in top cities, more than markets, but you are underdeveloped in the international markets on key arenas because you don't have the the NBA, NHL infrastructure like you do in the U.S. So we're seeing tremendous opportunities, whether it's building a new venue.

We're going into a market like Paris without defense, tremendous arena, great potential there. didn't have the full rigging to hang a modern arena show, modern arena production. So after that acquisition closes, we'll do some renovations we expect it will help expand the marketplace, be able to draw more shows to that market help us grow the overall business.

And the next question comes from the line of Kutgun Maral with Evercore ISI.

I had a few more on venunation. First, Joe, to follow up on what you just said, when we do use all the helpful detail you provided at the Investor Day and try to triangulate the rate of increase in venue Nation AOI. It really looks like this year 2026 could be an inflection year. And when you look at the AOI, the fan count build and revenue and AOI. It seems like it could accelerate further in 2027 and 2028. I know you don't provide specific guidance, but is that just the right framework to perhaps think about what's going on underneath the hood with not just Venu nation and concerts, but maybe on a consolidated basis as well?

And second, the acquisition of FormNet Group in Italy was interesting. I know the heart of the deal was centered on their arena -- but there are 2 other venues in their portfolio as well. So I want to see if acquiring companies that operate in multiple venues could play a more prominent role in scaling venue nation going forward? Or was that more of a one-off?

Yes. And just in terms of the ramp, I think you will see an acceleration that you would naturally have if every set of venues that you get, if you build one, there's probably a 3-ish year to run rate when you buy them maybe a 2-year run rate. So as we build that base, you're going to naturally get the benefit of all the pieces.

I mean, just to give you a little bit of context. So if you look at how we envision building our owner-operated fan count this year, I'd say it's kind of 20% from venues we opened in about 1/3 from venues we opened in '26 and about half organic. So if you think about that playing out as you add new venues, yes, you're going to accelerate your rate of increase because you just have more pieces that you're adding into that funnel. So I would absolutely expect each year to help help grow that base of fans in our operated venues.

Venu Nation, it's just a one-off. We're not looking to buy venue management companies. We don't love the return on those businesses as much as we like owning the venue and fully taking over the P&L. So in this case, they were added bonuses but not a regular strategy.

And the next question comes from the line of Batya Levi with UBS.

Great. Just a follow-up on the demand side. Can you provide a bit more color on the recent on sale activity and sell-through rates, how they stack up advanced last year into the summer pipeline? And maybe a bit more color on consumers' willingness to pay up against higher ticket prices for the World Cup that we're seeing now?

Yes, in terms of the on sales, we're seeing consistent performance with overall demand sell-through levels as we were seeing last year. Obviously, every tour is a little different. We gave you a few at the very high end in the release with Harry Styles and BTS and Bruner showing levels of demand higher than we've ever seen before. But in general, we're still seeing front to back the ticket selling across all the different sizes of venues.

And then we're obviously -- we're not involved in FIFA at all. We're not involved in selling their tickets, so we can't really opine on what they're doing. What we do know is for the concerts, the artists are very acutely aware of who their fans are and how to manage that relationship with them and how to manage the brand.

And as I said earlier, they're making sure they're pricing their tickets. So all their fans can get in the building and the front of house where -- they think it's going to end up being somebody buying on secondary if the brokers take them to get a big arbitrage, they'll take more of that money for themselves. So I think you're continuing to see that same macro story play out.

And our final question comes from the line of Peter Henderson with Bank of America.

Yes. So I mean, it seems like you're seeing a great international momentum across all regions. But I'm just curious where you're seeing the best momentum -- is it in Europe, LatAm, Asia Pacific, -- and sort of what's the mix shift implication for margins and capital needs based on that? And then what's the biggest constraint internationally right now? Is it venues, local partners, regulation or for talent routing? And I have a follow-up.

Yes. We're seeing all the countries equally have the appetite for that live show. So whether it's San Paulo or Milan, the major cities around the world all want to have superstar.

Great. And then I guess when you -- when Ticketmaster venue chooses Ticketmaster today, -- what are the top 2 or 3 differentiators that are consistently closing the deal for you guys? Is it the fact that you have the best technology? Is it the fact that you're investing tremendously in fraud tools or bot prevention. Just curious what your feedback is on why venues choose you so frequently.

Yes. I think #1 reason why they choose this is because we just sell more tickets. -- empirically a promoter or a manager would tell you, they look at the shows on the tour, the Ticketmaster ones are most effective at helping them sell the most tickets. Getting the highest gross from their show. So what they can do in terms of using our distribution, using our marketing capabilities in terms of using our pricing tools to make sure they understand what's the right level to get to all the fans.

So that's the #1 reason. And then depending on the marketplace in the U.S., where it's more mature, it's going to be more economics driven. In other markets that are less mature, some of the other software tools on the venue level are going to matter more. But selling tickets is the overriding that #1 factor.

My apologies, the line had dropped, but it looks like you took over to Johan.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. That does conclude the question-and-answer session, and that also concludes today's teleconference. We thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time.

Thank you all for popping over at 1:00. 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. So 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 -- we put [indiscernible] here but onward. But this will be a great industry in terms of demand supply. We think it's up to a $50 billion business by the time [indiscernible]. And 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 to 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 '25 was still a little bit of a digestion from the post-COVID in terms of lots of content went out in '24 and '23. Some of that didn't end up coming out in '25 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 AMS, and we're very confident that next year is back to kind of a normalized year across all of our platforms, the artist that they haven't toured this year because they tour a lot post COVID, the cycle is now back to a more of a regular process next year. So 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. So 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 not -- 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 '26 onward post all of the other COVID stuff.

So that should reconfirm any long-term shareholders that growth this year for many years to come. Big part of it we talk about is because it's 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 talked about. That 14-year-old that's living in Colombia, in Cape Town, Boston or Milan has a [indiscernible] box 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.

And this is new. This is for 50, 60 years. This was a U.S. Western Europe business. That's really where you could tour. That's where the gatekeepers kind of control 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. And these markets now are all open for business, something they weren't for many years as we grew this company.

And if you just look at any snapshot, where are they touring, you really started to see the last 2 years, especially last year where these artists are like, no, let's go now test all this. Let's get to India. As you saw us do 135,000 for [indiscernible] play selling up the second Traviscott, 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 mode and arena. And that was -- that was an untapped market for 60 years. That was unheard of. You never thought to play in India, Korea, Pacific Rim, Latin America. Those are low-margin vanity place. They work part of what an artist would say is a real payday and hit that kind of globalization. So -- 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 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 room. I wanted to play Latin America. I'm going to play India. So 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 happened 20 years ago when I was living in London was this idea that it's a global world, and there are no borders. And we, as a company, needed to make sure we were in all areas of the world. It's actually in Los Angeles, you don't add a lot of value to the Los Angeles manager. It kind of knows the sofie versus the Intuit done. 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, where you 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.

So -- this is why we're in a great position to capitalize on this global trend. And that's really what you saw this year why our international business was doing so well and will continue to do well. It will 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. So as great as that NFL game is or how great is this gold soccer. All of those are fabulous, live entertainment always ranks number one, where 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. So that magic moment of that concept is not duplicatable. You can't see it on TV, like you can the NFL game. You got to be there to get the goose bumps 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 metallic shirt on that night and spent 2 hours something his hands up and down. He is not a banker that night. He's let loose. That's what happens in music in 2 hours. That's why the magic moment isn't special. And when we ask them again all ages, and if there's a pullback, if the consumer dollars are short, where will you pull back Concerts continually rank as the last place they will pull back. So we like that. Now I will say this because I got beat up on a kind of out of context coat. What's important for us is to make sure it's affordable. So yes, we always talk about pricing and secondary, but this is an affordable category. And we got to make sure that, as Omo 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.

So our most and most overriding motive is not to increase ticket price. It's to fill every seat in the house. And 98% of shows don't sell out. The #1 way to sell that venue is to keep the price affordable for all consumers. That's our #1 goal. And then we make all the money if the consumer walks in the door and monetizes the ancillary revenue. So not only we got to make sure that the consumer hears about the show. We're going to make sure that they realize it's still a great value and keep pricing affordable for all. And that's going to make sure we keep as rated as the #1 place to keep coming back to.

And the last piece of data is consumer we're always obsessed with making sure that young consumer has the same passion that maybe some of us did around our youth and it overridingly continues. I have 3 young boys. They love music. They had to go see Playboy last week. They've got to go see the latest even Tyler Childers. Not Tyler, [indiscernible] the creator, which is not Live Nation, so that's tough. But they love going to shows our data will tell us generations as [indiscernible] is completely obsessed with this being one of their magic moments, whether it's just to get that Instagram that TikTok, but that cultural moment at being at that show is widely important to them.

And as we said yesterday, we think '26, 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 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, the AOI will follow. So we think '26 will continue to be a fabulous year on this calendar.

And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Omar, and he's going to take you through our [indiscernible] business.

Thanks, Michael. Usually stole my thunder. I took all my good stats, but I'll try to wow you with some other ones. So -- just to give you a complete look at the scale of our business, spent $14 billion on talent last year. The one that really always gets you is we produce a show every 10 minutes. Just think about that while you're in this room, we'll have 10 shows that will start somewhere around the world. We continue to grow our festival portfolio, continue to grow the number of artists we work with. And ultimately, that all drives fan count. And every year, the goal that we set forth is how many more flags can we add to the charts if you had to go back, look at last year, we've added 3 or 4 new ones and some of them at a 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, but the explosive growth comes from our new venues in the pipeline as well as all the countries that are now getting up to scale. Give you an example, Magic Dragons went to Brazil last week. Last time they were there, they played 2 cities. This time they played 4 cities. Next time, they'll play 4 cities, but 2 of them will be different than 2 this time, which means when they go back to the third time, they'll place 6 cities, right? So we just continue to make tours longer as artist go to countries they've been to before, but you're starting to get new markets in those countries. And then there's more infrastructure also coming online in those places. So that's 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, and that's 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 it, 90% clip, a lot of tickets still to sell in amphitheaters, a lot of tickets to sell in theaters and some real marginal growth in arenas. So we look at this a lot as our sort of 1 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 takes already in the system. So it's 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%. But what has happened is the other venue types continue to grow as well. So what we haven't seen is any deterioration in growth in other venue types of stadiums continue to grow. And the stadium growth has really become structural. If you look and see not only is there more getting bigger, quicker and wanting to place stadiums, generally, they do that because they can build a larger scale production, have more Instagramable moments and then the fans want to come to that because that's where they're getting their human connection. So we're really finding stadiums being a huge growth driver and it's now structural because you have more artists that can place stadiums and that want to play them. So we really believe the stadium boom is here to stay completely structural. And as you'll see in our numbers, after a giant 2025 in stadiums, 2026 are shaping up to be just as big in America and bigger internationally.

What else are we doing? Where are the other opportunities, and that comes in how we communicate with fans that we believe are going to a show or every ticket to a show -- so new program created a loyalty program called Live National Access, really proud by the end of the year on a really -- on a launch that really just occurred in the last couple of months. We'll have 1 million fans that have signed up. And so far, we've given those fans opportunities to buy tickets, presale access before tickets go to on sales. We've rewarded them with concert cash and personalized ticket deals. And 1 of the exciting things about this is getting into the notion of personalized commerce and having the ability of a bot reaching out to you, knowing that -- and 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 that allows you to buy in the app. This doesn't 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 you're buying history, something that you may want to go to giving you a chance a perk to get them 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.

So we'll use this to set up a concierge system for fans that signed up to do purchase and upsells, as you could read, also do some personalizations and chat-based discussion. So we think that's one of the ways to capture this opportunity that we have with these 35 million unsold tickets.

[indiscernible] 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 you play in the right city and the right out of the week and 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. So 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 in ways that we advertise. So we 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 wanted 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 error. As you can see up here, we already have stadiums on sale. The weekend sold almost 2 million tickets for next year already. Metallica continues this amazing run selling stadium tickets. Ariana Grande will be 1 of the biggest renters in the year already on sale, and you can see the rest of them. So 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 owner ownership to make sure that we are getting the shoulder of FIFA. That's why our stadium count is actually even at one point thought that maybe we'd have some struggle with that, but we're actually going to exceed even our own internal optimistic thoughts on stadiums. -- work really closely with Major League Baseball, and that's gone a 10-game road trip -- we used to put 3 shows in when they're gone for 10 days, knowing get 7 or 8 shows in. And then we're also starting to utilize these brand-new MLS stadiums, including 1 in Nashville that we'll do a contesters at next year. So all of that drives stadiums getting started earlier on amphitheaters to get us back to those 2024 numbers that we all liked on fan can't grow off that number. And then we're having a magical start to read us as well, double digit. That's both global and domestic.

