LYV
#The Big Concerts again would be just what we have been doing for many years in the major cities around the world that are now becoming ongoing regular places for the big artists to tour.
We want to make sure that we have a local office so we can capture all of the revenue and economics when that tour comes to town.
So Big Concerts in South Africa or Cape Town has been the leader, forever been one of our partners and now we are able to do a deal where we can put our proper base Live Nation business there and now build out the stool of ticketing and sponsorship.
So you have seen that happen over the years, you will see that continue to happen where we look for the leading promoter number one or two in that market and then use our scale to accelerate that business and make an accretive acquisition.
Tickethour is almost an acqu-hire in the sense it brought some advanced tickets sport software to our international business, same economics as over here in America but servicing obviously the soccer leagues versus the pro sports here.
And we were a little void in our software in terms of sports over there so this helped us plug a hole and provide us a better overall solution for our soccer leagues in Europe.
I mean I will do on-site, without giving you the guidance exactly this year but I think we have said out loud from our different presentations that we think on-site is a huge opportunity.
We have been underdeveloped versus the best in the league.
We looked at the sports companies and different venues we have shown in the past.
We think that we have huge opportunity to keep growing our per head revenue business or CM business annually for the next many years to come because we think we are probably at the lower end on a per head versus most of the sports leagues here and in Europe.
And as we invest in higher end lines, better products, grab and go, stores that we have now on-site, better VIP hospitality, we are seeing that continually kick into that $2.00 that we reported today.
So we think growth will continue for multiple years on on-site CM as we excel our offering.
Digital, you and I have talked, <UNK>, about the digital overall.
The digital is just a continual expansion of the ad unit for our business and the reason we have been able to continually grow our core advertising sponsorship business for the last multiple years is we want to keep offering our sponsors a wide variety of on-site to kind of online offering.
So having more originally, I think it was Yahoo! when we started, having more ways that we are distributing content on a digital basis, from Snapchat to Hulu to VR, using all of the different distribution arms as us kind of the publisher of that live experience, we think that will be a key foundational ad unit to keep giving our double-digit growth in our core sponsorship advertising business.
Specifically to your VR, listen, we believe at the core why our business is growing and is going to have a long runway of growth is experiential on-site is the magic.
So the 22-year-old that is going to Lollapalooza this weekend or the 52-year-old going to Guns N' Roses reunion this weekend is a magical moment.
And it is much like going on vacation is a lot better than watching the video.
So we do believe that the moat around the castle and the most advantaged kind of offering we have is our scale in live and live experiential, on-site ---+ where you get the goose bumps, the experience with your friends and make those Kodak moments has huge opportunity forward for us.
Now of course when virtual VR comes, can we do better ways of bringing the Guns N' Roses show to you in your living room in a more dynamic mechanism than a DVD or a current TV.
Sure, and we think those would be great ways to distribute that show, make it into some content and help us deliver some advertising.
But I have not ever been a big proponent that it is going to convince you in any way we are going to take that Guns N' Roses and have a big upsell on at home pay-per-view or selling that to our show no matter how dynamic it is on its own.
I think it is great content to extend the show.
First and foremost the biggest advantage to us is it helps us sell more tickets to the later shows and it delivers us some advertising reach and scale beyond the on-site.
So I think it is great, think it is great for the industry, will be incredible ad unit, will be an incredible way to sell the concert experience but most of the monetization is always going to be connected to the on-site.
To finish off that, I would say where our core kind of strategy that needed to be worked on was just the staffing of the skill set.
So when we brought over Tom See from Disney, we kind of created an upper-end division that is focusing on as we kind of call it.
We do a good job of getting 70 million people into the venue but just like first-class has come back on airlines, we needed to have a dedicated unit innovatively best in practice, thinking about the high-end part of the business and bringing better products, creating new products, packages, bundles, travel packages, tequilas, etc.
So first we needed to spend more time on the right skill set and this summer we are very excited about a bunch of the programs we are testing.
We think we have been making strong measured progress in our mission.
Our mission is when you have 25,000 shows and all of these festivals occurring, can you create content and distribute it and publish it to the growing distribution platforms, one to drive your core business and two, to achieve some new ad units.
And we think we have been making great progress with lots of different partners.
You will continue to see announcements that say we are going to stream these 20 shows on this platform or do VR on that platform or create some behind scenes document commentary online to Facebooks, to Twitters, etc.
So I think you will see more of the same.
I think the progress we have made is that we are very credible now with most distributors.
Most distributors want to meet with us and talk about can we bring that great live content to our platform with either being in a live stream or behind the scenes or live documentaries or artist interviews, access behind the scenes at festivals.
So I think we have been moving very nicely, we are very pleased with our progress and we will continue to do more content and more platforms to drive more advertising.
<UNK>, just to jump on that, I always like to remind people the vast majority of shows we promote are not in our venues so the difference between when we own the amphitheater or festival and our internal security protocols and how we make sure we have metal detectors and etc.
versus when we are promoting a show in someone else's venue, we have less of the if you want to call it the security capital risk cost associated with that.
So a majority of the shows, the high percentage of the 25,000 shows are not within our venue network so we have two very different strategies, one you can control and one you can't.
I think we will have ---+ venues will continue to elevate.
We have seen lots of them doing a good job but the good news is that is not our cost to bear.
It is just our choice to decide where to put the artist.
I will answer the second first and I will go backwards.
On our international ticketing, we actually have the most important market in international is the UK and Australia and Canada.
They have always been and are on the host platforms.
They are on the business.
That is where at the end of the day most of our business is centered and where we want to share and extrapolate all of our costs and product development.
When you get to decisions like Spain where you are running a separate platform which is a very small piece of your business, those urgency to get on one platform are not on our list right now.
They are running local currency.
Most of the Europeans are on still a retail system where you are buying tickets at the bank or the shopping mall, a very retail oriented ---+ years behind kind of where we are today.
So our priority has always been the big markets like the UK, Canada, Australia to leverage our product development which we have been doing.
We've had great growth in the UK over the last few years.
And most important was the priority was to make sure we excelled at secondary in the European markets.
Unlike Ticketmaster in its prior life here who waited too long and then we had to play catch up.
So our biggest priority in international was when we acquired Seatwave and with our Get Me In product which integrates secondary in now nine plus countries where we are now the market leader in the secondary business over there and are very proud of that.
So our strategy is in the big markets internationally.
They are sharing product innovation and are aligned to our current strategy around primary and secondary.
The smaller markets over time we will look to integrate them into a global platform but those would be minimal upside from a cost advantage in the near term.
No.
International is like a concert business.
Right now international is always going to be one or two people that are already the leaders so you may acquire somebody not because you are so much interested in their platform but you are just acquiring the cost of the contracts and the customers.
So historically when we have looked into expansion, we may acquire a company just if that is the quickest way to get scale and ticket inventory.
We can roll out ---+ our current platform can roll out into a new market today.
We don't typically though right now look at a new market and enter with our new platform if we don't have ticket scale behind it.
So our short-term strategy in international when we took over continues to be Ticketmaster was in ---+ I think when we took over 14, 15 markets.
Our goal was to get into the European markets where we had scale and start matching up concerts inventory with Ticketmaster platform.
And then step two, grow market share in those markets and that is where we have been and that is where we will see the fruit kind of bear from the tree for the next few years on growing our market share in Spain, and Italy and France and Germany where we have already got content versus obsessing whether we are in a new market or not right now.
