LiveOne, Inc.

Good morning. My name is Angela, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Live One Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Please be advised that this call is being recorded. You will have the opportunity to ask questions during the Q&A session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star 1 again. Thank you. I will now turn the conference over to Aaron Sullivan. You may begin.

Thank you. Good morning and welcome to Live One Business Update and Financial Results Conference Call for the company's second quarter ended September 30, 2024. Presenting on today's call with me is Rob Allen, CEO and Chairman of Live One. I would 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 its annual report on Form 10-K at the year-end of March 31, 2024, and subsequent SEC filings. You'll 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 websites. The company encourages you to periodically visit the investor relations 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, November 7th, 2024, and except as required by law, the company does not undertake any obligation to update or revise this information after the date of the call. I'd like to highlight to investors that this call is being recorded. The company is making it available to investors and media by webcast, and a replay will be available on its website in the investor relations section shortly following the conclusion of the call. Additionally, it is the property of the company, and any redistribution, transmission, or rebroadcast of this call or webcast in any form that the company has expressed written consent is strictly prohibited. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to LiveOne CEO, Rob Allen.

Thank you, Aaron. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We appreciate your continued support. I'll begin with a brief overview of our record-breaking financial results, followed by updates on recent developments and our vision for the future. Due to financial overview, we achieved record revenues in the history of the company for the first six months. Consolidated revenues are $65.7 million, with adjusted EBITDA of $6.6 million. Due to consolidated revenues, our quarter was $32.6 million, a 14% increase. Our audio revenues delivered $31.7 million, an 18% growth. Our adjusted EBITDA just on the audio division was $5.6 million. We closed the quarter with $11 million in cash, up over $4 million from the previous quarter. And again, earlier in the year, we converted all of our debt at $2.10. Now onto our opportunity with Tesla. Tesla has been a little misconstrued in that we extended our contract through May of 2026 under new terms. These new terms are now the seventh different iteration of a 12-year partnership with Tesla. Exciting part is this is everything that our management team has asked for at Tesla, which is to give us the opportunity to market to our customers, to expand to all devices. With that, Tesla will be helping us and has started to already to market our offering to the millions of cars existing out there in North America. We got prominent space on the home screen of Tesla in perpetuity. That beachfront property, you think back to Cirrus or XM radio, they spent billions of dollars getting to this point to have that ability to convert these customers. We now have direct access to Tesla customers for cross-selling and to upsell them from a $3 subscriber who can only use it in the car, right, to our larger opportunities of podcasting, eBooks, live streaming, pay-per-view. Tesla will continue paying monthly fees on existing grandfathered cars. What's exciting about this opportunity is we've never been able to be valued base per sub. Subs in this space get valued between $200,000 and $1,000 a sub. This has also opened the floodgates to major opportunities with other automakers. We publicly said we are in deep discussions with eight of the major auto companies around the world. I humbly believe it feels like since the announcement that people believe that we were under exclusivity with Tesla. We have an opportunity now to really expand those partnerships with other auto companies. That will lead into the diversification of our business that we've been talking about for the last 12 months. We hired Bill Wilchris as our head of B2B. We've now expanded that B2B team to 11 people. From one person hired a year ago, just over a year ago, to now 11 people. We see eight verticals. with huge opportunities to diversify and expand the business across automotive, carriers, hardware, retail, hospitality, airlines