So you add all those things up, and that's driving us towards our next goal of 225 million tickets. And some of those tickets will come from Jordan Zachary, who's helping us build new venues, and I'll bring them up here now to walk you through how he is going to help me help him, help you.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. I am excited to be here. I'll walk you through our Vennation business and part of our growth strategy, which we've been building over the last few years. So to begin, just a reminder on our portfolio, so we are the leading diverse and global portfolio. I think portfolio is most important 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, and 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 can give 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. And then in 2027 and beyond, you'll see a lot of international billings come online, including arena. So 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. So that will tell you that this is an evolving strategy, a growing strategy and that there are so many global markets out there that don't 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. And we are very focused on structuring this capital spend on a 20-ish percent -- greater than 20% portfolio-wide IRR on a portfolio basis. This capital program represents about $5.2 billion in spend, and that's funded through a combination of cash on hand, project and corporate debt as well as partner funding.

So 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, right, core to our strategy is a bit obvious, but just to say it simply, it's delivering products that fans want, right? 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 and what that consumer is going to want to eat or drink, and our goal is to deliver that. So it's not just about price, right? I mean, obviously, per caps need to go up, but value is critical. So this year, we launched a value program here in the U.S., 2 odd dogs. I don't know if any of you had any, they're actually pretty good. $5 beers. We saw no cannibalization of our high-end sausage or our premium beers, we saw growth. So we sold 600,000 value products as well.

So again, as Michael said, it's about hitting both ends of the spectrum and making sure this is affordable night or day at the concert. We've got scale. So with $1 billion of revenue, we can build and own our own brands. So on the slide, you'll see Rebel hand, Mashberger Ziggy. These are fruit products we developed in-house adjacent to our venues. They replaced licensed products. And this year in their first year at scale outperformed all of the licensed products and that's about quality and knowing our customer. Back to the fan segmentation strategy, we really apply that to beverages. Beverages are a hot topic. Obviously, consumption trends are changing by every generation. So we look at this very closely and we've seen growth. We've seen growth in RTDs on the alcohol side, which were exciting this year. And on the nonalcohol 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 [indiscernible] offerings. So similarly, premiumization is the term we used last year, and we're really focused on, right? We believe that for the right experience, fans will continue to invest. So we've been designing and building premium clubs and lounges at scale, modular at scale. So depending on the global market, if it's an indoor venue and outdoor venue, a stadium and arena, we have a product that works. So 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 tariff, you can see the skyline. This product is also going to be introduced this quarter in 2 international arenas, which we already own. So this is, again, new builds and then portfolio enhancements. So we believe there's a demand for this. And if we can keep building the right products, there's much more margin in the premium experience.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Russell Wallack.

Thanks, Jordan. It's 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 vinyl rooms or others are just more sponsorship opportunities that we can go to market with. From a brand perspective, globally, right? The 1,300 brands that we work with a wide range of brands, some of those are local, regional, national, global. But the real secret sauce is our strategic partners. -- those are multiyear, multimillion-dollar programs that we're working with brands on a global basis. The key for that is that, again, 3 to 5 years, that's where the lion's share of our revenue comes. We're taking -- we're upselling those 1,300 into strategics as well as uncovering new brands every day. Eyeballs. So we've got eyeballs online. We've got a eyeballs on site, and 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. .

And then one of the key drivers for us, you'll see in a couple of slides, our 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 that we're also able to upsell them because they're very happy.

From an AOI standpoint, we've been delivering 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 in general. We do great there. and a variety of different partners we work with. So 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. And 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.

So 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. So this is a global partnership across multiple festivals, again, around the world. And what we were able to do with this partnership is to start with the launch of it, we're actually launched as Airbnb was launching their experiences, new product. So 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. So that's happening on site. We then took that to their super hosts, be able to -- they're now able to actually host their super hosts with great experiences on site at our events.

And then finally, we can actually integrate booking into it so that our fans can then stay at Airbnbs when they're traveling to the event. So this is just a great example of multi-territories, one great travel partner that we feel really great about, and we'll 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. So when we talk about a Coca-Cola or Bacardi or a craft [indiscernible]. Many of these brands, they're not just working with us in the U.S. They're working with us around the world. And 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.

So 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 anywhere from 5 to 10 other countries around the world. And with that, I'm going to 3 days in. My new great friend, Sama, will talk about Ticketmaster.

All right. Hello. My name is [indiscernible]. I'm the new President of Ticketmaster, and it is my third day. So it'd be nice. But nonetheless, I'm thrilled to represent the work of the team and talk to you a little bit about Ticketmaster. Okay. So you all know Ticketmaster has always been global in its outlook. We are now ticketing in 39 countries. And 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. [indiscernible] 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. So we're thrilled about the global growth and excited to continue this work.

I'm now going to tell you a little bit about AI. So some of you know this. I was most recently the Chief Product Officer for Square. And over the last 6 months, I've spent my time mostly learning AI tools myself, just to begin his 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. So 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 our tickets.

Here's a concrete example. So you can see in a chat surface of your choice, and we will announce concrete announcements in Q1. Google is going live and Google AI mode with Gemini in the next 2 weeks. But 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, but we are going to lean in pretty hard here. But 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. So 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 on seller account per broker. We are the best at fighting bots on primary tickets. And you can see that compared to the rest of the industry, we are going to be far ahead, and we are going to save our head.

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. And this is something that Square Cash App Chime and other players have been really good at. And I'm really excited to personally dig in and contribute based upon my 10 years in fintech.

So 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. And so that tells you that the scale of the problem is nearly 20x the size. But the good news is that our defenses have kept up and are doing great. And 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. And I'll show you an example of how that actually works in the consumer experience. And 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. So 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 boot 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 e-mail. And 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, [indiscernible]. 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. So 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 we're out there developing, acquiring, bringing online.

And then 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're playing in our industry, along with the continued build-out of new amps and adding fans at every venue type optimizing show performance, first and foremost, figuring out how to better price and market the tickets that aren't selling, lowering those prices, continuing to optimize the entire house. [indiscernible] growth. That's 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 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 Sam brings to the table in terms of continuing to build new products, nonservice 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, or everybody else, we can take questions for anybody on the team.

Kutgun Maral with Evercore ISI. Maybe talking a little bit more about Venu nation and the on-site spend. I think for years, we've been customer 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 spend amination going forward?

Yes, sure. We've talked a little bit just now about really fan segmentation, which we've got -- 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 a majority, we think that will shift -- and then we're still seeing real diversity around beverage. So it's a little bit of everything, but we're excited about the food product, and we're excited about nonalcoholic as growth drivers. .

And premiums.

On the premium side, outside of food and beverage. And to Michael's point, premium drives a whole new angle around food and beverage, when you have people are placed to be.

And that would be our biggest opportunity right? When we look at on-site -- it's taking that earlier number we've given you. Our apps are 3% premium. Our new ones we built are 25 to 30. So whether you're building the new and making sure you have a proper premium product, or adding vinyl rooms, St. Louis was our test this year. We rolled out 2 new clubs there. give them quick .

Yes. So St. Louis, we -- I would say, we premiumize 2 new clubs, a backyard and vinyl, and then we also took the main concourse that made it nicer and we saw growth for the GA audience as well as the premium. So we're doing that across a number of amphitheaters this summer.

Stephen Laszczyk from Goldman Sachs. Michael, on the supply side, I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more about some of the trends you're seeing at the artist level, I think we're clearly seeing artists level up into stadiums, you've seen artist want to tour internationally, more, be curious of your take on trends and the reasons for why artist that currently play at the club level, the theater level could potentially level up into the ampinArena footprint. I think there's some debate on the supply dynamic on that front. I would just be curious to your take on what gives you confidence that, that can recover over the course of the next couple of years.

Yes. I mean you saw the history of the growth. You see our projected growth. The slide showed you there on all our different venues. So 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 seats on fire. I wish I had 20 more of those. That's truly development mid-range to low range. So the truth we just opened in Nashville great venues, big markets. So 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 has access to the same information no matter where you live.

And every artist now doesn't need to have got a record deal so-called the old model where a few artists went to Irving [indiscernible] and hope the label signed in that night. There are artists all over the world on a computer uploading music to any platform right now. So we actually see the supply of artist. There are always -- 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. So that's 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, an upload a song get access and be playing the Hollywood ball or the paramount. That didn't happen before. Most of the world was a British U.S. 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's globalization of the artist. So there is more artists on the road and in their begum on a computer wanting to be an artist than ever before as well as more fans. So that's why we believe that it's 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, but there was a slide that showed the growth by venues in 2019, and I was surprised to see kind of AMS have grown, but it underpays some of the other kind of venue types. And 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 contend to see some of that growth maybe trickle into arenas and stadiums. .

What was your first part you said you said, you.

Yes, I was referencing the slide that showed growth by venue in 2019.

Yes. So your question is what just will amphitheaters grow? The ongoing question. Yes, we wouldn't have built 3 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. And I want to see the rolling stones in the tumor. .

Second is I want to see outside. So 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. So 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 last country artist is more. So 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. .

Cameron Mansson-Perrone, Morgan Stanley. [indiscernible], hopefully, this is being nice to your question. But some really interesting stuff on how you're leveraging AI on like 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 mill a little bit more fluid a little bit more fan-friendly.

Yes. Thank you. I wish I had mentioned that in the presentation itself, but it's a great question. So yes, I mean, once you think about a fan in the Ticketmaster experience, whether app or site -- once that ban 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. So it is a logical extension that in the distant future, the fan can participate in the on sale, but they don't have to show up with their desktop at the office at 9 a.m. 10 and their agent acts on their behalf on parameters that they've 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 -- and so 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.

To give them more credit than just the 3 days. He's we signed a deal a few months ago. So him and I have many conversations. I've been widely impressed is the day we met is him and I are text every night. He's online. So he's a customer -- I mean he's upset with -- how do I make a mark and elevate the experience online and the friction. So that's a big part of what what attracted us from day 1 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. So the fact you didn't mention it's amazing because that's all him and I are on these exchanges every night about ideas, and I'm really, really energized about it.

I have 1 follow-up for Omar. On -- in the past, you guys have talked about kind of when you look at grocers region to region, then being fairly comparable to the kind of legacy North America, Europe markets. Is that holding true as the business continues to expand in more and more geographies? Or what kind of dynamics are you seeing there? .

Yes. It's actually closing. We're almost -- 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 tier price in India is USD 100 for big shows, that's growing incredibly quickly compared to other markets that we've seen developed the average ticket price in Australia and Asia already outpaces what you get in the U.S. So I think we're feeling really confident about that. And we're starting to see markets that -- what we're doing shows in that they were subsidized by the Middle East market subside by the day have coplay rolling in all at 4 stadiums, getting a real ticket price, Traviscot rolls in, get real ticket price. So we're starting to see less subsidies in those markets, which is then driving a real true commercialized music business, and then we'll see that last frontier in the Middle East to be Saudi Arabia, where there's a lot of activity.

A lot of it's government subsidy, where you're trying to get as commercialization, but I'm confident we'll see the ticket price there. But no, we are starting to see, specifically in Europe and big Western European countries in the U.K. that have absolutely caught up with [indiscernible] average growth, which is really fantastic.

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 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 Vans wanting to see contents under the star. So just curious about that.

Yes. We would love that. Historically, the market in America versus Europe was -- Europe was a very big festival market. So you kind of had your soccer stadium and tons of festivals and festivals really were the way artist thought about play in Europe because they didn't have an arena market. America, early on, the promoter started building the Jones speech, but that's all evolved now. So we would look at building an amphitheater in any market around the world. It's a great product.

Most of Europe challenge is always just land, finding land where you could actually do it and not being 100 miles outside of the main city. So now we look at these markets in Europe and go, if we found land that was good, let's build an arena versus an app just because it would have a higher usage, not because we wouldn't like to build one there. But we're 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? And/or if we do, is it an arena or an app that we put the shovel in the ground for.

And then in Latin America, what you're seeing is we're calling them stadiums, but they really are a hybrid amphitheaters [indiscernible]. So audio GMP in Mexico City is the #1 stadium in the world in terms of number of fans hosted. If you look at the design of it, it is more of a kind of a amphitheater with stage meets grandstands, ever Claro down and Bogota, similar. So I think for the Latin American markets where you have the weather and you can build those supersized amphitheater meet stadium. -- is a massive opportunity that we're pursuing.

