At your memorable Capital Markets Day in 2024, the management team outlined their vision for what is described as Streaming 2.0. How would you assess your progress towards the vision for streaming growth as outlined at that event? Yeah, I think it's been fantastic so far. I mean, we laid out exactly how the industry will move in the digital age from being largely focused on just volume-related growth to a mixture of volume and rate-based growth. Since that time, we have announced agreements with the vast majority of the large DSP platforms. As we head into 2026, some of the rate increases that we talked about in each of those are, you know, starting to kick in as we go through this year. In addition to that, around the AI side, you've seen us be very much on the front foot there and be the leading player in terms of announcing deals in that space as well. We continue to find new ways to monetize the space we're in. I think we've done everything the company said we would do at that point 18 months ago and very excited about the path ahead of us. Thank you. Perhaps digging in a little bit deeper on that pricing lever, we've had contract announcements with Spotify, Amazon, Google, and we've had recent price increases from both Spotify and Amazon. When should we anticipate further contract announcements and potentially further price increases? Relating back to the context that Matt set up, because I think it's really important that we were looking in Streaming 2.0 for better customer value optimization through rate increases along with product innovation, and platform integrity moves. Obviously, a lot of focus on the underlying rates, and the reason is really simple. Music as a subscription product has been significantly underpriced relative to other forms of digital entertainment, and we've provided comparisons before with different datasets. The one that I think resonates for people is in the U.S., the average SVOD household is being monetized at north of $60 a month that subscribes. The average music subscribing household is being monetized at less than $15 a month. If you look at the level of engagement, it's about 90% as great for music subscription households as for video subscription households. When, when you look at, you know, that pretty significant gap there, we're not planning to increase music rates by 4x overnight, but we see a significant runway for realizing customer value better. One of the indications, proof points in the marketplace is that with each price rise that has been announced by various platforms, you basically have had no reports of any material churn. Economics 101, you raise prices, there's no churn, you have more runway. You didn't raise prices enough. We're encouraged by the progress that's been made, and we think that there's a lot more of an opportunity. In terms of cadence, what we have done is with each of the deal renewals, as we have progressed into new terms with the partners, we've implemented the Streaming 2.0 framework. As Matt said, we've been successful in implementing a new framework with Spotify, with Amazon, and with YouTube, and with a number of smaller partners too. In terms of the expectation on cadence, there are the deals themselves, and then there's the underlying rate increase timing and then the price increases that you see manifest in the marketplace. That's in the process of, like, rolling out, you know, over the course of, you know, the last year, you know, into this year. We've indicated that most of what you're gonna see in terms of the impact of the rate increases, is moving forward from here, into 2026. Alongside those deals from the Streaming 2.0, we've had some new deals with startups including Udio, NVIDIA, Stability AI, a real diverse list. The deal with Udio is particularly notable. Could you outline the key features of these new AI partnerships, how UMG monetizes the relationship, and early updates on momentum? We're very excited about what we view as constructive disruption that's happening in the music sector with AI. You know, we've talked about, you know, minimizing the downside, but we're much more focused on optimizing the upside. We see a lot of potential for innovation. You know, Udio is interesting because it's a great example of defense into offense. We focused on defending our artists' rights. Of course, we're gonna vigorously defend their rights and their interests. That's been critical to our partnership with the creative community, and we'll talk a little bit later maybe about how that feeds into their support for adoption of new models. With Udio, out of litigation, we resolved with a compensatory piece of the new deal. The enthusiasm that we felt in terms of the partnership is really focused on going forward establishing a new product model. Udio agreed to deprecate the old product model. Their focus is on working with us, opted-in artists, ethically trained model, new product offer for consumers that enables what we think is the real commercial appeal of applying AI to a music catalog, where you allow the consumer to interact directly with the content they really care about, with the artists they really care about. This is remixes, mashups, you know, different forms of customization, what we refer to as hyper-personalization, enabling the fans to directly interact with the artists that they love and to participate in music culture. Those are really the key drivers of the music economy. Fans connecting with artists they love, fans participating in music culture. This type of product construct really brings