and travel, loyalty programs, credit card companies. We announced one of those first major deals was a $24 million, $2 million a month major streaming partner. Then we announced TechSnow, over 100 million users. We've announced partnerships with eBay, Facebook, TikTok, We are in active negotiations with dozens of Fortune 500 and Fortune 250 companies, including those eight auto companies. We fully expect to announce at least two before year-end and two before March 31st, our fiscal year-end. Now, as you go into our podcast business, really exciting quarter as well. Podcast one, success continues. We've delivered. We've gone from $20 million. to a run rate of $50 million over the past four years. We have 100 podcasts in our pipeline, 10 times our normal amount in history. We have eight podcast networks in our M&A pipeline, 185 podcasts, now adding 50 more in the next 24 months. We are adding almost a new podcast every two weeks. LiveOne has also acquired 224,000 additional... Podcast shares this quarter and over 550,000 shares this year. We will continue to buy back additional stock in Podcast One, and we now own over 73% of the company. We are on our way to over $100 million over the next 24 months. Podcast to TV and film adaptations. I've talked about this a little bit on our conference calls before. This is just starting to really, really start to take off. We now have a slate of over 10 podcasts that have potential to be TV and film adaptations. We have signed two of them to streaming partners, including Barnum town and vigilante, and a third opportunist to a documentary. And we see material opportunities to turn these without any additional costs to the company and massive upside for the company. Next door celebrity brands. We've just announced with SuperDuper Kyle, our second celebrity band called Smiley. We see, again, seven to 10 of these celebrity brands a year for the next five years, with potential of 10 million to a billion dollars of upside, with very little cost to the company as we utilize our partners in social media, artists, actors, producers, podcasters, social media stores to drive these brands across their social media. Our publishing business grew over 300%. Tonight, we are launching our live streaming pay-per-view event for SuperDuper Kyle's album, of which we own 50% of the publishing. Our live streaming pay-per-view has had over 5 billion engagements in the last four years. With that, we continue to buy back stock. I've now bought back almost 4.5 million shares of stock. We have increased the buyback to 12 million and will continue to buy back at these levels. I'm proud of my team. I'm proud of what they've been able to accomplish. We've gone through tougher times than this, including when COVID hit. We lost all live streaming business and came out of it stronger than ever. When you think back, when COVID hit, we were at 38 million in revenues, lost a third of our revenues. all of our live business, all of our live streaming, and we came out of it, and now we did $65 million for the six months. So we're looking forward to any questions from everyone. I'm going to hand it off to my CFO, Aaron Sullivan. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Rob. I'll spend just a few minutes providing a very brief overview of results for the second quarter of fiscal 2025 and in September 30th. Consolidated revenue for the three-month period ended September 30, 24, was $32.6 million, an increase of 14% over the prior year period. Blackwood posted record revenue Q2 of $19.5 million, and Podcast One posted revenue of $12.2 million. Consolidated revenue for the six-month period ended September 30, 2024 was a record $65.7 million, an increase of 17% over the prior year period. The second quarter of fiscal 25 revenue consists of 60% membership and 40% advertising, sponsorship, merchandising and other compared to 58% membership and 42% advertising, sponsorship and merchandising and other in the prior year period. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA for the three and six months ended September 30, 2024 with 2.9 million and 5.8 million respectively. On a US GAAP basis, LiveOne posted a consolidated net loss of 2.7 million or $0.02 per diluted share in Q2 fiscal 25. As of September 30, 2024, total members, which include three members, were approximately $4 million. Note that included in the total members are certain members who are currently subject to a contractual dispute for which we are not currently recognizing revenue. Rob, I'll turn it back to you.