And then just quickly a follow-up for [indiscernible] on the AI stuff that you were talking about before, 2 areas that you didn't mention maybe you're using AI for better pricing of primary tickets perhaps? And then 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 to past?

Yes, absolutely on both fronts, right? So 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 -- and so 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 Adani and pricing certainly is an area of core interest even to me, just given some of the work we've done at Square. So -- 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. So that's one.

I think on the cost side of the equation, we are absolutely pursuing the relevant efforts. So 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 process whether it's in finance or HR or anywhere else in the organization, we're absolutely doing that. And obviously, I just started, but this is going to be a core focus for me to figure out every single area, every single function are we today, where we need to get to and how can we be as nimble as an AI-native startup?

Because if you talk to AI at the start-up, I did a lot of this over the last 6 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 doesn't work at my scale. So that's the bridge that we're on, which is how do we employ as many AI-native practices as possible at our scale.

It's David Joyce at Seaport Research. A question on Venu nation. When thinking about the IRRs and the global opportunity set there, how much variability by market is there around that IRR? Or are the revenue opportunity is pretty much commensurate with the investment required. And just on the incremental food and beverage strategy, has that already been embedded in your thinking in broad disclosure on the 20% plus IRRs?

So I think the -- the short answer is yes. I think, generally speaking, especially in emerging markets, luckily, construction costs are commensurate with profitability. So that is working in our favor. But what I would say is in terms of the food and beverage strategy, we're not being widely aggressive in the market about where things are going. We're 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 because we'd like to outperform. But construction costs in a lot of these markets are working in our favor in financing as well.

Robert Fishman from MoffettNathanson. 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? And 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? So this has been the main goal. Livenation.com, historically has existed and looks like a me-too 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 with the venue versus who bought the ticket.

So the main goal of -- all Access is to have a real one-to-one relationship with the concert goer and start delighting them and giving them value when they don't expect it. So first, you hear a lot about presales. You hear a lot about the superfan strategy around access to concert tickets. You hear a lot about that. We've been doing presales 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 e-mail. So first, we wanted to harvest all of those presales we're already doing for Live Nation under this.

There are -- most brands are paying us tens and tens of millions to be able to say you can go here and get a presale. We already have that embedded. That's great value. We want to put that underneath the proper brand called -- all Access. And that's, first, the main value that if you just sign up, you're going to get all access and you're going to get access to our ongoing huge inventory of presales.

Second then is we have done historically a lot of value promotion, one-off in venues, $20 concert tickets, 25 more for 1. This will be a big platform and how we deliver against that. So as a remember, you're 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'm getting early access, I'm getting a bunch of value and filling those venues. That's the 2 great places we think that we can build a great relationship with a fan, give them incredible value ongoing.

Then as you said, once you get better at the AI and the chat part of the agent part, yes, then I know you and I know you want to go to the show anyways because you're a fan and at Matthews. I can talk to you earlier, I can tell you about what shows coming, upsell you all that great stuff now that, that database is connected to our agent. And we think that [indiscernible] will continually grow. We had tons of the base, as you can imagine, on do we charge? Don't we charge? Is it $9 a month, $20, $100. How do we make sure we find that sweet spot. So we like this first level. We think it's a great scalable idea that we'll 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.

Ben Soff, Deutsche Bank. I wanted to ask about the nonservice fee revenue opportunity in Ticketmaster. Could you remind us what you're working on there and what's been resonating with venues and customers?

Yes. 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, I mean this actually happened to a customer 2 days ago, which is they bought John Legend tickets, they bought VIP, they want to meet and great and they have to call customer service to do the upgrade. There is 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. And we talk to them and customer service did a great job of solving it for them. But for that one fan that took the effort to call, there's probably 50 others that didn't -- and so how do we make it easy for everybody, how do we make it amazing to upgrade? How do we do seat parks? And 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. So just take a few things we've just been talking about, which is using AI, develop new tools, the fact that we have 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.

I'm Peter Supino with Wolfe Research. A question for [indiscernible] 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. And so 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. And I wonder what are the technology pillars of that.

Yes. Thank you. So yes, as you might imagine, I thought about this quite a bit. And so 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's a reason it's a phenomenal point of sale in a lot of environments, but it does not usually find itself in high inventory retail environments. And that's because inventory is really hard. And inventory management is exceptionally difficult -- and to do inventory management in this environment at this scale across these many countries for these kinds of on sales it's an extremely challenging act.

And the fact that the organization has done it technologically over and over and over the last 3 years has gone through an on-sale hardening program. So the on sales are more were resilient and reliable and hardened better than ever before across many different markets, and 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. And I realized after conversation in 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, and they may not get there after that.

So 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's been 3 years of hardening and resilience that obviously I didn't contribute to, but benefit from is an amazing factor. And then the next logical question is, well, what do I build -- what can I build on top of it? So 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 patch and to do it while managing your risk loss is not easy.

But fintechsiture out how to do this, and there are multiple public companies that do this now. So 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. And this is where being from San Francisco being partially based in San Francisco is also helping because this is the epicenter of the AI boom, and there's new and interesting startups forming every 3 weeks that are doing really compelling work. And we -- I've already made 3 or 4 introductions to our internal teams from start-ups that most people here have not heard about because they're 15 months old, and they're not in the headlines, but they're doing amazing work, and we believe are valuable to Ticketmaster. So I think that's 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 and extremely sensitive, you have to actually really elevate experience and design. And so 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. So I thought that there was a lot of great foundation already done in 3 or 4 major areas where I could contribute and help up.

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 in the other parts of the business or said another way, what is the opportunity to flex that AOI opportunity in isolation?

So again, I talked about double-digit growth kind of where we are already for '26. And the venue strategy continue to be a key part of our growth Venue sponsorship or big deals, naming rights, official partners, founding partners in the venue business. Those are multiyear 5, 10, 15, sometimes 20-year partnerships with annual escalators. So we continue to see those rise over time. And then someone and I've already been spending a lot of time together because all of the great products that he creates our actual opportunities for our brand partners so that we can be working actually hand in hand on that as he is making all of these great improvements, launch new products those all create opportunities for our brand partners. .

Peter Henderson from Bank of America. Just on Venu nation. It seems like there's obviously a huge international opportunity there that's going to accelerate in coming years. And one -- I mean, are there any key differences between the domestic builds and the international national bills, for instance, on the premium penetration getting to 30%. Is that the same target internationally? Or what are the sort of key unlocks that are maybe different internationally versus domestic?

Cost. [indiscernible] so permits and cost.

Yes. What I would say is it kind of tracks where -- I think Michael started the meeting, which is really important to think about is both on the ground and local expertise. So we're building an Arena Lima, right? We and 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 will look like Argentina or it looks like Mexico City or maybe one day is like L.A. So we're building really music first, which is also the important piece. We don't have to get saddled with basketball or hockey, right? We're building venues that are flexible for our purpose. .

So premium percentage is definitely internationally focused, but it's not exactly where you think of at Jones Beach, right? It's flexible, it's an upsell versus maybe a membership. But premiums 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 it's been to a soccer state for a [indiscernible] beer. So it's very simple things where we think there's really a big opportunity. And then just to finish with Michael said, which I don't want to understate cost, right? Cost and the ability to build quickly is really important, and these markets are really looking for infrastructure .

What are we -- [indiscernible] what topics have we missed that they really want to -- what topics have we missed? Secondary. We've done a good [indiscernible].

[indiscernible].

So I think -- so I think there's a couple of forces going on. In general, pricing is a hot topic, right? The pricing of as our always makes it on social media, someone's upset about the pricing artists have their own challenges on finding that fine line. The secondary is the red hairing though, right? That is always the part. On any on-sale 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. So 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 to show at whatever price you want. And now hopefully, because of the Ticketmaster, we get better and better at saying if you want to price it at 160, we're going to get better at figuring how to get that 160 to a fan, not a reseller.

So 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, 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. So we do see that happening. And that's why we're leading this charge.

We've let it originally. Now we're going to do the next level. and say, "No, we want to absolutely be aligned to the artist agenda, sports as separate artist agenda, on how do we figure out how to price it the way you want it artists and deliver it to a fan. We're very proud of face-to-face 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-to-face exchange. You buy a ticket on Ticketmaster for an artist. You want to -- you can't go to the show. You -- all the reasons that the scalpers use the claim that it has to be transferable. You can sell the ticket Ticketmaster with no fees. Don't charge you a fee, not a safe -- so 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.

So our long-term strategy has always been about make sure the primary tickets protected. Secondary as a feature, not a business. We've always said we think feature has a shorter lifespan over time, the primary because it is the place that content will always attack. And 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 on-sale and 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. So we're not worried that if we put this next level of 1:1 that we lose a few pieces of inventory, all that 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 on-sale [indiscernible]. So 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 make -- and we're the easy go, great, but we'll still use that opportunity to say, okay, we'll even get next level in terms of how accounts are defined. And 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 will be regulated, capped and/or artists will start saying, where is my face-to-face exchange? I want to transfer or I want to have some place in it. So that's kind of our -- been our long-term strategy.

This has kind of just helped us excel. And we actually look at this as a great opportunity to lead the industry with a great consumer product that is bulletproof.

[indiscernible] that price caps are necessary in the United States on secondary. And number 2 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. No, no. So I think you're going to see like there already are some states that have bills on the table around it. So I think it will happen in some states. But I think the face-to-face will be -- will be highly used in '26 and onward. We haven't done a good job as we don't do that 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, and they're like, of course. Why? Yes, we take them through what we did with Billy, what we did with Ariana and they -- the reception is amazing. And they're shocked. -- no fees, a lot like -- so 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. Well, I appreciate you all coming out and I appreciate all your support, and we'll sort of talk ongoing. Thank you all. Appreciate it.

Good afternoon. My name is Joe, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Live Nation's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call.

I would now like to turn the call over to Ms. Amy Yong. Thank you, Ms. Yong, you may begin.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Live Nation Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Joining us today is our President and CEO, Michael Rapino; and our President and CFO, Joe Berchtold.

We would like to remind you that this afternoon's call will contain certain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ, including statements related to the company's anticipated financial performance, business prospects, new developments and similar matters. Please refer to Live Nation's SEC filings, including the risk factors and cautionary statements included in the company's most recent filings on Forms 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K for a description of risks and uncertainties that could impact the actual results.

Live Nation will also refer to some non-GAAP measures on this call. In accordance with the SEC Regulation G, Live Nation has provided definitions of these measures and a full reconciliation to the most comparable GAAP measures in our earnings release. The release reconciliation can be found under the Financial Information section on Live Nation's website.

With that, we will now take your questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from the line of Brandon Ross with LightShed Partners.

First, going into 2025, it seemed like it was one where the sun, the moon, the stars were all going to align with stadiums and arenas and amphitheaters all coming together. It's turned out, it seems to be a great stadium year, but there's definitely been underperformance in the other venue sizes. Can you explain what happened with [ AMPS ] and arenas this year? And what can give us confidence that they will rebound strongly in 2026? And I have a follow-up.

Thanks, Brandon. I'll take it. Just to be clear, we had an incredible quarter, incredible year so far. We had revenue up 11%, operating up 24%, AOI 14%. Those are numbers you pay for every quarter. So we've had an incredible year. One of the things we've always said about Live Nation is the great strength you have in investing in us is we are a global diversified business. And both geographically and venue type, and sometimes Europe over delivers, and American underdeliver. Sometimes the [ apps ] are having a record year, sometimes the stadiums are having a record year. And that's always been the pattern here. And what's great is at the end of the day, we're going to deliver our AOI 10% growth. And had an incredible growth internationally, Mexico, Latin America, a lot of our European businesses and stadiums, up 60%.

Again, we would hope we have this problem every year where stadiums are dominating the business. It just continues to show the strength of the consumer and the buyer. This year, we had a few less amphitheater shows. We're looking to [indiscernible] '26. It looks like it's going to be a great pipeline. We look like amphitheaters, arenas and stadiums are going to have a very strong year next year, and on both International and American basis, probably be sitting here in a year from now telling you one of those markets overdelivered. And that's the strength of our diversified platform.

So we don't think there's anything structural. We think there is a lot of content out there. A lot of artists decided not to play or not to play arenas and amphitheaters and go for stadiums. We support that on a global basis, and that helped deliver our global revenue growth of over 11%. We think next year, we'll have the same great combination on a global basis and deliver what we've been delivering for many years, record attendance, record revenue and record AOI will be in the books again for next year with the combination of international apps and arenas.