those two components, features together. In the analysis that we've done, looking at what consumers are interested in with respect to product features, the thing that ranks the lowest is simulated artists, what we would call perhaps pejoratively fake artists. What they're most interested in is that direct interaction that I described. When we test these different features, between 30%-40% of the fans that are interested in AI and music are gravitating towards that feature set. We're excited about the product, the expression that we expect to be in the market later this year. We're really happy that the defense and the offense game plan resulted in this very aligned partnership with Udio. We think that the way that they're innovating is gonna put a really exciting product into the marketplace, and it really epitomizes what we're looking to bring about in terms of innovation with respect to music services and AI. Yeah. Michael, I think you mentioned defense into offense a couple of times there. What's important here is we've done the work, we talked about it on the earnings call last week, listening to consumers. What do they want better today? It's not fake artists. They do want a better experience. They do wanna be able to kinda play around with some of the music they already know and love. This is additive to what we see going on today rather than we're gonna see a substitution from, you know, the music generated by the artists that we're all familiar with to now just being AI-generated music going forward. That's why we're, you know, very positive about just like every other technology that's come along that's been additive to the music industry, the way that consumers can interact. When consumers can improve their interaction, they listen to music more, they interact with it more, and they spend more on it. We see this as just the next chapter in that book. One of your absolutely enormous differentiators is the roster of superstar artists. Should we expect broad participation in your AI products or more selectivity from the biggest stars? Any early signs from the initial phases, and is it a bit more complicated than that and actually depends on the products we... Always a little more complicated than that. you know, first of all, by focusing on the interests of artists and advocating a very artist-centric approach to AI innovation, I think we've earned a lot of credibility with the artist community. Going back to 2023, when we articulated a set of principles and then got YouTube to support us in articulating principles as part of launching a new set of experiments and an artist incubator, our artists were all 12 of the founding members of the Music AI Incubator, and that included, you know, some major stars and very, very important artists in their genres that were part of that early experiment. I think that the credibility that we've established in starting the process off by working, you know, with artists and thinking about tools created by artists, you know, for artists and monetizing the content of artists, building the trust of the artist community every step of the way, and making it really clear that we were only gonna support models that fully embraced the integrity of their rights and fully advanced their interests, I think we're in a very good position right now. We're deeply engaged with our artist roster through our operating units. very, very strong indications of support. We expect to launch these new products on an opt-in basis with very, very, you know, strong critical mass support from our artist community. Of course, artists have, you know, various, you know, levels of interest, and. What's the word I'm looking for here? You know, there's reservation in some cases about AI. There may be a, you know, a little bit more of a wait and see attitude on the part of some artists. There are some artists that are extremely leaned in and wanna be on the cutting edge of experimentation. We're gonna respect all those perspectives. We're gonna operate on an opt-in basis and, you know, we're obviously going to, you know, work to encourage the first movers and put them in a position to have great success in the launch of these new products and then prove the model out and grow momentum over time. The early results of our conversations with our creative constituency have been very positive, and we expect to have that critical mass to support the launch of these products. Fantastic. Moving on to a related different issue, there was lots of noise in 2024 and 2025 around super fan or super premium tiers on DSPs. It seems that those hopes have faded a little with complexity around, for example, the windowing of rights or ticketing. Are AI tools the new super fan tiers? When can we expect those kind of products to be with consumers? Should we still think of that same addressable market of one in five premium customers as you talked in the super fan tiers? Yes. In short, I think the question has characterized the succession of events that lead us to the present day. We still believe in the feature set that we articulated around super premium, and if you look at the proof points, for example, in China with both Tencent and NetEase achieving a significant level of consumer adoption for a higher priced tier, 5x the standard price for the SVIP tier and, you know, trending through like mid-teens of adoption. Some folks have done analysis like trending the public statements from Tencent a year ago. They come up with the conclusion that we're approaching the point where we're proving out what