Yeah, so I'm going to go up to questions. So look forward to any questions, and then I'll close it out at the end. So thank you very much.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you have dialed in and would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star 1 again. Thank you. And your first question comes from the line of Brian Kinslinger. With Alliance Global Partners, your line is now open.

Great. Thanks so much. Great results in the quarter. Got a laundry list of questions that some investors have asked me. First question I have is, how many paid subscribers do you have that are either going to be grandfathered in or that are not related to Tesla?

Yeah, we can't give that number, Brian, as I've told you before. But it's a percentage of the total number of subscribers out there. but it's not a number that either Tesla or us are able to provide publicly.

Okay. And then what percentage of your Tesla users listen to your digital radio for more than 10 minutes a day or whatever timeframe you think is statistically significant?

Yeah, I think it's two. I mean, just to give you a highlight film and really exciting, even with this change that Tesla has made, As an example, this week, 285,000 people used our service. And then for this month, it's well over a million people have used the service. So it's really exciting to see. And the usage, right, the consumer is using it an average of about 20 minutes, which is extremely high for the industry.

Okay. I know the plan doesn't change until December 1st, but have there been Have you seen any conversions yet? You said Tesla's already reaching out, or is it too early and no one would really sign up until after December 1st?

No, we're already seeing some nice signups. We're really excited about it, and we're going to be talking about that. I would say somewhere in the middle of December to the end of December, we'll probably hold a conference call on it. But really exciting, even though they're still giving it away for free. We're signing a lot of subscribers right now. And in signing them, here's what Tesla has done. They have moved. They have sent out a message. which shows the orange button that was previously there to finally giving us that live one branding in the car. You think about what Cirrus and XM paid to get that prime real estate. Almost every car I've seen, I take a lot of them. I've been a lot at Ubers. I was in New York all last week. Every Tesla car you see, I also own five Tesla cars, have now changed. That orange button has now that bottom number one spot in real estate on Tesla. You're going to see that live one button. Now, it takes a little education, right? People have to figure out what it is, right? And they click on it, and they immediately can hit that barcode, and they can choose to convert. But it's a little tricky because you could also listen for free. So you still have another month for that. But we're really excited about the number of conversions. It's exciting. It's energized. I think we expect almost none, and we're signing a lot every day.

Last question related to Tesla, and I have a few others. When someone buys a new car in North America post-December 1st, will they get a month or two free like you do with other cars with Sirius, or will there not be a free subscription?

I can't answer that yet. This is the first time that the company's had the opportunity to talk to those consumers. You're going to see a lot of different things that we never could do before. right, including advertising, right? These are things that we didn't have the capability of doing before, right? We were strictly paid for by Tesla, right? It was an amazing partnership, right? And that was the terms of it, right? No advertising, so on. Now we'll have the ability to to be able to really stretch our arms and really go out there and to be able to do the different marketing and different price ranges, right? As you can already see, if you've hit that code, Brian, we already offer a $399, a $3499 for a year, right? And then $99.99 for the year. So huge discounts to everybody else in conjunction with Tesla. So it's really exciting to see us have that ability and be able to stretch our muscles and be able to showcase that and really be able to start to sign these subscribers and have the individual as a customer of the company and be able to upsell them to podcasting, to pay-per-view, to live streaming, to all the different verticals, eBooks that we have. This is the first time we've had that opportunity to do it.

Great. Switching gears, are you already integrated into TechsNow? And if you are, has there been a meaningful impact yet to the subscriber base in the first four months?

Yeah, it's really just beginning. It's an exciting partnership, but we've just started to start the trials, right? They have over 100 million users. This is like a boost mobile for anyone that doesn't know. It's a low-end provider of music, of phone service, right? So they're a perfect fit for us. We're going to see how well that turns out. And I think both parties are really excited and energized by the partnership, but we're in the very beginning phases of it.

Great. And then on podcast, Did you disclose, I mean, you have in the last few quarters, how many titles you added in the second quarter, how many you onboarded, and then what's the expectation for the second half of the fiscal year?

That's a great question. I don't think we put the number. Aaron, if you had that, we should have. But we put the total for the year. It's really a staggering number. I think we've added now, yeah, for the 12 months, I think we just announced our 49th new podcast. Yeah, we're adding almost one every two weeks right now. And Brian, these are, these are podcasts with real traffic and real revenues. So the podcast industry is heating up. As you can see the elections like this, there's an argument. Elon Musk just came out today and said, you know, Trump won the election off the podcast. You have anyone that follows this podcasting is just exploding. You start to see that second wave, you saw $28 billion acquisitions. You start to see that second wave kicking in right now. The Kelsey's just signed for 120 million with Amazon. SmartList just moved over to Sirius for $150 million. Joe Rogan just signed for $250 million, right? And it's kind of the haves and have nots right now in podcasting. The smaller podcasts are all coming available. This is our sweet spot. Those 50,000 to 250,000, maybe even 500,000 downloads of true podcasters really need a home. And we're really the best place from the comments. The only place you can come for a full 360 experience and You know, as I said, you know, as I said, we have over a hundred podcasts in our pipeline, the largest by 10 X in history. We have eight podcast acquisition acquisition mergers in discussions right now. And we've just added Steve Lehman to our team is just, you know, just, just a great addition to the team. Steve, Steve built premier radio from 30 million public company to a billion dollar public company. And, uh, is really one of the experts in radio and with the loss of norm, you know, It really is a great addition to the team. I think he's going to be hugely helpful. And like I said before, I fully see us now growing from $50 to $100 million over the next 24 months.

