LiveOne, Inc.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Live One Incorporated Fiscal 2022 Q2 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please also note today's event is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference call over to Michael Corteri, Chief Financial Officer. Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to Live One's business update and financial results conference call for the company's second quarter and six-month period ended September 30, 2021. Presenting on today's call are Rob Ellen, CEO and Chairman, Dermot McCormick, President, and myself, Mike Corteri, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. I'd like to remind you that some of the statements made on today's call are forward-looking and are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions that involve various risks and uncertainties. These statements include but are not limited to statements regarding the future performance of the company, including expected future financial results and expected future growth in the business. Actual results may differ materially from those discussed on this call, for a variety of reasons. Please refer to the company's filings with the SEC for information about factors which could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements, including those described in the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December, sorry, March 31, 2021, quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2021, and other SEC filings. You will find reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures discussed today in the company's earnings release, which is posted on its investor relations website at ir.liveone.com, and the company encourages you to periodically visit its IR website for important content. The following discussion, including responses to your questions, contains time-sensitive information and reflects management's view as of the date of this call, October 28, 2021, and except as required by law, the company does not undertake any obligation to update or revise this information after the date of this call. I'd like to highlight to investors that this call is being recorded. The company is making it available to investors and media via webcast, and a replay will be available on its website in the Investors Relations section shortly following the conclusion of the call. Additionally, it is property of the company, and any redistribution, retransmission, or rebroadcast of the call or the webcast in any form without the company's express written consent is strictly prohibited. Now, let me turn the call over to LiveOne CEO, Rob Ellen.

Thank you, Mike, and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today on our fiscal 2022 call. second quarter business update and financial results call. We plan to keep our prepared remarks somewhat brief in favor of leaving more time for any Q&A. Live One team again has survived and thrived through the COVID-19 Delta variants, which necessitate that we push all of our planned live events into Q3 and Q4. Even without live events in Q2, the Live One team delivered a record 60.7 million in revenue for the first six months of fiscal 2022, an increase of $35 million or 142% compared to the same period a year ago. Quite often we've spoken of unique flywheel business model of associated and complimentary businesses and how the components create a synergistic offering to consumers. to listen, watch, intend, engage, and transact. Let me repeat that word, transact. We are going deeper down the funnel with our customers for further modernization through premium content and pay-per-view and live events, upselling memberships, packages, including merchandise, NFPs, and integrating consumer products that will have ownership positioning. Everyone connects. The model, when fully optimized, creates a unique opportunity to bridge and connect live events with digital offerings. And with the return of live music, our business model is poised to truly kick into high gear. We have multiple subsidiaries, multi-billion dollar addressable markets in each, music subscription, live events, live streaming, OTT, specialty merchandising, and podcasting. We are thrilled to see the return of live music events, and we expect to report record revenues for each of the next two quarters. Although we had an unfortunate and challenging weather conditions, we held our first major live music festival, Spring Awakening Music Festival Autumn Equinox, which is the Midwest's largest all electronic music festival on October 2nd and 3rd in Chicago, and we sold 33,000 tickets. We signed 25,000 members. We currently have booked a lineup of over 100 live concerts and festivals featuring over 300 artists performing over the next six months. As I touch on shortly going forward, all ticket purchases, all pay-per-views, all merchandise, and any of our live musical pay-per-view events will receive a paid one-year paid membership that provides for discounts to future live in-person and pay-per-view events, discounted merchandise and NFTs, and the enormous amount of curated music and podcast content. Our wholly owned subsidiary, Podcast One, continues to experience robust growth. The entire podcast team has done an outstanding job both recruiting new entertainers in podcasts as well as aggressively pursuing advertising and sponsorship deals. podcast metrics continue to impress and grow, as it had over 2.48 billion podcast downloads in the trailing 12 months ending September 30th. And its franchise of exclusive shows has grown to more than 235, with over 50 new podcasts now producing over 300 podcast episodes per week. We continue to grow our paid subscribers with our Slacker Radio streaming audio service to now over 1.25 million paid subscribers. We have a keen eye on expanding the reach of Slacker, adding over 35,000 subscribers a month. As many of you may know, through a nine-year exclusive partnership with Tesla, a LiveXLive Slacker Radio subscription is pre-installed as default radio in every Tesla car sold in North America, and LiveOne is paid directly by Tesla for those subscriptions. The LiveX Live Slacker app is pre-installed now in 85 other automobiles, as well as across major cell carriers, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile, which allows Slacker subscribers to listen in their cars, as well as across their mobile devices. We are seeing compelling growth opportunities for Slacker by partnering with other automotive OEMs as a default radio service, especially outside the US, as well as the other white label B2B partnerships through Android Automotive. Since launching Pay-Per-View, Pay-Per-View One, our new subsidiary platform in May of 2020, we have generated over $26 million in Pay-Per-View related sales and live Pay-Per-View events. As of October alone, pay-per-view live events and tickets sold more than 25,000 new subscribers and over 1 million live stream views. Coming off the outstanding success of Social Glow's pay-per-view events in June, we look forward to owning and producing our own next hybrid pop culture franchise pay-per-view in the January 2022 quarter called Self Made K.O. This event will combine boxing exhibitions featuring women in prominent social media influence in e-sports entertainment, all vying for over 1 million in prizes, as well as a lineup of renowned music artists and bands. Social Gloves drove over 136,000 pay-per-views and 136,000 members of Live One. As many of you hopefully know, in September 2021, We announced our intention to spin out our existing pay-per-view business as a separate public company and plan to distribute a portion of the new company's equity to LiveOne shareholders. We anticipate that spin out to take place before March 31st, 2022. In our last call, I spoke about the significant investment that LiveOne is making for original programming, content, and marketing events. I would now like to introduce President of LiveONE, Dermot McCormick, to provide more details of those efforts.