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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 Loschek, and I cover entertainment here at Goldman Sachs. We are excited to welcome back to the Communicopia and Technology Conference, Joe Berktold, 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, you know, thinking back over the last number of decades, the industry's compounded at a higher level. It's a high single-digit growth rate for a number of years. We'd just be curious to get your take at this point in time in terms of what 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? Yeah, I think we start with just the industry as opposed to us. I think they were absolutely still in the early years. I mean, most of what we've seen in the last couple of decades is still largely a 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, if not stronger, than it has been. 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 are international markets outside the u.s but but put the other way right u.S. is five percent of the global population still has half of our business. Latin America is up for us 15 times in the past 10 years. It's still one-tenth 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. Again, this year 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 LiveNation 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, multi-year growth algorithm at that double-digit rate? Yeah, so first is just for us it's always continue to put it 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, $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 of in and of itself, it 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 artist needs. 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'thave enough of it. And big cities, you know, Rome, Istanbul, Frankfurt. And in Europe, it's, you know, 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. It's a great way to set the stage, and I do want to dive deeper into a lot of those drivers. 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 artists tour at an incredibly robust clip over the last three to four years. I would just be curious to get your sense to the extent of if this is slowing at all or if you see the supply-side of the marketplace continuing to scale over the next number of years. 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 brand. 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. Number one artist post-COVID has been bad funding, selling out stadiums globally. You've got, obviously, K-pop has been a huge phenomenon, Latin in general. Number two 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 a truly global so you know pre-covid and eight percent of our top 50 uh of our Top 50 tours were by non-English speaking artists today it's 30 percent I don't think we're going to be it's not going to that long where I'm sitting here saying and now over half of our artists are not US UK English speaking artists it's just it's easy for them and you know you I'm amazed I look at all of our shows down in LA number of artists who I've never heard of who are selling out arenas even stadiums in LA but if you think about it if you're an artist of a very specific genre you only need 0.1 percent of the population in LA to be your community right so really what's happening is is they're able to reach that 0.10 percent 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 and social media who shares the music with their friends and brings them to 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 this supply. Maybe a near-term supply question. Investors and analysts often focus on the near-term mix of touring, the geography of that tour, 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? Yeah, 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, even. 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. The U.K. 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, two-thirds of our growth in large venue types, those three, 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.F. continues to do well. Everybody's looking for a glass half full version of those comments. um timing again consistently i think two-thirds or so of our growth and fan counts coming in the second half this year um doesn't mean anything we don't worry about quarter to quarter we're trying to continue to you know build for build make the full year successful lay the foundation for the long-term growth um looking at 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 markets. I think international markets will lead our growth, but I think that's going to start to be an irrelevant statement. Ten years ago, we had five 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 to have to take with a grain of salt. But, yeah, 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 a slowdown in the job market. Just would love to get your latest sense on what you're seeing out there on the demand-side, things like tickets go through and per caps. Yeah. I mean, empirically, again, I would start with the big numbers are the best indicator. We've sold over 155 million tickets. We're still up 12% year-on-year toward that 175 number that I talked about earlier. So we've seen no deceleration whatsoever. I think we have these conversations every quarter. Our sell-through rates are very consistent with our sell-though 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 international arenas. So people are continuing to spend when they show up. 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, you know, 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 onthe back of thehouse 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 mean, 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 the type of experience they want to have, and we're not asking people to go three times a week, right? This is a couple 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, every week we get the numbers, 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 VenuNation. It's an increasingly important part of the Live Nation investment narrative, the Live Nation story. We'd love just at a high level, Joe, if you can maybe talk a little bit about the strategy behind Venu Nation. Talk us through the opportunity that you see out there and why you think it's a good use of capital. Yeah, I think, I mean, all of 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 Longtime, it was fine, but I wouldn't say, you know, 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, and 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 what you have to spend. How do you reduce friction? 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 three 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's getting the same experience. Nowhere does everybody get the same experiences. How do you create more premium offers so people can have? Yeah, 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 wanna 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 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 got 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 two 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 mean, 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 70. The top 75 market, forget the fact that there's easily the next 75 after that so we think it 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 that connect with their fans. That's absolutely our mantra, right? We're not, this is not a zero sum at all. That is one of the things, again, go back to tailwinds. It's great to be in a business that has the structural supply and demand tailwind 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. 