My last question, thank you, is I know, Rob, you've got your team super motivated and there's very few people more motivated than you. But even your guidance suggests you're going to shrink before you recover based on your execution and conversion of Tesla subscribers. So I just want to understand how management is thinking about overhead in the short term, and if there should be, if you expect any changes until you see how things play out.

Well, we're not going to make any changes yet, right? Because we're so excited about the opportunity, right? When you get that beachfront property, we're going to give up some revenues, right, in the beginning, right, to now convert these subscribers, which we have the opportunity of perpetuity, but it's really going to showcase that first 90 to 180 days right right as we get into you know the middle of the fourth quarter we'll have some real decisions to make on that remember you know you got to remember in this business almost 70 of those revenues go to the music industry right so you buy good news and bad news you automatically cut 70 of your costs right if you don't sign those subscribers right so now you're just looking at 30 of that right so it's an easy fix and as you know you know we cut from 350 people in COVID hit, you know, we w we were at a hundred and I don't know, 120, you know, at some point we're probably at 130 right now. Guy, uh, we'll do what's needed to be done and we'll do it. You know, we've proven over and over again that this team is resilient and then added maneuver in tough times. And, you know, we'll come out of this strong in the never, but we're not going to make any moves on it right now, especially with us seeing subscribers signing up every day right now, the usage not going down. It's kind of amazing. that our usage is not going down when the conversion is tricky right now. You're seeing in your car, you'll see a picture of that beautiful green button that my son happened to create that logo, so I'm very proud of it. But that logo, we finally have that prime real estate. You see it in every single car. Now you click on it, you get that code, but you can still listen for it. So we're really not going to have a full clear picture right until middle of December to middle of January, how those conversions are going. But we could be more excited about what's happened so far.

Great. Good luck, Rob, to you and your team. Thanks, Brian. Appreciate you.

Your next question comes from the line of Barry Sine with Lightfield. Your line is now open.

Hey, good morning, guys. Just a follow-up question on Tesla. Do you have access to their subscriber base? Is it only through the car or do you separately have access that you can market to them?

Yeah, we got to be careful again. We're under strict NDAs with Tesla. What I can tell you is that they have been extraordinarily cooperative. We've worked in collaboration to put the marketing package together as best as we can. As you know, when you're reaching out to millions of people, you have to be careful what marketing you do and don't. But for anybody that's seen it, You see this beautiful picture that Tesla has sent out across the car as well as in emails and goes out multiple times. Every time there's an upgrade, you'll continue to see that. You'll see it say the live streaming music has now moved from this orange button with an arrow going to a Live One logo. Number two is, and I should have shared this on this, but good, but next time we'll do that, is when you look in the car, it is so exciting, Barry, to see this. you own that beachfront property, right? We lost some of our tenants for a minute right now. The question, can you fill that beachfront property? If we could fill that beachfront property, this is going to be a moonshot. And you know, as you know, you know, whether it's yourself or was Brian, nobody's really been able to give us a per subscriber, right? Number here, right? You look at Spotify is trading at $400, right? It's trading at these crazy sub numbers. We have such an opportunity right now that if we can convert 25% of these of our subs, right? Okay. And that doesn't count new cars coming. And so we'll be in the car in perpetuity. If we can convert those, right, you're going to start talking about, you know, $200 to a thousand dollars a sub in this space. And you're going to give us the ability to be able to upsell those and grow from $3 to a much higher number. And I fully expect that number is going to grow from three to at least five and could be as high as, you know, seven or 10.

And you, just to help us think about how to get at that number of subscribers i believe in the past you've um released the number of tesla subscribers within your base i don't know if you've done so recently and then also we have to look back at pre-2018 um you were giving even back then you were giving out subscriber numbers so uh presumably those were mainly tesla those would stay on if i understand correctly and then the delta between what you've announced as customers in 2018 numbers would be the jump ball that you're going after with marketing, and we're hoping, I don't know, 25% penetration at $5 a month. Is that the right – I'm not asking if the numbers are right, but is that the right way to think about it?

I think it's a good thought, right? I think that's a good thought, right? Again, we can't give the exact numbers that it grandfathered, but we fully expect a lot of them, and we fully expect to convert a lot. And again, we're cautious in this. This has some risk in it. You definitely have some risk in losing some revenues and even thought in the beginning, but you have an opportunity to grow massively and really be valued properly and valued against your peers afterwards in a much more unique way.

