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 Communicopian Technology Conference, Joe Berchtold, the CFO of Live Nation Entertainment. Joe, thanks for being back with us today. Thanks, Stephen. All right. First, maybe to start for those either newer or just revisiting the Live Nation Entertainment story, I thought it'd 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. I'd say 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 you 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 five, ten years? Yeah, I think it's been an incredible run for the last 20 years. If you look at it, it's basically grown at about an 8% compounded annual growth rate, which for any business over that length of time, it's pretty good. Over that period, we've grown our business from about 30 million fans to over 150 million fans last year. 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, there's no major leaps. In 2005, our business was about 70% North America. If you look at it this year, we've sold, I think, 158 million tickets at this point. You know, let's call it 160 million. It'll be over half international fans this year. We've done a great job growing the North America business. It's quadrupled roughly over the 20 years. The international business, as it's truly globalized, is where you've seen the tremendous growth, eightfold increase. 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. 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. I think that'll 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 Entertainment at a higher level, you had a target for double-digit annualized growth over the next five or so years, over the medium term. What opportunities specifically to Live Nation Entertainment's execution are must needs in order to execute against that double-digit growth opportunity? Yeah, I think number one is we grow our fan base. 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 to 200 million. I expect 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%+ returns for the portfolio as we invest in those venues. 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. 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 and 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. 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 two. Specifically as it relates to supply, we've seen artists tour at such a robust clip coming out of COVID. 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 2026, 2027? Are there secular reasons why artist supply just continues to tick higher on a global basis? 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 DSP's distribution of recorded music is global. The social media platforms, so the TikToks, Instagrams, and others are global. That fan base is global. Ten 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, a 50% increase from five years ago. We're seeing, I think, 20% of our top 50 tours are non-English-speaking international artists, double what it was five years ago. 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, I feel like one of the bigger debates of this year as people look ahead into 2026 is the World Cup. We'll be hosting 104 games next year across 16 stadiums in North America. It's a lot of capacity. That'll be restrainers coming offline for at least a part of the summer. Could you talk a little bit more about how Live Nation's navigating this? As you look forward to the stadium slate in 2026, 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? Yeah, the team's done a great job in the past three or four 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. 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. 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. We're halfway through. 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 six months ago, just in terms of how we were going to deal with it. 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's 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. Would just be curious to get 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. Yeah, I think we really tend to get lumped at first glance into this highly discretionary big swings in demand bucket. I don't think that's ever been our reality. The first thing is we're not dependent on you coming seven times a week. We're not dependent on high frequency. All that we need is for a quarter of you to go once or twice a year to a show and for that special outing, that special event. 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. That's just not our reality. We've talked long. 30% of our tickets are under $50. Two-thirds 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. Artists are very focused on their relationship with their fans. 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. They're not, and now, by the way, on the other side, they'll take 10% of their tickets and they'll say, yeah, those are the best tickets. 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. 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. Overall, you see, again, I look at long-term trends more than I worry about noise of what bounces around year to year. You're seeing some, you know, 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. Pricing the entire house absolutely means a big focus on keeping a large portion of tickets available to all fans. Long wind-up to say, 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 days. For those 14 days, they had 10 times as many people show up for the queue as were able to even get in the queue or even able to get in to buy a ticket. Only a third of the people that got in to buy a ticket were able to buy a ticket. You had 3% of the people that showed up able to buy tickets. This is a band that, you know, may or may not roll off your tongue as the hottest thing. It's a phenomenal show, by the way. There is absolutely very strong demand from the biggest stadiums to these incredible events at the Sphere to what's going on in our clubs and theaters. Festivals continue to perform well. 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. 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 around to wanting to come to the show to the people who are two weeks out or 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. Part of it is using pricing to do that. 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 set to come online next year in 2026. 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. Yeah, I'd say our number one priority is looking at the international markets at the infrastructure of arena. 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. If you look at the top 75 markets, probably half of them are lacking a modern arena. 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. 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., put on the YouTube Theater. 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's in this business. How do we work together? What's the role that we each play? How do we build that? 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 open to a range of things. We recently bought, at the start of this year, the arena in Lisbon. We'll put some money in that. We'll bring that up to more modern standards. That'll 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. We're very flexible as we look at the markets. What's the make opportunity? What's the buy opportunity? If it's a buy opportunity, is it buy and refurbish? Or how exactly do we play it based on just what's available in that market? 