Great. And then on the Ticketmaster side, following the FTC suit, it seems like you've really begun to crack down a lot on ticket scalpers. Can you remind us of the actions that you've taken so far? And what impact you expect each to have on both [ LYB ] financials and the broader ticketing industry? And it seems like most of the work that you're doing, most of the changes you're making are concerts only as opposed to both concerts and sports. Any color on why that's the case?

Sure, Brandon. I'll go get on the mic, Mike can jump in. First, again, as always, just to set the context. Secondary is a low single-digit percentage of our revenue. It's a feature to us as we've long top. We focused on primary and helping content get the tickets priced and sold how they want.

First, just to answer sports versus concerts, it's very different. Sports, the teams and leagues use secondary as a distribution platform for disaggregation of season tickets. So the second area I would think about is being it's really heavily a liquidity market in sports. In concerts because they're all sold one-off, there is no liquidity market. It's all a price arbitrage market. So as we look at it, it's a matter of how much are the scalpers taking, how much of a [ tag ] they are they getting? And the actions that we're taking, I think, are heavily driven by the fact when we look hard at it is just too much.

So the piece is, first, even though it gets pressed is less important is Trade Desk. It's a tool that brokers use to manage their tickets and simultaneously place them on multiple marketplaces, it started because of sports. It's often confused that somehow it's a tool that the brokers could use to get tickets in some advantaged form relative to fans. It's not this, it's never been this. But just to eliminate the noise, we're shutting it down. We don't expect it to have any financial impact on us or on the market. We expect most of these folks will either do it manually or go to one or the other multitude of platforms that offer this service.

More impactful to the industry is the identity verification tools we've started to deploy. So now when our system identifies high-risk accounts based on 100 different signals, we can require a validation that the account holder is a person and their government ID matches the account. This is a key tool we've used in canceling over 1 million accounts over the past month. And on a recent high demand on sale, they got some press, we used it after the fact looking at the signals and putting fans through to determine whether they were real fans or it was bought, purchased. So that's been helpful. We're optimistic in the short term, this can help rain in some of the excessive abuse that's developed. But we're frankly, we're also realistic that without legislative and enforcement changes. The scalpers will continue to invest in new tools to fuel our systems and mask the fact that their bots.

So it's hard to fully translate into financial impacts. But I think given the low percentage of revenue that secondary accounts for, what we've seen so far in terms of the activity and the volume, we don't have any reason to think it would be more than low to mid-single-digit impact Ticketmaster's AOI next year. But even more importantly, we don't see this fundamentally impacting our growth strategy given our focus on the primary side. So as we lay out our multiyear strategy tomorrow, this is not going to have an impact on that strategy or on the numbers that we would show you in terms of where we think we can get to.

The next question comes from the line of Stephen Laszczyk with Goldman Sachs.

Joe, maybe on the concert segment for the quarter. I was wondering if you could help us break down some of the puts and takes to Concert segment AOI growth in 3Q. I think there's a number of factors that investors are trying to better understand. You have growth in [ tenuation ] attendance and the profitability that might be coming on as you layer on some new capacity there, you have more stadium activity as you called out. earlier and then some pressure on [ AMP ] and arena attendance. I think any color to help us better understand the sizing of some of these drivers would be helpful as we look into next year. I would appreciate any of that? And then I have a follow-up.

Sure. I'll give you the detail on the quarter. Overall, for the Concert segment, we grew AOI by about $40 million with roughly 1 million or just over 1 million fans. So pretty good per fan incremental profitability. It's 120 more stadium shows that really drove the growth, which was pretty well balanced between the U.S. and international. And it was also heavily driven by stadiums that we operate. So it's not the [ GMP ] reopening and building back up the Rogers stadium in Toronto. So it was a lot of hands that we operate at, which is what drove some of the high profitability per fan.

We had about 250 fewer [ AMP ] shows, as Michael alluded to, just from a cyclical standpoint, fewer shows. And arenas are about flat, but we did grow our activity in our operated arenas with the new Portugal arena coming online and some of our other European arenas. So a big shift to stadiums and overall, in some of the large venues outside of the [ AMPs ], we had more activity in our operated venues that helped in the context of the future ramp shows.

Great. And then maybe secondly, just as a follow-up on regulatory and some of the commitments you made on the FTC side. Just would love any other color you could provide about where we stand in your dialogue with the FTC? And then maybe related to that, where we stand in the DOJ's process? And to what extent you feel like maybe some of the more recent dialogue you've had, maybe perhaps both agencies is created a framework or common ground with these agencies or lawmakers.

Sure. I'll start with the FTC. I think the government shut down pretty much immediately after it came out. So no real action there. What I would say, and we've said this before, when this happened, we feel very good about our case with the FTC. We think it's an extremely expansions [indiscernible]. The fact that they would file the suit when we do more to stop bots and to counter a lot of this activity than the rest of the industry combined, we find the very far afield. And from a legal standpoint, we don't believe that they have a strong case.

A lot of the changes that we just talked about are friendly things that have been motion for a while. Obviously, you don't roll out identity verification in 2 weeks. That's the tool we've been building and we're just ready to deploy it. So we have done so.

On the DOJ, that case is advanced procedurally. Generally speaking, discovery is complete. Everybody is exchanged expert reports, and we're in the middle of some of the expert depositions. All is left as a few scraggler depositions. So that process continues. The judge reaffirmed the March 6 date for the trial. So we'll continue on that process for now. But the other development that I think is a real note is we think the remedies decision in the Google search case is very much validated our view that the claims in our case, can't lead to a breakup of Live Nation, and take master even if the DOJ prevails on one claim or another. So we expected that but certainly welcome news in that side.

The next question comes from the line of Cameron Mansson-Perrone with Morgan Stanley.

First, on the ticketing side of the business. You've talked about the competitiveness in the ticketing industry in the past, particularly in the U.S. I was wondering if you could just kind of describe how that landscape has been evolving and how you've been responding to that level of competitiveness? And particularly whether it raises your appetite or the attractiveness of capturing international growth within that segment of your business?

Yes. Cameron, I don't think we think of it as an either/or. We look at it as a global business. So we're a global platform. We're global in concerts, we're global in ticketing. Were underdeveloped in international markets in Ticketmaster, particularly if you look at Latin America, you look at Asia, even parts of Europe. So there's a heavy focus on building out our presence in those markets. We think we have the best ticketing platform and enterprise tools out there, and that's clearly been helping us win a lot of business as we've given you those numbers over the past several years in international markets.

North America is competitive, but that's fine. Most businesses in life are competitive. And I think we continue to win a lot because we can compete effectively on all dimensions, and we've continued to add clients and tickets in North America as well. We'll continue to fight that fight. But we certainly see international over the next several years as a great growth opportunity.

Got it. And then on the -- on the numbers in the release around deferred revenue, some pretty healthy growth both in event-related deferred revs and ticketing reps. Any color you can provide in terms of how we should think about that as indicative of 4Q activity relative to indicative of 2026 activity?

Yes. I think most of that will be getting into next year at this point given the size of those numbers and the fact that Q4 is cyclically one of the smaller quarters, and it goes hand in hand with the other things we've given you on the strength of the pipeline for '26 in terms of large venues and the fact that our ticket sales for shows next year are up double digits. Ticketmaster, you'll continue to see some growth in the deferred also as we're adding more venues and the tickets for those venues get deferred.

The next question comes from the line of David Karnovsky with JPMorgan.

I wanted to see if you could refresh on the venue pipeline that will impact in 2026 in terms of the buildings opening in the second half of this year and those planned for the coming year. And when we look at your fan count growth at Venu Nation, I think you had previously guided this to around 7 million fans. Any reason to think you wouldn't be able to sustain that pace comparable to that next year?

I was going to jump. The good news, David, is we're going to take this through our Investor Day tomorrow and get into more detail on the venue stuff. So that's probably the best place for it. But no, we continue to see the same pipeline of growth as we've outlined previously, and we've made great progress this year in getting these buildings either started or opened up this year. And tomorrow, we'll take you to kind of the longer-term vision of it.

Okay. And then just on the stadium outlook. I just wanted to see if you could check in on the pipeline for next year. I know there had been some hope expressed in September that you could get to a comparable year in the U.S. with the growth internationally despite the FIFA factor. Just want to get an update there.

Yes. I would say the World Cup FIFA some of those fears that everyone had earlier haven't seen to come to life. We are looking right now at this time of the year, which is early still, but good for stadiums to have a very strong year next year. International, which already had a spectacular year, looks very strong on a global basis. So we look at next year being a very, very strong stadium year again.

And going to Brandon's concern, add a few extra shows in amphitheater and arenas and you're back to your annual higher double-digit fan growth that we've been able to do for the last 15 years or so. So we see that consistency will continue onward for the next few years.

The next question comes from the line of [ Robert Fishman ] with [ Moffat Nathanson ].

I have 2 for either Michael or Joe. Maybe just following up on where you just went. The earnings release calls out the international fan count is on track to surpass the U.S. for the first time. So I'm just wondering if you can shed some additional light on where you see that mix shift going with international fan growth over time? And how much of that factors into your confidence of delivering another year of double-digit AOI growth in 2016? Start there.

I'm not sure I got the question right, but I think if you're asking about international, we believe this will be a continued global international business. And most of our growth, both in Ticketmaster sponsorship, venues, concerts, will continue to be on a global basis, given there's so many markets that were not very high in market share or haven't entered yet. So that mix will continue to grow and continue to be an international story for many years to come.

Got it. And then just secondly, can you discuss your recent hire of a new Global President for Ticketmaster and maybe how that -- you expect that to help in the AI transformation of your overall business or at least with Ticketmaster.

Yes. I think we thought it was time. Mark has done an incredible job, growing the business dramatically. Our focus under Mark based out of London originally was to really focus Ticketmaster to be a much more international business, [indiscernible] away from being just solely U.S. focused and think about a global platform. We had many different technologies at time and [ Carlos ] and Mark had a fabulous job standardizing our global business launching in many markets. And Mark will continue as Chairman, that will be his focus to keep running hard on international.

But we absolutely want to find somebody that had a very strong technical background engineering AI-based that could look at the platform overall and not just how do we make the enterprise marketplace better. But of course, how do we make sure we are leading the charge on AI from an agent perspective, at the front door to all the places that we're adding on the enterprise level.

The next question comes from the line of Peter Supino with Wolfe Research.

This is [ Logan Angus ] on for Peter. Just a quick question for me. Your release reiterates your expectations for long-term AOI compounding but doesn't discuss 2026 specifically. I'm curious given all the strong leading indicators that you've called out, is it fair to assume that you can continue to grow AOI double digits next year? Or are there mitigating factors that we should keep in mind?

This is Joe. I think what I would say is no mitigating factors. We've just never sitting in November before the year has started, made that call. I think that's traditionally a conversation that we have in February. I think what we try to give you now, which is what we're looking at is the leading indicators that have to do with our show pipeline tickets sold our sponsorship committed, our deferred revenue, a lot of factors that are pointing extremely positively.

But I think we all view we'll get to -- and nothing no mitigating, no concerns. But we generally want to wait and get to February and have the full data set to make that call.

But your point is what we've been saying for year after year, the last few years we think this business on a global basis has incredible growth ahead of it that would mirror the history we've been able to deliver.

The next question comes from the line of Peter Henderson with Bank of America.

I guess just ask one on sponsorship. How much sort of upside...

And the next question comes from the line of Jason Bazinet with Citi.

I know you guys have long held that your business is not particularly economically sensitive. But there seems to be growing press reports about maybe the low-end consumer sort of running out of gas. And I just wonder, underneath the hood, are you seeing any sort of signs of sort of maybe sort of bimodal behavior with the high-end consumer spending more, but you are seeing a little bit of pressure at the low end to offset some of the strength at the high end? Or is that not what you're observing?

No. We have not seen any of that. We have our business is very diverse. It's powered from clubs to arenas, to festival stadiums, small town to bag on a global basis. So we see it all. And we need all levels of consumers consuming to make the show sellout. And we're already on sale for next year for many shows and festivals of certain sizes and they are selling as fast as ever. So the appetite, the consumption going to that show still seems to be #1 priority for them and we saw no pullback anywhere yet.

The next question comes from the line of Eric Handler with ROTH Capital.

Just wondering if you could talk about corporate appetite for sponsorships now in terms of what they're willing to do and sort of how much they're willing to spend?

Yes. Again, our sponsorship numbers, you saw the 14%. They've been growing for double digits for years. And as we grow our business, we provide more inventory. The more arenas, the more international, the more cities we add, the more inventory our team has to sell. So we think that live show continually right now to a marketer is a really good return on -- return on investment. They may not have all the other media channels solved, while they're figuring out where to put their dollars.