And Rob, on the broader pipeline, you did an update over the summer, and I think, if I recall correctly, there was about 60 substantial customers in that pipeline. I wonder if you could help us on an update there. Obviously, you've announced that you've won two major customers. You said by the end of the year, two more. By the first quarter, by the March quarter, I think two more. Do we... Still have 60 total opportunities. Has that grown? You've certainly grown the size of the team that's going after that base. But what does that pipeline look like now in your ERP system?

Yeah, so we didn't increase that number yet, but I fully expect that as we do an update call the middle of December to middle of January, we're going to be talking about that number growing. I wouldn't be hiring. As you know, Barry, I was cutting substantially, right? And some of that was going to happen anyway because it was consolidation. And some of it was because of COVID and some of it was because we closed our live business and the merch business, right? But the reality is, is I wouldn't be growing it to 11 people if those deals aren't moving fast and we don't feel that confident that we're going to be announcing sizable deals. And, you know, I don't know why people discount it, but the first deal we announced, right? It not only did it happen, right, which is $24 million, but you see it in the revenues, right? It actually not only happened, but it's working, right? That deal may get bigger, right? So we could be more excited about this. You don't need to land too many $24 million deals to change the history of this company, right? And as you know, Barry, you know me a long time, and you have people that know me, whether it was I-1 or Digital Turbine, it was Majesco. I built so many of these companies off the backs of B2B deals. We never really had the opportunity to do it because we had a messy balance sheet, right? We had COVID, we lost our live business. Some of the acquisitions we did, which unfortunately on the merch side of it, never really panned out because of COVID. We had a pivot, right? We've had a pivot over and over again. Now we don't have to pivot. Right now we've got to focus our energy on those B2B deals and landing those B2B deals. And I would say it's way higher than 65%. I can't give you the exact number yet, but I think we'll be talking about it a lot. I think you're going to see more streaming partners. You're going to see more auto partners. You're going to see a retail partner. I stayed in the last call. I expect to hire at a B2B for retail. I see a massive opportunity there. Everybody in that space has to compete with Amazon. You see Walmart just did a massive deal. They bought Vizio for $2.3 billion. I see telltale signs. That music subscription thing. should be synonymous with every one of those retailers. And if you want to keep your customers in the funnel and get them to buy more things, it's certainly working amazingly well for Amazon. If they're going to compete with Amazon, they're going to have to do more of it and they're going to have to do it fast. So we see that as a next big vertical for us. But again, just going back on the auto side of it, it's kind of amazing what's happened. And Aaron and I just talked about this yesterday. It's like all of a sudden, it almost feels like people felt we were in exclusivity with Tesla when it wasn't the case. They were exclusive to us and paying us. but it seems like the floodgates may be opening up to big opportunities with other auto companies now that we've been talking to, but the dialogue has gotten way more serious, you know, since the announcement.

And, you know, one thing you haven't talked about on this call that I believe you've said in the past is an opportunity is the upsell all slash cross-sell opportunity. So whether it's with the Tesla customers, or others where you may have the customer relationship information. You know, you've talked about the celebrity brands line. Will you have an opportunity to cross-sell, you know, let's say somebody from Tesla signs up for a subscription. Can you then cross-sell them some of these celebrity brands products or other live products?

Absolutely. And, you know, I mean, all this opportunity to open up advertising, right is game changing for us right we've never been able to talk to our customers before right we it was a beautiful deal they were a great partner right they were paying us three dollars a month right but we couldn't talk to those customers right we just had we got we got our customer we got paid and we were able to deliver the music to them which was great now we can start to start to do a lot of that and you know i see a lot of telltale signs tonight Tonight, we're doing this amazing event tonight. We're going to cross over. This will cross over multiple parts of our business. We're launching Super Duper Kyle's new album. He's had over a billion streams. We're launching it literally at a place called Harry's, which is around the corner from my house next to the Troubadour. They gave us the entire place tonight to do it. We're live streaming it. We're launching his coffee tonight, a product that we own, as well as we own 50% of that song. Do you see that pollination that we've talked about, Barry, where we get from the same piece of content, same celebrity, same piece of content, we get multiple revenue streams with no additional cost to us?