we said was the objective, the target 20% adoption of the current subscriber base at perhaps like 2x multiple of the current price point for that feature set. Now, what's happened in terms of the major platforms is AI's overtaken that conversation the way it's taken over just about every other economic and cultural conversation in our world. The focus of the major platforms has been to compete on AI innovation. The plans now have really set on how can AI be implemented and harnessed in a way that advances the music subscription proposition for the consumer. I think what you're gonna see from the major platforms, now, you know, in this market, in the U.S., you're going to see AI being integrated into the feature set and be a core part of the super premium proposition. That's with respect to the DSPs, and we see the super fan opportunity as being broader than that, and there are many things that we're looking to offer that are not just, you know, entirely focused on AI. The DSPs, we think they certainly have a big role to play, but we're not waiting for them to bring some of these things in. You've seen earlier this year we've already announced a couple of deals, one with Stationhead and one with EVEN. These are two companies that bring some of these super fan experiences to consumers. Stationhead allows artists and fans to have listen parties, et cetera. Then EVEN gives artists the ability to make their music available earlier to a subset of fans who have paid for the service. We've seen one of our own artists, J. Cole, has with his latest release, take advantage of that. Some of these super fan experiences may be part of an overall DSP offering, they may be standalone. We continue to see it as a very important piece. We know there's a subset of consumers that want to engage with their artists more deeply, willing to pay more to do so, and we're very happy to continue to find ways and find partners who are gonna help facilitate that. We've talked a little bit about some of the AI opportunities. Recently, AI fears have impacted global media and internet share prices across diverse segments, including, of course, the music industry. For music labels and other content owners, I think there are two primary fears: increased competition as barriers to content creation fall, and secondly, deflationary pressure from UGC-based offerings. You've got some very unique advantages, the high catalog consumption in the music industry, your formidable market share, your fandom as the basis of consumption, but risks remain. Could you talk through those risks and how you are navigating them? I'm happy to do so. Based on a lot of analysis and reflection, we feel like the case for AI dilution risk has been massively overextrapolated from a few anecdotes. On the earnings call last week, we went through some data points and analysis. If, if you were listening in on the earnings call, forgive me if I'm repeating things that you're already familiar with. If you look at the actual consumption of content, there was a story in Billboard about 10 different artists that were impacting the charts last year that were AI artists. We analyzed the performance of those artists on the charts, and the number one AI artist did not break into the top 7,000 acts last year, and the number 10 in that list of 10 did not break into the top 92,000. If you look at all of those AI artists, the most popular AI artists, like in the English language market, in the U.S., which is the furthest along in terms of, you know, adoption of AI and embrace of AI, the actual performance of that repertoire was 0.015% of the consumption of the artists in that same bracket of charting. If you look at the organic consumption across a platform where we have the best public data, this is Deezer, but Deezer's data is analogous to all the DSPs because all the DSPs get hit with the same distribution pipes. They just happen to have the technology that they developed under a 2023 deal that we did with them, our first artist-centric deal with Deezer, where they have the ability to detect and manage AI content. What they found is the vast majority of AI content that's being consumed is associated with fraud. 85% of all the streams of AI content on their platform are detected and excluded from the royalty pool based on being fraud. The organic consumption of this content, and this is 60,000 tracks being uploaded every day. We don't have to theorize about what a future of AI inundation would look like. We are in, you know, the current age of AI in content inundation. 60,000 tracks a day being uploaded to the platform, the organic consumption by consumers of that content is less than half of 1%. There's very, very little content consumption. We put a number of protections in our deals to exclude even that level of content consumption from the royalty pool. There are the anti-fraud provisions, and that would attack the 85% of the total streaming, and catch a lot of the content that might potentially impact the royalty pool. There's also artist-centric provisions that demonetize content below a certain threshold of consumption. Specifically, we've introduced in many of our deals, in most of our new deals that we've announced, anti-dilution protection against AI content, meaning that pure AI content is not part of the royalty pool calculation, with respect to, you know, our participation and revenues from the platform. There's very little organic consumption, and there's no material dilution of our revenues. That level of risk is not something we're too particularly