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 in 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 continues? Yeah, 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-digit 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. 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. 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. 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 it, you know, 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. 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 to world-class standards, 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's interesting. You mentioned programming. Do you feel like the reason you're getting an uplift in utilization is the type of acts that you're bringing into these markets, maybe you're selecting better markets to begin with, quality of the venue? You can go back to what I said earlier. 11,000 artists we're 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. All of that helps drive your utilization. On per-capita spending, you mentioned 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-capita spending higher across your portfolio of owned and operated venues. Yeah, look, operating venues is the same as, you know, we can talk about a number of different aspects of the business. You have to understand the world's changing. If you try to say, hey, I ran this playbook 10 years ago, why aren't I being successful today? 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 base. 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. 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. You have to have the products, the ready-to-drink High Noons, gin and juices are going to be very popular with those demographics. 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. It's our job to figure out how to make it easy on them. Michael's talked a lot about this notion of 30% of our audience should have the opportunity to have some sort of premium experience. That premium experience, again, will differ by who the audience is. It'll 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. 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. 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? As you look more broadly within the realm of concert promoter M&A or maybe even ticketing M&A internationally, where the frontier is? Yeah, obviously Latin America has been a huge success story for us. We've talked a lot about triple 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 an artist like Shakira, who's very popular there, doing stadium shows in 12 different cities in Mexico. A home run number, I can't remember, 12, 14 stadiums in Mexico City. 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. 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. 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. It'll play very nicely into the venue side as well. The other opportunity, again, consistent, I think, with what we've talked about is Asia. 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. 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 hundred million fans. Again, incredible opportunities in Japan on the promotion side, the local artist side, exporting the J-pop, the venue side. It'll 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. 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 and 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 just to gauge the business and to think about the puts and takes. You mentioned some of the strong demand trends earlier in the conversation. Yeah, 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. Yeah, 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. 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. That's helping us a bit this year. 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 viewers over the last couple of years. $17 million enterprise tickets added to the platform already this year. Maybe just talk a little bit about the growth looking ahead, international versus U.S. 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's competitive edge is? Yeah, I mean, just to start, it's a very competitive industry. All the industries we're in are very competitive. There aren't a lot of industries that aren't highly competitive these days. 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. 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. Empirically, 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, its pricing capabilities, its 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. You look at the overall growth profile of the business. Again, it's a fantastically situated business as 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'll continue to benefit, number one, from our concert side. As it grows from 150 to 200 million tickets, that'll deliver natural growth to Ticketmaster. We're adding other clients, as I just mentioned, another 20 million tickets. It'll benefit as well from some of the general pricing trends that we've talked about. Its services have been very successful creating pricing and marketing services for event organizers that it can charge for. I expect that'll continue. 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 on the 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 two. What are you seeing in the secondary marketplace? Has it gotten more competitive? Is there anything you're looking to do to stabilize some of that market share, some of the performance trends at a secondary? Yeah, 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 kind of 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. The 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 tickets. 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. 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. I simply, you know, we don't even report secondary versus primary broken out. I give you guys occasionally 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? Yeah, I think, again, we lay this out every fall with our investor presentations. I think what we said in those is that Ticketmaster's probably, you know, 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. 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 sponsorships have been under contract in the 2026 supply demand. Yeah, 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. Overall, we've talked double-digit growth over the last year in terms of travel and entertainment, financial services, technology sectors. More importantly, looking at it over a bit longer timeframe, really since 2019, growth heavily driven on the festival and on the venue side. 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, the big conversation we've been having this year is around the opportunity to super fan more broadly in the music industry and live entertainment. Clearly, a way super passionate fans interact with artists. Just curious to get your latest sense of how Live Nation, 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. Yeah, 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. In this context, we absolutely see an opportunity to work with them. 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 we think about it over the next year or two? Yeah, I expect it'll play out. Everybody's 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, 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 purchases, dividends. Yeah, certainly over the next handful of years, certainly our focus is going to be on the venue expansion side. 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. All right.