Do you own the first half of the song or the second half of the song? Never mind. On the eight companies in the eight verticals that you've talked about, can you talk about which one or two? are the most promising, where you're seeing the most traction, and what are the customers telling you where you're getting further down in the process?

Yeah, I mean, I think you're going to hear a lot of this. I mean, obviously, the live streaming partner, they do $2 million a month, placing our content inside of other streaming partners, right? It's a telltale sign. You're watching all these streaming partners struggle tremendously, right? The cost of content is skyrocketing. Minimum wage has gone up tremendously. Cost of production has gone up tremendously. Competition is fierce, right? Netflix is eating everybody's lunch and it's costing a million six an hour for content, right? Well, we got this great luxury of that audio content, right? Podcasting content, pay-per-view content, music content is way cheaper, right? So we have 3,000 hours of of programming. 3,000 artists who have performed on our platform. Everyone from Justin Bieber to Bruce Springsteen to the Rolling Stones. We own that video, right? We own the interviews and the backstage and the green rooms, right? Some of the biggest stars in the world. All that MTV-like content has unique value. Our podcasting, you're just watching. And again, just to highlight the presidential election, you just watch the numbers that Trump delivered on Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson and across the board, every politician in there. And it's like, you know, it's just magical what's happening to podcasting. I've been calling for this, right? COVID podcasting grew from 400 to $2 billion. It's on its way to 25 billion. And it's not just because of podcasting. It's now every television host, every radio host is becoming a podcaster, right? It's a better medium and it's starting to reach globally as well. So we see big opportunities there and you're going to start to see those celebrity brands from our podcasters, right? Our podcast is just think about this, right? 50% of the revenues come from direct response. They're selling everything from insurance, right? To better health, to Viagra, right? Well, this is superstars talking to super fans. They've got massive influence over it. I fully expect to see multiple podcasts of ours launching their own products over the next 24 months.

And I can't wait for the Varnumtown movie. Thank you. Very much. That's my question, Rob.

Great. Well, just to hit on that, Barry, because I think it's important. And I say this very humbly to everyone. I own 48% of Atmosphere Films. It's the first thing I did when I moved to Los Angeles. I invested less than $3 million into that company. We had a slate of 100 potential films. Those were books, scripts, and stories. These are podcasts that have proven audiences proven track record, and we already know the demographics. And now when you're working in your streaming partners, you're walking with the missile. On our last conference call, I promised everybody that we were going to sell Varnumtown in a bidding war. And within six weeks, there was a bidding war on it. And we'll talk about it a lot more, and we'll talk about our partner in the middle of January. We'll start talking about it. But the biggest producers, the biggest writers, right, have been hired on that. And millions of dollars are being spent between vigilante and and Barnumtown are both being spent for those to be greenlit. Knock on wood, if they get greenlit, those could be game changers for the company. And I say this humbly, when I did Atmosphere, I owned the product. We owned 5% of the royalties from a movie called 300 and 5% of the royalties in a movie called Spiderwick Chronicles. And those movies did $1.3 billion. So if you can own a television show, you can own multiple. We'd have two, we have one documentary and we have seven or eight more in the pipeline. Now that we're going out with, there's another great opportunity. So I hope you all get to listen to it. It's a, it's a really, it's a sad story and interesting story, but it's Tim Fallon who was very famous for going around the world, stopping sex trafficking. And then it turned out that he, uh, he, um, The story goes, and I'll be careful in my words because I want you to get an opportunity to listen to it as you listen to it. They made a huge movie about the guy. He has a CIA agent and all the great things he did, and it turned out he may be on the other side of the tracks. If you have an opportunity to listen to it, I'm positive this one is going to be sold again to one of the streaming networks.

All right, your next question comes from the line of John Hickman with Lattenberg. Your line is now open.

Hey, I have a question for Aaron. Can you hear me okay? Hello? Okay. So the G&A expense, it was up quite a bit this quarter. Is there something in there that

There's a little bit more stock-based compensation running through. Are you comparing it to sequentially or year-over-year?

Sequentially.

