Eric Levin: This is Eric. I’m happy to take the question. So I think you are right. When you look at — traditionally, when you look at — I mean at the time of our IPO, just looking back a couple of years, when you looked at what’s going to drive streaming growth, it was the numerical growth in subscribers, it was literally subscription growth. Now, it’s a multipronged growth engine. It continues to be subscriptions, but now it’s not just developed markets. Emerging markets have accelerated their growth in subscriptions pricing. We’ve seen in the past year pricing come pretty much across the board now for all — virtually all substantive distributors. You’re seeing emerging streaming continue to grow with positive renewals, reaffirming the category and it’s potential You’re seeing the traditional ad-supported streaming that was affected by economic weakness starting to improve and get back to positive growth.
So we’re seeing a series of growth drivers in streaming, all of which are seeing positive momentum. As far as the number that, that growth will hit in the short-term, I wouldn’t want to give that forecast there. Many third-parties that publish numbers there, I would ask you to look at, study and evaluate their assumptions. But I would say that as we were — as we’re entering fiscal ’20 — almost entering fiscal ’24 versus ’23, the environment across the board has become meaningfully more positive and optimistic as far as the variety of growth drivers and the strength of the growth drivers. So we do agree with you that there’s real positive momentum out there, Kutgun.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Benjamin Black with Deutsche Bank.
Benjamin Black: So Robert, on the last earnings call, you mentioned the, disconnect between sort of the value of stream from higher caliber artists and sort of the current payment model. Obviously, quite a few DSPs have raised pricing. So I guess my question here is, have you made any progress towards a more artist-centric model? And then just a quick follow-up question on TikTok — I think when it was announced you mentioned the possibility of new revenue opportunities for your artists and your song writers and also new fandom monetization on possibilities. So what exactly are those new opportunities? Any additional color or commentary would be great there?
Robert Kyncl: So on the progress around DSPs. So the — if you sort of step back, what I highlighted before is there is sort of disparity between the value that users receive by subscribing to music services and what it costs today, right? I’ve like I said in multiple times versus Netflix versus inflation, et cetera that’s monthly. And the need for innovating around price optimization. And what has served the industry incredibly well for the past 15 years, was this collaboration about getting hundreds of millions of people — multiple hundreds of millions of people into the premium experience, creating playlists and having stickiness and I’m in a great value prop. I don’t think that is what will serve the industry well in the next 15 years.
And we will all collectively have to focus on much more innovation around audience segmentation and price optimization and without negatively impacting any of the users, I should add. And that is not a thing that happens overnight or quarter-to-quarter. It’s a carefully developed and orchestrated change that we will undergo, but don’t expect news on that anytime soon. It takes time to unfold. And it takes multiple parties. It takes 2 to tango in this and more than 2 in this case. And — but I’m very much focused on it, because I do think it is the right thing for all parties involved. And it’s worth undergoing and do it in the most collaborative fashion possible. I forgot there was a second part of your question, which I’ll pick up. Now TikTok, I think I said earlier that I can’t give too many details on TikTok because of our confidentiality agreements.
