Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE:LYV) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Michael Rapino: Yeah. Thank you. Well, I’m sorry, I’ve seen this written, but we didn’t promote the Taylor tour. So I don’t have that comparable to worry about in 2024. Beyonce was our tour wildly successful. But when we look at any artist across Ticketmaster Live Nation, no artists is going to account for more than 1% of the tickets. So no one tour will ever hurt us year-over-year, it’s about our macro portfolio of artists and tours. And we have a very good pipe as we’ve been saying for next year. We think next year — crazy to say, but sitting here looking at this year that we’re looking at double-digit growth over this year, next year on ticket sales and our stadiums are gaining a lot of steam. So we’re very confident.

We’re going to have big record-breaking tours on the road next year as Bad Bunny just went up again and more to come announced — more to be announced. So we are very confident that well Ticketmaster Live Nation are going to have big strong years next year with a pipe full that we will overcome this year’s numbers.

Stephen Laszczyk: Thank you.

Operator: And the next question comes from the line of David Karnovsky with JPMorgan. Please proceed with your question.

David Karnovsky: Hey. Thank you. Maybe following-up on ticketing. It looks like your revenue growth well outpaced GTV growth, so interested to understand how non-service fee revenue might have helped in the quarter? And then, Michael, I don’t know if you can say anything on the Mastercard agreement to today — from today and I don’t know, what other opportunities you see for sponsorship deals to kind of cover your international footprint?

Joe Berchtold: Yeah. Sure. I’ll start just on the ticketing. Absolutely, Ticketmaster continues to benefit from the non-service fee revenue sources it has. On the upsells and other services that itself to fans, as well as increasing array of services that it’s providing to venues and promoters are all good sources that are helping us increase the profitability per ticket that we’re selling.

Michael Rapino: And Mastercard, we’re thrilled to have him onboard. We’ve been working over the last couple of years to have a great diversity across our partners on the payment side. Thankfully, we didn’t take any of the easy crypto money at the time. We worked hard to make sure we had a stable of great partners. Today looking at Citibank, PayPal and now Mastercard for international rounds out our global portfolio in that category at an overall economics surpassing we historically had. So very, very happy to have them onboard, big part of our business and continue to show strong growth in our sponsorship side and sponsors lined-up to be part of this Live boom.

David Karnovsky: Thanks.

Operator: And the next question comes from the line of Ashton Welles with Evercore ISI. Please proceed with your question.

Ashton Welles: Thank you. I think you guys are on track to add 6 million fans or so this year at your owned and operated venues. Is this sort of the right run rate to think about going forward or could this step up in coming years?

Joe Berchtold: This is an area that we’re absolutely focused on continuing to add venues. So the hope is that we continue to build on that number. I think it will probably not be linear year-to-year as we add to our portfolio, but it’s an area that we’re very focused on building as that tends to be our highest profit, highest margin fan that we serve.

Operator: And the next question comes from the line of David Joyce with Seaport Research. Please proceed with your question.