Yeah, there's a little bit more stock-based comp in there, and there's a little bit more audit fees. And that's just the timing of when the work for the. We had some reviews. An audit spillover from from from the prior period, but that that kind of normalizes itself out over the year.

OK, thank you and then my other questions have been answered. I just wanted to maybe ask a little bit about the other B2B opportunities. I mean, it seems to me like if you could.

sign one or two more like the the first streaming one you have your issues with tesla would kind of disappear is that not the case yeah i think i think you know that's you know if we can we can sign i mean we're i mean the answer to that is we don't think a a we're excited about the tesla opportunity all right super excited about it right this is mass optionality for us right Number two is in terms of B2B deals, it's not that we're – it's not we're – we have signed, and we're going to expand those deals, and we're going to have more deals like that deal, and it's coming very shortly. So I don't look at them as a replacement. I look at it as an enhancement.

Okay. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Sean McGowan with Roth Capital Partners. Your line is now open.

Thank you. I want to pivot for a second back to something you mentioned earlier in the podcast world. It seemed like there was a period there where it was red hot and some of the big players were backing away from it, and that created an opportunity for you guys to pick up some shows. Are you seeing that kind of, is the space heating back up, and is that affecting kind of the tenor or the tone of the negotiations that you're having with some of these shows? You know, are deals, are hot deals coming back, and are the costs of getting these shows rising?

You know, it's an interesting thing. It's kind of the haves and have-nots, right? The big shows, you can't compete on. Right. Even if you had a pool of money, right. These deals, the Kelsey's and the smart list. I mean, they're really just, you know, they're multiple multiples, five, 10, 10 times revenues, right. You're not going to compete in those, but the smaller deals, you know, there's very few of us left. There's very few competition that can really compete in it. There's a little bit of VC money that came in. So there's a couple of deals and done, but I could tell you today, we just signed another million dollar podcast. Just got signed. It'll be announced next week. We're signing pretty fast, and we're in the trenches right now. We just bid on $12 million of podcast deals in the last 10 days. There's a lot of opportunities for the small to mid-sized podcasts. There's not opportunities for the big ones. The big ones, you're not getting close to.

Okay, and the heat on the big ones is not indicative of the cost of getting the small ones going up?

You know, there's a little bit of competition, you see, but it's interesting. You know, I think I've told this before, Sean. You know, we were just in active negotiations. We just announced our extension with Adam Carolla. We just announced our extension with Lady Gang. So all of our biggest podcasts that would be just in that same fray, we never lose them. And now what humbly is happening is we're starting to get a lot of the other. A, you're getting from Spotify, Apple. Amazon, you're getting a lot of podcasts from them that are just too small for them to manage, right? They're still distributing them. They're distributing for us, right? They're falling into our lap, right? Then you're getting the opportunity that some of the mid-sized ones that really weren't available for a while. We're starting to see opportunities. There are some other bidders in it, but we're seeing a real opportunity to grab some of those. And knock on wood, I mean, if we could grab half of this 12 million, we just got a million of it. If we get, you know, half of it, which is what I think we're going to get, it's going to be a big jump, giant jump for us, you know, in the next couple of quarters.

Okay. Thanks. Um, and, uh, turning for a minute to, uh, the celebrity brands, you know, some of these categories you've been talking about a while, and you've got a lot more that you've announced and the new ones that you're talking about, uh, when do we really start to see some kind of needle moving revenue from, from these lines? Are we on the threshold of that?