worried about. The issue of AI content creation with tools, we're actively supporting through partnerships that you mentioned, for example, Stability AI, also with Splice. We think developing tools with artists in incubators, so tools developed by artists or artists remunerating artists for the training, so ethically developed tools within the right parameters, so you're not asking an artist to sort of give up their name and likeness in association with content that somebody else is creating as a derivative of their content, and then competing with them. Putting it, you know, within guardrails so you're really talking about professional content creation by artists, we think there's an incredible opportunity to amplify artists' voices and visions with a new tool set. Think of it as the synthesizer of the 21st century. You know, from the standpoint of ethically developed tools and that contribution to the music economy, we think that's really significant. From the standpoint of dilution of generic, like, AI slop content, we think that that is almost entirely mitigated right now, the combination of a lack of consumer interest and our ability to put protection into our deals. Thanks, Michael. Perhaps shifting gears away from AI, towards free cash flow and net content investment. Yep. Back of the envelope, it's average 5% of revenue over the last five years across both artist advances and catalog deals. Speaking to investors, a key anxiety is that's effectively maintenance rather than growth CapEx, sustaining rather than boosting growth. For each of the advances and catalog deals in turn, do they make UMG grow faster? How will that play out in the medium-term financials? Yeah, absolutely. They are a key part of the growth strategy. You know, we continue to be very happy to engage with artists, to sign them up for additional pieces of work, lengthening our relationship with them. It's one of the reasons we are the company we are today. Are advances higher than they were 5 years ago, 10 years ago? Yes. So are the revenues the artists are generating. When you think about the advances, as a share of the value the artist is producing. That's why I put the additional information in the call last week. Over the last, since 2019, the last six years now, gross advances have gone up by 8%, whereas our total revenue's gone up by 10%. There's very much a case of moving in proportion. When you think about advances, especially with an established artist, it's not just recoupable from the new work that they are going to produce and provide, but it is also the catalog that we have with them. As catalog has increased in terms of its share of overall listening as we've gone into this digital phase, for an established artist, an advance has never really been safer than they are today. We certainly see, you know, it's part of having the largest artists, largest stable of great artists. You saw us announce last week that for the third year in a row, we had nine of the top 10 artists last year. That's an incredible record, and it comes from you know, consistently investing in our artists, being their partner of choice, helping them develop the careers that they want to have, the results speak for themselves. Catalog is a great way for us to continue to add to the total product that we bring to the marketplace. We think we have the ability to monetize that better than anyone else. We look at every opportunity on a standalone basis. When there's value to be had, we will acquire the catalog and I think our track record on what we've delivered, the growth of revenue and EBITDA associated with that speaks for itself. The continued spend on catalog despite the Chord deal. Yeah is a reflection of opportunity? Yeah. Look, I think Chord, we're very proud of that relationship. There's other people we work with as well, in that space. You know, Chord has been increasing their velocity. There's a number of deals that have gone there. There were some that we knew Chord was gonna take, but we initially purchased and now sold on to Chord as well. We're not gonna necessarily put every catalog acquisition through one of those vehicles. We may continue to do a number of them on our own balance sheet, especially as you think about expanding globally to some markets where we don't necessarily have as a larger back catalog, and, you know, try to build up that. That may be better for us to do ourselves. We look each deal on an individual basis. Very clear. Perhaps, moving on to a different and related debating topic around artist remuneration. Yes. There are concerns that increased artist remuneration will drag on both margins and free cash flow. Disentangling what's driven by changing royalty models, e.g., more distribution deals, the Downtown deal, more investment and growth, underlying artist cost inflation is very difficult. How should investors think about the outlook for artist royalty inflation and its impact on your operating margins? Obviously there's a number of different deals structures. You mentioned there's distribution deals we're doing through Virgin, now Downtown as well. They have very different structures than what we do throughout front, frontline labels. The margin's lower. It's incremental EBITDA that adds to the total company profitability and cash flow. We look at it on a return on investment basis. As we look at those distribution deals, they meet our return criteria. As I think about our frontline label transaction with artists, we continue to see very healthy margins in that business. The nature of a deal will