But if you want to absolutely touch consumers on a live location like sports or music, these 2 places are where marketers tend to be spending more money today. So we're matching that with them. We have the best inventory in the world and we see continued growth for a long time in sponsorship and brands that want to be part of that exciting 2 hours of magic.

The next question comes from the line of Ian Moore with Bernstein Research.

I just wanted to zoom in a little bit on food and beverage spend. I was just wondering if you could stratify the growth that you're seeing a little bit across different venue types and then front of the house, back of the house VIP, if possible.

Yes, we've had a strong year with [indiscernible] Food and Beverage, and our amphitheaters, our festivals, owned and operated clubs. We delivered on our growth targets this year again. Continue to be better at diversifying our portfolio, increase in our hospitality, increasing our kind of our offerings across all platforms. So had a strong year. We continue to see year-over-year growth on-site food and beverage, VIP hospitality, premium, all of the ancillary revenues, when they come to that show, they still want to find that place to have fun and spend some dollars to enjoy it.

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'd like to hand the call back to Michael Rapino for closing remarks.

Thank you, everyone, for your participation, and we'll talk to you tomorrow afternoon at our Investor Day. Look forward to it. Thank you.

This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

All right. Great. Let's get started with our next session for today. Thank you, everyone, for taking the time to join us. We're excited to welcome to the Communacopia Technology Conference, Joe Berchtold, the CFO of Live Nation. Joe, thanks for being back with us today.

Thanks, Stephen.

All right. Maybe to start for those either newer or just revisiting the Live Nation story, I thought it would be good if we could start with some of the longer-term outlook for the live music industry. It's grown from a relatively small industry thinking back 20 years ago, it's just $5 billion in total revenue. Today, a much different picture. It's the driving force behind the entire music industry really as a whole, $35 billion in revenue last year.

Maybe just give us an update looking ahead, where you see the industry growing from here, now that it's more mature, some of the secular growth drivers? What's new, what's different? What will continue on in the next 5, 10 years?

Yes. I think it's been an incredible run for the last 20 years. If you look at it, it's basically grown at about 8% compounded annual growth rate, which for any business over that length of time is pretty good. Over that period, we've grown our business from about 30 million fans to over 150 million fans last year. So it's been something that we've been able to drive a lot of the market growth ourselves, frankly, by bringing the artists and the fans together.

If you look at the evolution of that, and I think everything is just sort of ongoing trends. I don't -- there's no major leaps. In 2005, our business was about 70% North America. And if you look at it this year, we've sold, I think, 158 million tickets at this point. So let's call it, 160 million. It will be over half international fans this year.

So we've done a great job growing the North America business. It's quadrupled roughly over the 20 years. But the international business, as it's truly globalized, is where you've seen the tremendous growth, eightfold increase.

And I think if you look forward, we continue to believe there's still substantial growth in North America as we get more and more localized with bringing the shows to all the markets as we focus on really growing that mid-tier venue, 5,000 to 7,000 capacity.

But even putting that growth aside, if you simply said the opportunity over the next several years, is for international to catch up to the U.S. because it is now fully globalized in terms of the demand, you've got a fivefold increase that you could grow our business or grow the industry.

And I think that will be the major trend. I think we'll see more and more international as the core of how the industry grows and where artists are able to engage with their fans.

As you think about that international opportunity and maybe as it relates to Live Nation at a higher level, you have a target for double-digit annualized growth over the next 5 or so years over the medium term. What opportunities specifically to Live Nation's execution are must needs in order to execute against that double-digit growth opportunity?

Yes. I think number one is we grow our fan base. So what I was just talking about is we set the metrics, right? When we grow, our next target is we want to grow our fan base from 150 million to 200 million. And that will, I expect, be predominant -- the mix will be more international than North America.

Number two is a real focus on the venue side. We've seen tremendous success by investing in venues, strong, averaging 20%-plus returns for the portfolio as we invest in those venues. And we get a double benefit of not only is that a source of good shareholder value creation, but it also creates the infrastructure that we need in some of these international markets to be able to deliver the supply to the demand.

Then from there, you have some ongoing pricing benefits that accrue in the concert business. It's still underpriced, as I'm sure we'll get into. You continue to invest in the platform and Ticketmaster in those client tools, in that marketplace, that continues to grow and your ad business continues to grow.

When you take each of those pieces, we don't need any of those pieces to leap, right? We need just year in, year out to make a bit of progress on each of those fronts. And we think, over the medium term, that means that we can compound at double-digit growth for the whole business.

You mentioned Live Nation creating a lot of the supply and a lot of the capacity in the industry over the last decade or 2. I guess specifically as it relates to supply, we've seen artists tour at such a robust clip coming out of COVID. And this year, in particular, on the stadium side, international side, North American side, incredibly robust.

Is there any sign of that slowing as we look into '26, 2027? Or are there secular reasons why artist supply just continues to tick higher on a global basis?

Yes. I think it's -- I think we almost have to get away. I mean, we do it ourselves talking about U.S. versus international. It's simply a global business now. The DSPs distribution of recorded music is global. The social media platforms, so the TikTok, Instagrams and others, are global. So that fan base is global.

10 years ago, we were working with 3,000 artists. Last year, we worked with 11,000 artists. We had, I think, 100 artists sell over 250,000 tickets, 50% increase from 5 years ago. We're seeing, I think, 20% of our top 50 tours are non-English-speaking international artists, double what it was 5 years ago. So there is no change to that trend other than continuation and expansion of the relative importance and magnitude of what's going on in the rest of the world.

On the supply note, like one of the bigger debates this year, as people look ahead into 2026, is the World Cup. You'll be hosting 104 games next year across 16 stadiums in North America. It's a lot of capacity that will be restrained or is coming offline for at least a part of the summer.

Just talk a little bit more about how Live Nation is navigating this. And as you look forward to the stadium slate in '26, is it possible for us to see growth in show count on the concert side as you maybe move where that supply goes on a global basis?

Yes. The team has done a great job in the past 3 or 4 months of getting out ahead of what we knew was going to be an issue with these 16 venues being shut down for a chunk of time with the World Cup. So I think they've done a very good job of scheduling before the time period, after the time period, figuring out how to route around it.

At this point, we're probably roughly halfway done booking our large venues for next year, which would be the stadiums, arenas, amphitheaters. And we're every bit in line with where we were coming into this year, which was a great start in terms of the bookings.

I think that our great scenario would be that we can deliver U.S. stadiums consistent with this year and then get some growth from the international markets, as we've talked about. It's certainly possible.

Again, we're halfway through. So the good news is we've seen good news so far, we still have a ways to go. But we're feeling much better about the scale of activity that we're seeing at this point than probably I was a bit more concerned 6 months ago just in terms of how we were going to deal with it, but I give credit to that team of really getting on it early and getting the tours booked.

It seems like the opportunity for stadium show count next year, nothing is precluding it from growing at this point.

Correct. Correct.

Maybe shifting to the demand side of the equation for the moment, every year, I feel like we have this debate on the consumer, how resilient demand is or how resilient it will be in the next economic downturn. We've seen a lot thrown at the consumer this year between tariffs, inflation, slowdown in the jobs market. I would just be curious to hear your latest on what you're seeing on the demand front as we came out of summer and we're heading into the early days of fall.

Yes. I think we really tend to get lumped at first glance into this highly discretionary big swings in demand bucket. And I don't think that's ever been our reality. The first thing is we're not dependent on you coming 7 times a week. We're not dependent on high frequency. All that we need is for 1/4 of you to go once or twice a year to a show and for that special out in that special event.

And then the second half is all the focus is always because it grabs the headlines on the $800 ticket, the $1,200 ticket, the $2,000 front row. And that's just not our reality. We've talked long, 30% of our tickets are under $50, 2/3 of them are under $100.

Even if you look at the stadium shows, I looked at a number of tours. And for Shakira, Blackpink, The Weeknd, Coldplay, Stray Kids; all five of those stadium tours, which are five of the biggest stadium tours. All of them had over 20% of their tickets priced at under $75.

So it's just -- artists are very focused on their relationship with their fans, and they want to keep a lot of tickets priced so that anybody, any fan, who's making this a priority, can afford to get in and that they're not -- now by the way, on the other side, they'll take 10% of their tickets and they'll say, "Yes, those are the best tickets. And I don't want those tickets just being swooped up by the scalpers. I want to price those more in consideration of market value," still well below market value in most cases. But saying, "There's no reason for me to be giving all of that money away to somebody who's just going to come in, buy the tickets up and resell them."

So overall, you see -- again, I look at long-term trends more than I worry about noise of what bounces around year-to-year, but you're seeing some -- you see prices grow at a handful of points above inflation because they're getting smarter and smarter about how they price the entire house. And pricing the entire house absolutely means a big focus on keeping a large portion of tickets available to all fans.

So long wind up saying, no, we're not seeing issues. The on sales are continuing to go great. The Backstreet Boys just announced -- I saw this one the other day. Backstreet Boys, a phenomenal show at the Sphere, they just announced 14 more dates. All the -- so for those 14 dates, they had 10x as many people show up for the queue as were able to even get into the queue or even able to get in to buy a ticket. And then only 1/3 of the people that got into buy a ticket were able to buy a ticket.

So you had 3% of the people that showed up able to buy tickets. This is a band that may or may not roll off your tongue, is the hottest thing, but it's a phenomenal show, by the way.

But no, there is absolutely very strong demand from the biggest stadiums for these incredible events at the Sphere to what's going on in our clubs and theaters. Festivals continue to perform well. So no, we're not seeing any issues with consumer demand.

Even at the low-end amps, theaters, smaller price...

No. Again, you have to -- you just have to be aware that you can't have a one-size-fits-all in our business any more than any other business. It's why we have a summer sale where we sell tickets on the lawn for $25 all in because you know that you need to give an attractive price point in order to get some people off the couch and go.

And so you have a limited period of time promotion, the same as you do in almost any other industry because you're going to have segments ranging from the major fan who's going to plan their life at the day of the on sale to getting -- to wanting to come to the show to the people who 2 weeks out are casually deciding, "Do I go to dinner? Do I go to a movie? Do I go to a show?"

You have to reach all these different populations. And part of it is using pricing to do that. But no, we're still seeing people go to our show.

That's great. Maybe pivoting a little bit and discussing some of the ways you're investing in the business. You mentioned venues creating capacity, the Venue Nation strategy early on. It's been a big focus of yours over the last year. I think, at this moment in time, you have over 40 venues around the globe in construction, 10 major venues that to come online next year in 2026.

Can you maybe just spend a little bit of time talking about the opportunity ahead of Venue Nation? Where you see some of the greatest opportunities for venue expansion? How quickly that venue comes online over the next several years? And if there's maybe an opportunity to ramp the velocity of venue investment from here?

Yes. I'd say our #1 priority is looking at international markets at the infrastructure of arenas. They don't have the benefit that you have in the U.S. in terms of NBA, NHL, the arena infrastructure that's been created to support the sports teams here.

So if you look at the top 75 markets, you probably half of them are lacking a modern arena. So we have teams now, teams that have been built in Latin America, in Europe, in Asia, all focused on how do you develop those markets, how do we get traction? How many projects can we get going?

In the U.S., I'd say, it's a slightly different focus, which is more on that 5,000 to 7,000 capacity theater, sweet spot in the middle that we see there's not enough of them. And also, for sports owners who are looking at renovating their arenas or stadiums, they're often looking at a broader entertainment complex. You saw it with the Battery Park in Atlanta. We worked with the folks at the Red Sox put in the MGM Theater there. We worked with Kroenke and the team in L.A. on the YouTube Theater.

So in a host of markets, we just announced Utah the other day, they're all looking at how do I create that entertainment complex around my main building? Restaurants, bars and music is a key part of that. We're now getting that first phone call saying, "We know Live Nation is in this business. How do we work together? What's the role that we each play? How do we build that?"

And then to your point on accelerating, part of the way that we look at accelerating is we're not married to building everything. We're also -- we're open to a range of things. We recently bought at the start of this year, the Arena in Lisbon, and we'll put some money in that. We'll bring that up to more modern standards. That will be a great asset.

In Helsinki, where the ownership, Russian, had to turn it over to a trust; there wasn't an opportunity to buy it, but we do a long-term operating agreement there.

So we're very flexible as we look at the markets, what is the make opportunity, what's the buy opportunity, if the buy opportunity is to buy and refurbish or how exactly do we play it based on just what's available in that market. So I think you'll see bits and pieces here and there, where you see us accelerating just the natural time that it takes to get things built for big venues in most cities these days and using some of that investment to augment it.