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 five 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 of that, I think about the cadence and mix of that contribution. Is there any venue type in particular that you feel like drives that added capacity. Yeah, so I mean, no question, arenas or things like arenas are our number one priority. So arenas, particularly in Europe and Asia, Latin America, you have some of these venues that are a little bit more like a stadio GNP that may be a little but 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. They're 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 US. There's a handful of them, but because of the NBA, NHL, NHL, you've got a pretty established modern arena network here. As I said, we've gone from five, ten years ago, to 25 arenas that we're operating now globally. Eighty-five percent of that fan growth coming from the international market, so I expect that to continue. I think, you know, what have we done? In that period, we basically doubled our operated fan count. It's being about $75 million now. Seventy percent of that growth has come because of the international markets, definitely 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'll be 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 do 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 first quarter? In the second 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, excuse me. 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. 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 Ticketmasters sits in a great spot with, it's the beneficiary of the tailwinds that the concerts business is the beneficuary of. So first and foremost, it will benefit 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 Samuel and his team. 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 in and Japan's a complicated market It uses retail distribution. It's not just a matter of bringing in a people. They get to your master I'll just drop in a marketplace. It 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 But I see continued growth in our international markets. That will position as 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 client 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 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 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. 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 views as to how fast you think Ticketmasters could grow or net new fee-bearing tickets added to the platform? Yeah, 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, through 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 right that that's moving at such a pace and i think that you know 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 has never been the main focus of Ticketmaster, but it still drives a notable portion of your service fee revenue. We would just love your updated thoughts on how you are thinking about the role secondary plays within the Ticket master 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? Yeah, as we've talked about, we see secondary as a feature, not a standalone product. We think it's important to be in it for a couple of reasons. One is sports are very different than concerts in the second area. 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 disaggregated them and put them on the secondary it's good for them because they get the money up front they get If it's 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 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 concert. So the secondary existing concerts because people see a price arbitrage. and our philosophy is always we start by working with the artist or other content owners what's their agenda how do they want to see their tickets sold if that means they want a price them closer to market value we support that that means they want give value to the fans we support that if they want have it so that it's limited transfer so that 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 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 artists demands so we're trying to figure out and it's It's an 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, oh, primary tickets do still exist, and I'll often make the price-value tradeoff 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'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 splatter 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, loaded 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 all large numbers, but on the Venue Nation side, it seems like there's a lot of capacity coming down the pipe. Yeah, 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 number one 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'll be the number one driver. The other, and I alluded to it earlier when I talked about Ticketmaster benefits on this side versus the Ticketing Master books technically, but everything that gets done on that Ticket Master 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 if someone on 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? You know, I mean, the team's 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 anything we're missing that's a big hole. I want to touch on capital allocation 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 jewelry verdict. Could you just remind investors where we are in the regulatory process today and how things could play out from here? Yeah. 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'll continue on over the next two or three months. Then in terms of the post-trial with the states, we have a couple 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 these states did an effective job with a trial to win over a jury, which is different in our mind than a trial that went on the facts of the case. We think the DOJ settlement was fully responsive to the facts of a case, so we'll see how the 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 progress play out and sort of timelines from there? You take it to the appellate court? That probably takes nine months to a year, depending on what they do. And then you have an ultimate option of appealing based on that to the Supreme Court, which, you know, 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 VenuNation 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. 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 this synthetic venue co-structure and then a typical capital structure with the rest of the business. So I think our leverage may fluctuate a bit. If we grow our venue business, you may actually get a bit higher leverage, but because a lot of it is in that separate vehicle, you have to kind of go a 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.