evolve over an artist's career. As an artist goes from being in the early stage of their career to when they hit a high level of success or become one of those nine out of the top 10, you're gonna see their deal structures change over time. That's based off of the level of success they've had, the comfort level we have with the catalog and how that's gonna play out, and so on. In terms of the overall, are artists in general taking a larger share? I don't think so. I just think you see artists earn more and more as the total industry has earned more and more as well. They very much move in relationship. Very clear. Switching gears perhaps to your emerging market business, which is an increasingly important growth driver as volume growth shifts to emerging markets, as Western markets mature and living standards rise in EM. How is Universal Music's market share evolving from an organic perspective? Do recent deals move the needle in addition to that? When we think about how key emerging markets mature from a streaming perspective, how do they differ from the playbook we've seen in developed markets over the last 10 to 20 years? Yeah. Certainly, the approach we're taking to the high potential markets is really threefold, right? One, we certainly want to have a traditional frontline label, A&R presence in those markets. Secondly, we will have our labels and services business, Virgin, expand in those markets as well, so we can work with local artists and local entrepreneurs who are already established there. Thirdly, you know, when we see the right M&A opportunities in different markets, you'll see us participate there. Done a number of deals in the last two, three years in places like Vietnam and Thailand and Nigeria and so on. We're very excited about the ability to create the footprint in those markets and then, you know, really grow as those markets continue to grow. See very good increase in, you know, digital platform initially, often in ad-supported streaming, but moving into subscription. You know, so have that ability to. You know, the vast majority of the consumption of music is local language, local music in those markets. Being there, having the credibility in each of those places, having the presence there and the ability to, you know, it's not just taking a global artist and say, "We can take them into all these countries." You have to have that local presence as well. Very proud of what the team's been building out and, you know, the opportunity for that to be a growth driver for a number of years ahead is very strong. Sort of shifting gears to the recent major deal that you completed. Yeah. Could you talk through the strategic benefits of the Downtown deal for the group and what it brings what's complementary to the existing UMG portfolio? Yeah. Certainly we've been expanding significantly for a few years now, you know, what we call the Virgin Music Group. We were in the distribution business in a few different ways prior to that, but it really hadn't been a focus. As we saw, you know, that part of the industry growing faster, I mean, there's we like what we do with our frontline businesses, but, you know, there's only a certain number of artists that we're gonna be able to service that way. As we've seen this, you know, the other part of the business expand, it gave us the opportunity to get in there. The team under Nat and JT have done a great job of building our business there. We had the chance to partner with Downtown, will give us a really strong business there on a combined basis as we think about everything you want to offer individual independent artists, smaller labels, what they need as they expand the various different services, so it's not a one-size-fits-all approach to the different customers they have. We feel much better positioned with that combination to really provide, you know, a great service to that part of the market and that will contribute significantly to the overall company results. When we think about ad streaming, which is one of the group's primary revenue drivers, short-form video consumption among your partners has exploded, but the music industry's monetization has lagged with the perception that contracts are based on minimum guarantees rather than ad revenue share at this stage. How are these short-form video relationships evolving with Google, Meta, ByteDance from a monetization perspective? What's driven the recent improvement in performance in that segment, excluding the impact of those deals? We have made progress in our partnerships with the social media players that you identified on that list and with others. Of course, we're always, you know, fighting for full participation and value creation of our artists on our partners' platforms, and so you can rest assured that, you know, we're working to improve the economics of those deals. I mean, one thing to keep in mind, people tend to talk about flats as though it's some sort of abstract number. In a situation where the platform doesn't have the ability to pay on a rev share basis, we haven't put that model in place, and we have proxy economics. We understand the consumption of our content on the platform, and we're strongly advocating, you know, fair participation in the deals on the basis of, you know, knowing what engagement of music is like on those platforms. The thing with short-form and the disruption there in particular is that you've had a big shift in consumption without the evolution of the ad products that fully address the level of engagement of consumers on those