You mentioned earlier the returns that you're seeing on or expect to see on this venue investment north of 20% returns on invested capital. I think there was over the last year, a fair amount of investor debate around if this was achievable to what extent as Venue Nation scales, if these returns would stay on that level.

What are you seeing in this, I guess, first vintage or first ramped vintage of venues that gives you confidence in that 20% return figure and gives you confidence as the strategy scales that, that continues?

Yes. I mean we look at things, we've had a handful of amphitheaters we brought online this summer. Because we were able to develop them from the fan experience from scratch in those situations, we see we're delivering on-site spending double-digits growth relative to the comps of existing buildings because you're doing -- you have more flexibility in how you do your point of sale, how you sell your products as well as how you do your premium.

So we know we're driving more revenue than in our existing portfolio and frankly, more than we had in a lot of our business plans because we didn't know how much that uplift would be.

And then the second thing is just it's all about -- it's really about utilization then. If you look at our utilization in our amphitheaters today, it's up 15%, 20% from 10 years ago. So if we can drive the utilization of the venue, we can operate it reasonably effectively from an on-site hospitality standpoint, manage the costs like the same as anybody else, assume no better.

Then we can deliver superior returns because, again, because we're involved in that utilization, we're able to bring the content to those venues in a way that maybe others couldn't and again, grow the market. It's all part of the same story, right? It's all part of the -- okay, how are you growing the business? You're growing the business by international.

You're going in, you're investing in venues. You're bringing them up the world-class standard. And then you're bringing more shows, which supports both the artists, giving them more opportunities as well as the fans in those markets by expanding the marketplace.

That utilization point is interesting. You mentioned programming. Do you feel like the reason you're getting an uplift in utilization, the type of acts that you're bringing into these markets, maybe you're selecting better markets to begin with, quality of the venue...

Again, you go back to what I said earlier, 11,000 artists' working with instead of 3,000 artists. You've got 20% of your major tours are international artists. You have artists in general because they can, are doing longer tours. So all of that helps drive your utilization.

On per caps, you mentioned up double digits at amphitheaters, large amphitheaters again this year. Talk a little bit about the trends you're seeing both this year and then as you plan ahead to drive per cap spending higher across your portfolio of owned and operated venues.

Yes. Operating venues is the same as -- we can talk about a number of different aspects of the business. You have to understand the world is changing. If you try to say, "Hey, I ran this playbook 10 years ago. Why aren't I being successful today?" It's the world evolves. You're not going to build your per caps if you think you're just going to be selling a lot more beer to a 20-something year-old audience that has a much more diverse pace.

So really, our focus this year has been twofold. One is to do a much better job of segmenting audience types based on the show, figuring out what are the products that, that audience is going to want to consume, making sure that it's readily available at a large number of points of sale.

So a country show, which is heavy beer drinking, still is going to be very different from a show that is a younger audience or a female-dominant audience. So you have to have the products, the ready-to-drink [ high noons ]. Gin and juices are going to be very popular with those demographics.

So you have to think through what is it that you're selling to the audience, who, in all cases, want to show up and spend money and have a good time. This is a social night out. So it's our job to figure out how do we make it easy on them.

And then Michael has talked a lot about this notion of 30% of our audience should have the opportunity to have some sort of premium experience. And that premium experience, again, will differ by who the audience is, it will differ by what the situation is of the fan. "Am I going with my wife and other couples? Am I going with my buddies, Am I taking my kids?" You may have different situations. You want to offer different premium experiences.

So through both of those, yes, we think there's continued growth opportunities. Looking out over the next several years, we think that our current portfolio of venues still has work to do to catch up. And we think that the new venues that we're adding on, which will bring up your average, will do a better and better job at that as well.

Maybe on the international front, earlier this summer, you increased your stake in OCESA to 75%, which is the largest concert promoter ticketer in Latin America. Maybe you could just spend a few minutes talking about the opportunity ahead in Latin America now with this increased ownership stake. How much is ahead in that business? And then as you look more broadly within the realm of concert promoter M&A or maybe even ticketing M&A internationally, where the frontier is?

Yes. Obviously, Latin America has been a huge success story for us. We've talked a lot about tripled the number of fans with OCESA in a very short period of time, incredible success, just a fantastic management team there that they've done in terms of really growing the market in Mexico.

You see some interesting things this year with stars like Shakira, who's very popular there, doing stadium shows in 12 different cities in Mexico and a home run number, I can't remember, 12, 14 stadiums in Mexico City.

But to me, the really interesting part is they're following the U.S. version of the hyperlocal strategy and really getting into what are all the cities that can support major events. And then you take that and you start to extrapolate that into the other major markets in Latin America, we may have 15 million fans there now.

It could easily be another 100 million fans as we develop that market over the next several years, as we bring more artists globally down there as we go into more markets, as we develop more artists in those regions, bring them across the region, bring them back to the U.S. and Europe and so on.

So we've got great teams in place now. I am very confident we'll be able to continue to grow as we have been. I think there's something like a dozen venue opportunities we're looking at down there. So it will play very nicely into the venue side as well.

And then the other opportunity, again, consistent, I think, with what we've talked about is Asia. And now that we have a foothold in Japan, I think we feel much more comfortable that we've got the potential of the two pillars of Japan and Australia. We need to certainly build out our capabilities more in Japan.

But at least for now, we have the ability to come in, be promoting shows there, start to drive scale, figure out what other markets in the region we can develop. That's one where, again, I think we think our penetration is almost nothing today in Asia outside of Australia. It could be a couple of hundred million fans.

Again, incredible opportunities in Japan on the promotion side, the local artist side, exporting the J-Pop, the venue side. And it will be more like our experience in Germany, where we have to build the pieces over time, and it's going to take a few years. But as a market, it certainly has as much or more opportunity than any other in the world.

Maybe just to round out the concert segment AOI margin trends for the year. I know you don't particularly spend a ton of time looking at margins, but it's a helpful tool, I think, for investors to gauge the business and to think about the puts and takes.

You mentioned some of the strong demand trends earlier in the conversation. Curious if you're thinking about the puts and takes of the concert segment margin profile for this year, how you would encourage investors to maybe think about it?

Yes. I think what we've said is we expect our margins this year to be pretty consistent with what the margins were last year. We're benefiting from growing our venue portfolio. We're growing our non-venue promoted side rapidly as well. But I think that the success of the venue portfolio, also, when you have the stadium shows just from a scale standpoint because you have so many fans, you get some benefits of scale there against your cost structure. So that's helping us a bit this year.

But I think the main thing is, as I said earlier, I think we're nearing 160 million fans, expect to be up -- have nice growth in the fan count this year, which is really just what sets the basis for growing the entire business.

Maybe pivoting to ticketing and Ticketmaster on the primary side, it's been a great growth story for -- of yours over the last couple of years, 17 million enterprise tickets added to the platform already this year. So maybe just talk a little bit about the growth looking ahead, international versus U.S.

And then we've seen some competition come in over the last couple of years, [ ASX ], SeatGeek, some others out there have spoken about wanting to get larger in the primary ticketing market. How do you view that competition and where Ticketmaster is competitive edge?

Yes. I mean just to start, it's a very competitive industry. All the industries we're in are very competitive. I don't -- there aren't a lot of industries that aren't highly competitive these days. So we always wake up assuming that there's going to be a lot of competition, but that ultimately, if we can deliver to the best of our capabilities, then we can be successful. And we need to focus on delivering to the best of our capabilities.

At this point, we're up over 20 million net new tickets signed for the year, 70% of them international. So empirically, we're -- we've been successful growing, helping build the markets internationally. Ticketmaster's technology is a point of differentiation, particularly its ability to sell single event tickets. It's pricing capabilities, it's marketing capabilities, the effectiveness of the venue-based tools; all help it to continue to add new customers.

We expect that to continue to happen internationally. I mean you look at the overall growth profile of the business, again, it's a fantastically situated business, is a leader in the category globally, delivering robust margins, long-term contracts on the venue side, certainly in the U.S. and then internationally, more mix between the venue and the promoter, but still a lot of long-term venue contracts that exist there.

It will continue to benefit, number one, from our concert side as it grows from 150 million to 200 million tickets, that will deliver natural growth to Ticketmaster. We're adding other clients, as I just mentioned, another 20 million tickets. It will benefit as well from some of the general pricing trends that we've talked about.

And then its services. It's been very successful creating pricing and marketing services for event organizers that it can charge for, and I expect that will continue. And Ticketmaster is an ad platform, money that shows up in sponsorship, not in our ticketing segment, has also had great growth over the last several years.

You layer into that some of the things that are going on today with AI and some efficiency you should see over the next several years, whether it's from coding or customer service or venue support, the effectiveness that you expect to see from using the intelligence you have and an incredible database we have on our fans, all of that points to continued real success globally for Ticketmaster.

On the secondary side of Ticketmaster, I know it's not a particular main focus of yours, but it does drive a sizable amount of service fee revenue for the platform. It would appear that competition in the secondary space has ticked up, particularly here in the U.S., over the last year or 2.

What are you seeing in the secondary marketplace? Has it gotten more competitive? And is there anything you're looking to do to stabilize some of that market share, some of the performance trends out of secondary?

Yes. I mean, no doubt, we've had players that are very focused on driving share in the secondary activity. It's also just this year, not been a great secondary year on the sports side.

You've had some events that you didn't comp, other sporting events that just didn't have the same level of fan interest, either small market teams or just the same teams back again. So sports has been a bit lighter. Concerts, we've seen a number of artists continuing to take out some of that value. I talked earlier about getting 10% of those tickets priced closer to market value.

Our obsession is not to drive our secondary activity or secondary share. We're in it because we know that fans want to have a single place they can come to buy ticket. And our focus is much more on working with all the event organizers to understand -- so they understand what's the value of every seat in that venue. And then I can make a decision as the event organizer, how much of that value I want to leave for my fans and how much of that market value do I want to capture for myself?

I think if we continue to do that effectively, then we'll be successful. And I simply -- we don't even report secondary versus primary broken out other -- I give you guys occasionally it's sort of a low teens portion. But we don't break it out because we don't talk about it. We don't think about it that way as being a priority to grow independently. I'd rather grow the primary at the expense of secondary.

Maybe taken all together then primary growth, secondary for Ticketmaster as a whole, how should investors think about the growth profile of the business, either at a revenue or AOI line over the next couple of years?

Yes. I think, again, we lay this out every fall with our investor presentations. I think what we've said in those is that Ticketmaster is probably -- a baseline case would be a mid-single-digit growth rate over time, historically, what it's done with upside potential from some of these things that I've talked about using AI tools, figuring out how to really build on the international markets, growing some of the non-service fee revenue opportunities.

So I think there's upside potential to unlock, but a pretty robust steady-state growth that we've been able to consistently deliver over the long term.

Understood. Maybe just to round it out with sponsorship. It's one of your most consistent double-digit growth businesses. It's the business I spend the least time talking with investors on, but I think certainly one of the more underappreciated businesses that you have.

Maybe just give us an update on the sponsorship business as we look into the back end of the year, most of your sponsorship has been under contract in the '26 supply-demand.

Yes. Sponsorship has been a business that's just very consistently delivered that strong growth. This year, from a timing standpoint, it's a little quirky. It's much more Q4 weighted in terms of the growth than traditionally. just based on timing of signing some clients, delivery of assets, some of the digital campaigns, some of the Asia, Latin America business.

But overall, we've talked double-digit growth over last year in terms of travel and entertainment, financial services, technology sectors. But more importantly, looking at it over a bit longer time frame, really since 2019, growth heavily driven on the festival and on the venue side.

So I think as we continue to focus on our venue strategy, one of the absolute considerations is that is a key driver, more fans in our venues is a key driver for our Sponsorship; growth because the brands want to be able to engage with us in a way that they can tangibly interact with their customers and deliver some real value into their concert-going experience.

On Sponsorship, a big conversation we've been having this year is around the opportunity of super fan more broadly in the music industry, live entertainment, clearly a way super passionate fans interact with artists.

Just curious to get your latest sense of how Live Nation and the live music industry as a whole could maybe participate in some of these new products or services that are being created around monetizing the super fan.

Yes. With the super fan, there's certainly a lot of talk about the fact that one of the differentiated assets that could be provided in some cases is tickets. That puts us in a great position. We have a lot of relationship with brands in terms of helping provide privileged access to tickets for those brands.

And in this context, we absolutely see an opportunity to work with them. And if we can provide value for their super fans and they can be a key client for our sponsorship business, I think that could be fantastic for everybody.

Any sense of the timing of this opportunity if you think about over the next year or 2...