platforms. Also, the platform evolution has sort of lagged in terms of monitoring and measuring, and, managing the consumer engagement of that content up against monetization. There has been a little bit of a lag effect, but we are making progress. We expect to continue to make progress. Because of the secular migration of ad dollars online to social and video and short-form where, you know, we play significantly, you know, we do expect to see significant growth over time. In the most recent quarter that we reported, we had, you know, 9% increase year-over-year. We attributed about half of that to deal-based increase in value and about half of that to underlying organic growth. We still preach caution in looking at the expansion of ad-supported in the near term. We're bullish in the mid to long term about our ability to grow revenues. We are improving in terms of monetization with the partners in the short-form category in all the deal renewals that we're in the middle of. Jumping around a little bit in the, in the last few minutes. The cost-saving program that was announced in 2024. Yep. Where have you achieved the biggest savings within your cost base? Can developments in AI complement that via greater cost efficiencies? Yeah. Through the end of last year, we've delivered about EUR 165 million of the EUR 250 million. We'll deliver the rest over 2026 and 2027, on track with that. A lot of it has been restructuring some of the organizational structure in various parts of the business, and really making sure that we're spending time on the items that we think are gonna create value going forward. You know, if there's things that we've worked on in the past that were useful then but not so much going forward, that we stop doing those things. There's ongoing restructuring activity. We started in the U.S. labels, gone to some of the overseas locations as well now, We'll continue to do that. You asked about AI. AI is another tool in terms of managing the business and looking at the processes that we use to deliver the products and services that we do. It is a new tool, but it's not gonna be the right tool for every situation. You know, it's certainly gonna allow us to do a number of things faster and more efficiently and more effectively. When you think of the amount of data that we now have through the digital services that we've been on for many, many years now, the ability to really get all the insights out of that and do it quickly is, you know, changing on a daily basis, and the team's very much engaged there. How we do it, you know, some of the marketing campaigns, how quickly we can spin those up has changed, and I'm sure a year from now we'll be talking about new things in that space as well that we're doing. It's another tool. It's just a case of constantly challenging the team of, you know, increasing the efficiency and effectiveness on how we do things. We talk about programs like the EUR 250 million program. They're important. You know, some of the cost work is one of those things where you're never actually ever done. Every year, we have to constantly be looking at are we being as efficient, in where we're spending money? Are we spending resources, putting resources to work that are consistent with the go-forward strategy of the company as opposed to just what we've done in the past? That's something we'll continue to do. Perhaps last question, as I know we've kind of gone over the 30 minutes, timer. Could you talk a little bit through how you're thinking about capital allocation from here? Yeah. The relative appeal of buybacks in the context of the recent share price dislocation. Yeah. M&A in the context of the emerging market label pipeline, catalog acquisition, in addition, sort of what's the right level of leverage for the group in the longer term? Yeah. Look, the first thing that we'll always look to do is how do we make sure we're investing in the future growth of the business. That's our ability to continue to support artists, continue to look at catalogs that we think will add value, and then M&A, whether it supports the emerging market strategy or whether it supports our Virgin business or any other growth part of the business where there's opportunities to invest and create value. Secondly, we're committed to a very significant dividend, right? We pay out at least 50% of our cash flow as a dividend to our investors. As you think about buybacks, it's certainly something that, you know, the board has conversations around when we look at the different stock prices where we may wanna do that. I think fundamentally we look at cash and say the number one thing we wanna do is invest and generate a return for shareholders. Obviously there may be, you know, the right time for buybacks. That hasn't been that case to date. Then in terms of, you know, we like the leverage on the balance sheet. It allows us to invest where we need to. There's space for us to put a little more leverage on and stay within our current ratings. We have the flexibility to think about a lot of different things, which, you know, gives us a lot of optimism about the future. We don't see us being restricted in terms of pursuing any opportunities that will come up. With the execution of the track record of the UMG team, we feel great about having those opportunities and being able to go after them. Well, I think that's a great note to finish on. huge thanks to yourself, Matt, and Michael for all the detailed answers, and, thanks for everyone in the audience today. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.