Yes. I expect it will play out. Everybody is trying to figure this out now, but I don't think it's going to take more than a year or so to figure out.

Last question for you, Joe. Just capital returns, capital allocation longer term and leverage, very reasonable, generating a ton of free cash. It feels like the Venue Nation CapEx envelope is pretty well defined over the next couple of years. Just thinking about capital returns, share repurchases, dividends.

Yes. It certainly -- over the next handful of years, certainly, our focus is going to be on the venue expansion side. And I expect that we've got a deep enough pipeline of both things building and potentially buying that, that will be where we'll deploy our capital.

Great. Joe, we'll have to leave it there. Thank you very much for being a part of the conference.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Peter Henderson. I'm the covering analyst of Live Nation Entertainment, and very pleased to have Joe Berchtold with us this morning, the President and CFO of Live Nation, a lot to discuss. So let's get into it.

So the live entertainment industry is benefiting from secular shifts towards experiences. Just wondering how has Live Nation positioned itself to capture these tailwinds over the longer term.

Yes. I think the first thing that we did 20 years ago is we really declare ourselves a global company when most people were focused on either single countries or fairly narrow regions. So we certainly saw, with the disruption in recorded music and the fact that artists were losing that revenue stream that the live experience was going to be important from their standpoint, right? So from a supply standpoint, they were going to need to be out on the road to earn their living.

And then that was also, frankly, the start of what we've seen is a pretty consistent macro trend of shifts of spend by consumers from goods into experiences. So we looked at ourselves operating on a global stage, very focused on how can we work with artists to get them out and I'd say that we quickly learned, wow, there really is just this global latent demand that exists for artists. And at this point, our focus is figuring out what is every pocket of that latent demand.

Clearly, the disruption in recorded music that caused the artists to not get the revenue stream anymore is the same technology that has enabled all the DSPs to stream the music globally. It's ultimately the same technology that has TikTok and Instagram providing social platforms for discovery and engagement with artists. So that has shifted demand considerably for major markets, major cities or where record companies focused on their distribution to being fully democratized on a global basis.

So as we saw both that demand trend along with our focus on serving the artists and bringing them globally, we pretty quickly saw that we could make a substantial market just in bringing these 2 together and that's led us to now 50-odd countries where we're operating in, gone from 40-ish million fans in 2010 to 160 or so million this year. So a dramatic increase and we see hundreds of millions of more fans out there that if we can just figure out how to unlock by bringing the artists to them that there's great runway for continued growth.

So just, I guess, digging a little bit more into that. Global expansion, as you mentioned, has certainly been a major pillar of your strategy. International revenue is growing faster than domestic revenue. Can you just sort of outline the priorities for the next growth legs internationally? And what is the right mix of own venues, JVs, promoter partnerships to balance that risk and that return?

Yes. I don't think we think about it as risk and return. I mean we are in the risk business. We are in the business every year of $14 billion, $15 billion this year of riding risk, for artists to go out on the road. We guarantee their performance. We give them certainty for them to plan the show and then an upside from that certainty. But in many respects, we are undertakers of that risk. And that's a core piece of our value proposition.

The artist is -- they're going to know, I'm going to go out for 100 shows. I've got $50 million of guaranteed revenue that can help pay for the band, the production, the preparation, being out on the road and then ultimately, the money that I get to keep and take home. So that's a core piece to how it is we've driven the growth is by being very willing to undertake that risk.

So as we look at markets, we're not looking at it from the standpoint of where we want to grow, how do we share risk, we're looking at from the standpoint of where can we get the local knowledge that we can use to then better inform our global understanding of the business because there's always going to be some local nuances. It's why we've got 20 offices in the U.S. and we have offices in 50 countries is because we understand that being on the ground, you're going to have a much better understanding of not just the local music, but even what type of demand there is for different genes globally, different artists globally.

So we're looking to figure out who can we work with. Usually, you're trying to find a promoter in that market. Promoters generally are going to come with a festival or a club or an amphitheater or some other piece of business. And so you want to go in and partner with them, you generally structure in a way that you want to keep them motivated to grow the business. You want to have an ownership of it, that we're motivated to use our platform and connect our platform to really drive the growth in that business.

And I mean, we've had a number of success stories ranging in Germany, working with Marek Lieberberg, acquiring him is really just the promoter over the past decade building that up towards the #2 market in Europe for us now because we've together built that .OCESA, we've talked a lot about home run, Alejandro and his team there, an absolute asset that working together and by bringing our content and bringing our ticketing some of our sponsorship capabilities, we've been able to help them accelerate that growth to where that business has tripled in 4 or 5 years.

So we have found it to be very successful. And so again, whether -- it's not so much about, oh, I know I want to have this mix of this as a JV versus this is an acquisition, it's who are the right people in that market. Usually -- and there aren't 10 options and one or 2 options, you got to figure out.

We took a long time with Japan. We've talked about Japan wanting to get in Japan for a long time. Took us a long time to figure out that HIP and Kaori are the right partners, the right people, structure the right deal. Now we're off to the races with them, but it takes -- you just have to take the time to find the right partner to set you up so you can bring your platform to bear.

Sure. And I guess recently, you accelerated your OCESA deal, increasing your stake to 75%. I think it closed last week. That further solidifies your position in the fastest -- sorry, a fast-growing market in Mexico, I think, the third largest concert market.

Yes, that's right. Yes.

Like beyond OCESA then, like what additional investments are planned for markets down in Latin America or South America, places like Peru, Brazil, Colombia and how do you think about just the economic volatility of that region as well?

We're very long-term focused. So every market will have currency ups and downs in general, some level of volatility. I mean about economic volatility. I think every quarter for the last 12 quarters, I've been asked what's going to happen in the U.S. when the consumer goes away, you guys are too far over, right? And so for the same 12 quarters, we've said things are going fine.

So one of the benefits of being very global is you have some of that diversity of the economy as well as diversity and other forms. So I don't think we spend a lot of time saying, "Oh, Latin America, you can be volatile." It can be volatile, but it's probably not going to have the same volatility at the same time as Asia is Europe as the U.S. So that doesn't slow us down.

We see Latin America as a large market of very music-oriented, music loving fan, lots of great indigenous content, lots of music from all the countries throughout Latin America and Mexico and a huge desire for international artists. So we'll continue to look for some local partners in any of the markets there that make sense to accelerate our growth.

We will certainly -- I know we'll talk more about venues, but we'll certainly be looking at venue opportunities, whether it's opportunities to acquire or to build new venues, to help us have the infrastructure we want to bring that to bring that supply and demand together. There are times where you want to either create or improve the infrastructure to help you do that more effectively. So I think that's an absolute high priority. We have a team focused just on that.

So I mean, I guess, sort of thinking about it broader, but what percentage of your overall AI could be international by, say, 2028, and what is the gating item there? Is it artist supply? I mean as you mentioned, there's lots of artists are indigenous. Is it venue footprint? Is it the infrastructure of the countries?

I mean we're certainly moving that way. We've got -- this year, I think, will be the first year that we have more fans outside the U.S. than in the U.S. So we don't -- we don't -- we report North America is U.S. and Canada. So some of our external members don't quite jive with that, but probably should do U.S. and do Canada separately these days.

But -- so this will be the first year that, that happens. Now if you look at our AOI, our revenue, that's gone in the past decade from probably 75% U.S. to 60-ish percent. If you ask, when are you going to have half of your concerts profitability by 2028, I'd say there's certainly -- that would be very realistic depending on the pace of some of our venues. We have more venues in the U.S. that are very profitable with our amps and theaters and clubs here. So that's going to weigh a bit to the U.S., even though you have more international fans.

You obviously have an incredibly successful ticketing business here that is of a scale and profitability that's not quickly, not as quickly getting replicated internationally. You don't have the same sports leagues and all the other components put aside concerts. So I think we're on our way. I don't know if it's 5 years, 10 years, but it would certainly be our aspiration to be more international than U.S. because that's where most of the fans are.

Yes, sure, sure. So I mean as Live Nation continues to deliver very strong AOI growth, how are you sort of thinking sustainability of that trajectory over the next several years? And as part of that, I guess, if compounding double-digit growth, as you and Michael has spoken about is the North Star, what does that path look like? And which priorities will you lead in on the most?

Yes. I think try to answer backward and forward. In terms of the priorities, we obviously -- we lay out every fall. Here are the set of initiatives, 6 or 7 initiatives that we're going to focus on over the next several years that we think can deliver double-digit growth. And I think if you look over the last 10, 12 years, we've been incredibly consistent. It's evolved a bit, but we don't show up and go this year, we're going into -- we're buying it -- we're pretty consistent in terms of what we do, mainly evolve a bit as we plant some seeds and those things come to bear.

So the 2 that we're talking the most about right now are our venue strategy and international. And there's a high degree of overlap between those 2. But on the venue side, we've seen that a, we need to make a lot more money on a per fan basis when they're in our venues. We think we're pretty good at operating them and have some natural advantages in being the operator of a venue relative to some other potential owners and 3, which I talked about a bit before, it's helpful in some locations to give us a better infrastructure to bring supply and demand together.

Now in terms of the sustainability, I think one of the benefits that we have is that diversification. Ultimately, while we're a global company, it's all very local. Your decision to go see Oasis last weekend, right, is a very local decision. My decision to go see Lainey Wilson last week was a very local decision.

So and then take that and replicate that in hundreds of cities in 50 countries, not dependent on a blockbuster working in December, right? I'm not dependent on this one drug successfully going through trial. I've got 50,000 different events that are taking place every year that you'll have some normal distribution curve of outcomes, that we have teams focusing on each and every one of those 50,000 events, and they're being judged by those. So I think it's that diversification gives us a lot of strength in our sustainability.

Yes, for sure, for sure. So a lot of positive trends. A lot of it, I guess, is underpinned by the demand for overall demand from the consumer. How do you think about sort of the next leg of demand? Do you think more shows, more seats, higher monetization per fan? How do you think about demand from here?

Yes. First and foremost, our view is that we want to bring more artists and more fans together. If we can bring more artists, more fans together, I'm very confident we can unlock other good things to happen. So it's why we always start every one of our growth strategies with -- okay, we're at 70 million fans. We want to get to 100 million fans. We're at 100 million fans, we want to get to 150 million. We're at 150 million want to get to 200 million fans.

If we can do that, then we can figure out what are the other ways that we can monetize that. Some of the people will be in venues. We do some things for ticketing, we could do some things for sponsorship and so on. So we've got a multitude of levers. Ultimately, you want to continue to grow your fan count because that drives the other pieces of the success.

Yes. So I guess moving more near term. You said 2025 is pacing towards double-digit AOI growth, record deferred revenue, ticket sales pacing ahead of last year. What is the single biggest driver, if you had to pick one, of upside to the outlook for the second half of '25? Volume, pricing, international?

I think, again, first and foremost, we've talked a lot about this, it's an incredible stadium year. We've got a lot of great activity. The stadiums have been selling great. 40% of our stadium shows, 95% sold through in the first few weeks of the on sale. Overall, I think our large venue amphitheaters, arenas, stadiums, that activity are probably up 10% fan count. That's what's really driving our concerts growth this year, just a phenomenal year in terms of how we've set that up.

So in terms of upside, it's how do these shows close out other people continue to spend when they get to the venue or there are a few more tours that we might drop in at the latter part of the year. And then as we move in towards planning for '26, it's just -- it's really timing at the end of the day, but what on sales do we have in '25 versus '26. Shifting around, but that obviously impacts each year's economics. And we just try to guide everybody by the time we get to November to get a feel for how much of the activity is occurring Q4 versus Q1.

Yes. So speaking of '26, I think the supply trends show that like 40%, 50% of global stadiums are already booked. What early indicators are you seeing in sort of our supply and demand elasticity? And how might the FIFA events the roll up is going to be in North America next year impact your stadium strategy?

Well, I think it's impacted our stadium strategy by our getting out early by saying, we know we're going to have constraints. There are 16 stadiums that are going to lose a few months. So let's get out early to make sure we're really booking to either start early or end late in those markets, how can we get the availability, how can we get this stuff booked. We're well ahead of where we were expecting to be. I was 6 months ago. I was a lot more concerned than I am today. We made good progress. We still have a long ways to go.

I expect growth to be more -- again, we're still 40%, 50% in stadiums, less in arenas and amps at this point. But the hope would be that we have Stadium's growth internationally. But then look towards the U.S. more on the arena and the amphitheater side for helping drive the business next year would be the mix I would expect.

Yes. And you guys are going to have these -- I mean this is just part and parcel with the industry, you got the Olympics last year.

Exactly. The Olympics in '28. Yes, there's always some constraint that you're managing against -- but no, we feel good. We don't really have shows on sale yet. So most of our demand indicators are around still right now, how are some of the things that are going on sale for later in the year and early next year doing -- how are shows closing, how are people spending on site. All those indicators continue to look good. So we don't see any issues there.

Great. So I guess coming back to Venue Nation, I talked a little bit about it, but maybe dig in a little bit deeper. How do you think about investing that next dollar? And sort of what are the trade-offs that you contemplated as you consider buying versus building and partnering. And I guess also as part of that, what are you seeing from competition at this point? Like whether or not it's AAG or B firms or --

Yes, you always have competition for everything you do, which is fine. We're deeply competitive concert business, deeply competitive ticketing business. Our expectations on the venue side will be exactly the same. So it's our job to figure out in pieces and in total, how do we both create a strategy and then execute the strategy in a way that delivers value for our shareholders. You don't have -- you don't necessarily have a whole range of options when you go into a market. If you decide I want to go and I want to be in Paris.

Well, you don't have 8 vacant lots and 4 people that want to sell their buildings, right. Probably you go in and you say, okay, here, is there a build opportunity? Is there a acquisition? Does that person selling want to stay in and be a partner? Do they want to sell out? So each market you're looking at, you've usually got just a couple of different options.

So you're trying to figure out in that market, with the options you have, is there a structure that you can come up with that's attractive. The good thing is there are so many cities out there that really need that infrastructure or have that opportunity for us outside of the U.S. where you have the $1 billion arenas, multibillion dollar stadiums. You get to the other markets. You're talking about infrastructure that often need some investment because it hasn't had it in a while or you're going to get something that's more focused on music at a much lower cost. There's just a lot of opportunities.

So we don't have -- we don't have to be in London, right? We don't have to be in any single city. We can say, oh, okay, well, let's go be in Lisbon, instead. Let's be in Helsinki. Let's pick the market and let's be in Cardiff, because London doesn't work. We can't get something built, and there's already The O2. Let's go to Cardiff because the local that I talked about earlier, right, if I can get an arena someplace and still put in 50 shows and have 100 nights busy, well, then I can make those economics work and it's attractive for us.

Yes. I mean, obviously, a brilliant strategy. I'm just curious, how does the venue ownership like change your sort of tour routing leverage? And also the economics versus third-party venues -- and just, I guess, help us think through the uplift when an artist runs through your footprint versus third party?

Yes. I would never say we have leverage with artists. I mean, ultimately, the artist is making every fine decision. So our job is to do a great job serving artists and if we can do that, then they give us the opportunity to work with them and figure out a few ways to make a few dollars here and there.

For us, and we've talked before, there's -- you have 2 to 3x the profitability on a per fan basis when they go through your venue because you get the beer money, you get the parking money, get the venue side of the service fee. You get all those other revenue streams that come with being a venue. And because we have a lot of artists that we work with, we have a lot of shows that we put on, if we pick market -- we're not picking markets that the artists -- why the heck am I there, right?

We're picking markets that are major markets and major cities that are very logical that we can show artists they have a strong fan base in, they're going to be delighted because it lets them continue to have more places to successfully tour and successfully have that same sort of gross for their show that they need to have in order to go to those markets. So I don't -- I don't see it as any level of conflict or anything else with the artist. We are creating more places where the artist can go and make money and that's great.

Totally. So I guess turning to Ticketmaster. We talked about a little bit earlier, but how are you approaching sort of international expansion there and technological innovation just to maintain your leadership? And also how you think about sort of navigating the regulatory landscape in different countries and just overall enhancing value for the fans and partners alike?

Yes. First of all, it's obviously a global addressable market. Any place that has a concert, that has a show is ultimately going to need to be ticketed. We think that Ticketmaster is the best platform in the world for selling tickets, selling concert tickets in particular, providing a lot of services to the artist team in terms of marketing, pricing and analytics and other areas.

So we think it's a great platform. It's an interesting business also. I mean, I think on one hand, everybody sees it is just -- it's an incredibly simple business. I just want to go on in the marketplace and buy a ticket. Just like I want to go on Amazon or walmart.com and buy the pair of shoes and have them delivered tomorrow. Why is this complicated? There's not the understanding of what goes on behind the scenes, whether it's in sports, where you have one set of dynamics where tickets are effectively managed via brokers and put on the secondary market to disaggregate season tickets or in the primary market where you have brokers, some just being right there with fans, some cheating to get more tickets and the tickets go on the secondary and why are they on the secondary.

So all of that, combined with the inherent particularly in music, level of passion and commitment you have with fans combined with an era of superstars that more people want to go to than you have tickets. All of that putting a pot and mix it up creates a lot of noise and consternation and happiness. And when people are unhappy, they complain. And when politicians get complaints, they want to be perceived as acting. So they're going to spend time acting.

So I don't think there's anything that's really about us at the end of the day. I think it's about the industry. I think we're seeing some things now. Obviously, the executive order that came out, there is an increased desire for more transparency and more understanding, maybe some clearer rules on how people should behave. We don't have all of that yet. The fair ticketing act that's sitting in Congress, I think, would be helpful. We'll see what comes out of the executive order that it might be helpful.

I think even more transparency, the better for the industry. And we've certainly seen over the past couple of years, we've tried to play our part in terms of creating more transparency. We led with all-in pricing well before it became regulated. We've supported it a lot of other reforms.

So I think in the next couple of years, I think the transparency is inevitable. You're seeing it being discussed not just in the U.S., but in the U.K. and other places, that will ultimately be good for the fans. It will be good for the artists. It will be good for everybody in the system.

Yes. Ultimately, you just want like a clear set of rules, I mean --

Exactly. Yes. Yes.

Okay. So I mean thinking sort of taking what innovations and new technologies are you most excited about in the life of that space and ticketing. And how are you leveraging AI right now to drive those results?

Yes. I think that AI, for us, I wouldn't say that it started to really change things yet. We talked about this a little before. I am absolutely convinced that AI will be transformational for a number of businesses ourselves included. I think 7 years from now, there will be massive changes.

What I don't know is the pace of some of those changes over the next 7 years. It's clearly going to reduce costs. It's going to reduce costs on our technology team of building our systems and adding and creating new products. It's going to reduce the cost of customer service and fan support. It's going to reduce the cost of all of our infrastructure that we have that supports the venues with that venue ERP system.

Today, every show -- every one of those 50,000 concerts plus all the other tens of thousand sporting events and Disney on Ice and Harlem Globetrotters, everything else, every one of those shows, every venue is getting built one at a time. So you can just -- it's not hard to imagine the tools you're going to have that are going to immensely automate that for -- and reduce the cost for both the venue side as well as our side. So all of that will be in place.

And then on the effectiveness side, the marketing, the pricing, the targeting of the fan of the offer. All of that, I think, will ultimately, I think, create a much more personalized interaction with the fan and what they want to have as opposed to what right now is still that 9:00 a.m. Saturday morning, 100,000-person rush to try to buy those Olivia Rodrigo tickets.

So again, I think a lot of that will transform. I think we're -- we tend to underestimate the level of impact that's going to exist over time. And we overestimate the amount of impact that will happen in the next 12 months. So rather than trying to fall into that same trap myself. I would say, every one of those things that I talked about, we have initiatives driving forward. I generally don't go out and talk about how great the results are until we're far enough along that we have confidence of what we're going to deliver and what time frame.

Great. Great. So I guess shifting gears to sponsorship. Sponsorship is pacing up double digits. It's been a great area of growth for you guys over the years now, 95% committed for this year, I believe. Which verticals are driving that? What is sort of the multiyear retention that you guys are having on those? And how much runway remains on naming rights, in venture digital?

Yes. I mean just very tactically this year versus last year. We've had strong growth in financial services, travel, entertainment, technology verticals. If you step back and look a little more broader trend over the past 5 or 6 years. What you're really seeing is that the on-site, the festival sponsorship and the -- what we call venue or on-site at the venues we operate along with the access, the presales and such.

Those pieces of the business, those we would call verticals of our business have all more than doubled. There's just an absolute focus on brands saying, how do I tangibly reach a fan, all the sponsorship that we do is really predominantly focused on how does the brand add value to that fan experience.

It's more than just putting the name up, even if you're getting the name in title, your discussions are also, but then how do we bring that to life? That's great that I haven't even -- how do you really bring that to life? And turn that into some value for the finance because if you deliver value for the fans, then they're going to embrace the brands and see it's very positive. We've done a lot of research that the fans are very open to the brand interactions if they see them delivering some value in the experience for them.

So in terms of runway, this obviously ties back into our venue strategy. So -- so your runway is tremendous as you add fans and as you add venues, you're adding the most valuable assets you can by giving brands greater scale and the opportunity to reach those fans. And in advertising, it's one of the scale to get success because advertisers generally want to have reach. So if you can give them a platform that gives them more reach, that makes it substantially more attractive.

So few minutes left, the obligatory DOJ question. So I'm not going to ask you, obviously to delegate it here, but the trial is set for March. How are you planning for various potential outcomes, whether or not that's a continuation of status quo, some sort of behavior remedies, et cetera, how are you thinking through it? I guess at this point? Obviously, there was a decision last night, favorable to Google. Any thoughts on that?

Yes, I read your note this morning. Still everybody is still digesting it, I think. I start with we run our businesses on a very decentralized basis. So there is nothing that we're doing scheming behind the scenes about some integration connectedness that we'd say, "Oh, my God, we can't continue to operate in that web in the same way."

We run our businesses very decentralized. We spend time on DOJ regulatory issues more broadly, a handful of us at corporate. We do our best to keep the businesses focused on running the business. Everything that we've told our teams to take a master on the concert side, the venue side is you guys keep running. You guys are running your business you guys should not be worried for 1 minute about any of that. You guys just go out and compete hard and very competitive businesses do your best, and we'll deal with that.

We've said that most of the things that we think are the greatest concern around exclusivity, length of exclusivity. These are not things that are ultimately drivers of our success. Exclusivity and ticketing is driven by how venues, certainly in the U.S., how venues seek to monetize their rights.

So the question isn't are we doing anything bad by forcing exclusivity because we're not forcing it. We're not demanding it. That's what they're auctioning off. So if they're told that they can't auction off exclusivity, then fine. We'll adjust.

As I said earlier, I think we got the best platform in the -- we've had clients that are nonexclusive. The vast majority of the time, even when they're not exclusive, they put all their tickets through our platform because it's the best platform to sell tickets. So I wouldn't say that we're -- it's impacting really how the business is operating at all at this point.

Yes, good. So I guess one last question from a few minutes left. Capital allocation. So obviously, Venue Nation strategy is very important. But just what is sort of the target leverage range as you go through this current cycle? And obviously, I know there's a lot of inputs to think about there.

And then beyond that, like what conditions would you prioritize buybacks over sort of this new venue development strategy? I mean it seems as though -- very limited considering how on success you're having, but just what scenario would drive buybacks?

Yes. I think that the venue opportunities, whether it's building them or acquiring them is absolutely the greatest shareholder value creation given the returns that we're generating on that initiative.

I think that we're focused on using first and foremost, the cash that we generate as a business and we look at our balance sheet and as we grow our AOI what kind of increased capacity we have that naturally grows with the business.

And I think if we really hit a dry period, and we were unable to close deals to acquire venues and unable to get them out of the ground and you start building up too much excess cash or delever too greatly, then certainly, you look at what are we going to do with all that cash? The plans we have in place and that we've laid out, we laid out last November in terms of cash to be deployed over the next several years. If we're successful in driving as much venue activity as we hope we are, then that's where the cash will go for the next several years.

And I mean I guess the venue opportunity, you're currently focused, I guess, on like Europe and maybe South America, but then there's opportunities in, let's say, maybe 10 years down the line or something like that, places like India or --

Right now, well, Asia would be the right -- so across Asia, Latin America, Europe, in particular, we just launched one in Salt Lake City, the other day, 6,000 capacity theater. So we've said there's a lot of opportunities in the U.S. So that's kind of 5,000, 6,000 capacity theater often in conjunction with sports owners who are looking to build out around their arenas or stadiums and build more of an entertainment complex.

So yes, we think there's all that in the near term. And then you get into India, Africa and the next horizons and there are certainly more cities but I think ultimately in the next 10, 15 years, they could take your venue than we have on the list today just because you want to prioritize and work from what you have most active today.

Thank you. It's been a great discussion. Really, thank you for your time. Appreciate it. Thanks, Joe.

Thanks, Peter.