Well, let's, let's cross our fingers. We just got distribution, uh, for our wine with Jeremiah. Um, we just got into the state of California, Georgia. We're about to get Pennsylvania. We got 600 cases in the first week. All right. Not a giant number, but, but once you start to get those, you get 600 cases, they sell the next order is thousands and thousands of cases. Well, we see, we see a real opportunity there. We see. You don't have to get to in that business, as you know, Sean, right? You know, when we built Avion and Entourage, it only got to 20 million in revenues and sold for $250 million. If the trajectory is there, you're going to get a lot of money and you're going to need to be able to raise money at a substantial valuation into those, right? And part of the beauty of this is there's no real cost to us. We're getting ready to launch our second line, which is our Purple Rosé. We're really excited about this. We haven't announced the celebrity talent, but It'll be a massive, huge talent that's around this. And then, you know, we get this double whammy with Super Duper Kyle, right? We get multiple prongs, okay? We haven't announced yet, but he's going to do a podcast too, right? He's like the good guy rapper. He's done over a billion streams, right? And he's got an album coming out that we produced. So our producers on Split Mind and Drumify produced it. So we own half the music, right? We're launching a live stream with him. Right. Which is going to happen tonight. And then we're launching the coffee as part of that. And so you're going to get three pieces of the pie on that. And you're going to get some of the biggest talent in the world, including Anderson pack, who invited us to hold the event at his, his venue tonight. And he's done this for us before. I'm hoping he shows up who, you know, is one of the, one of the biggest stars in the world. Um, so really excited to see that. And I think you're going to see us have eight to 10 celebrity brands. We may even have some brands. that, you know, come into us that are already brands that are out there doing real revenues that may come into the fold that need our skills. And, you know, we haven't announced fully. Some people know, but we hired Sarah DeBolt, who is consulting for us, but we haven't brought her in full time yet, right? But that may happen soon. She ran all the marketing for White Cloth from $600,000 to the current $8 billion. And then subsequent to that, she launched Kevin Hart's Tequila, which sold more tequila than Casamigos in the first year. So we've got a world-class team here between Josh on the music side of it and talent side of it. Right. And our talent team at podcast one, I love celebrity brands with podcasters. The fact that, you know, direct response works so well, you'll know how those products do so quickly and so fast out of the shoot. And, you know, with signing the band of pumps and, We've just expanded that lineup, as you'll see next week, dramatically, right, and all the housewives and so on. There's so many opportunities here of products that can really work, work from cosmetics to multiple different brands, expanding way beyond coffee and alcohol.

Okay. And help me out with the economics on the music business, which can be pretty opaque sometimes. When you say you own half the song, do you mean you get half the economics of, you know, up and down the stream on that song?

We don't have, we don't have to publish it. Right. So nobody has to publishing if, you know, if it did like I spy, you know, did what, what Kyle selling did last time we'd make, you know, tens of millions of dollars off it. Right. I can't tell you it's going to do that, but even if it made us, you know, hundreds of thousands, this is all brand new money, brand new revenue streams coming in. Right. Our publishing business was up 300%. Right. It's just starting to really grow. We've just announced a partnership that I'm surprised the street didn't read into. But I announced an AI partnership that, that secret Intel, um, Intel is obviously, you know, competing with the video. It's yeah. It was the biggest chip maker in the world. They got to come back somehow. And they're entering the AI world in a positive way. And so they're building and spending all the money on it to build out the entire platform for us for beats and sounds across. But between drama fly and split mine in publishing, as you know, cause you know, you know, you know it all too well from Renaissance. right? These publishing sales for 16 to 25 times EBITDA, right? We have, we have an opportunity here. We don't have to get that big to have a division that's worth a lot of money. So you got, you got massive optionality in our publishing and Josh Valber who ran a vision of rock nations and had multiple number one songs. We get another, another number one song. We just hit it with Brett fires and, and a whiskey, um, number one African song ever to come. come to the markets and it's already done, I think 13 million streams about to hit radio. One of those songs could be millions to tens of millions of dollars of cashflow of the company. So, you know, keep your fingers crossed. And, you know, again, these aren't guaranteed, but there's a lot of optionality. When you start to see those kinds of numbers and the amount we have, we own a piece of a thousand songs right now and growing.

Okay. Thanks for that clarity. A couple of questions for Aaron. Aaron, circling back to question on GNA. Are you suggesting that the GNA level that we see in the September quarter is, you know, there are reasons for that to be higher than what we should expect in December and subsequent quarters because of, you know, the timing of some of those costs?

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I would expect GNA to drop down back to kind of historical levels Thank you.

And Aaron, when will the 10Q be filed?

10Q will be filed, I'll say early next week. So maybe one or two days before the deadline.

Okay. William Boschelli, Ph.D.: : All right, thanks and i'll just close my questions with a comment rob I echo what you said about the. William Boschelli, Ph.D.: : opportunist podcast on to balance really excellent you know some of the more recent pockets, I thought were a little weak frankly in that series, but this was outstanding good job to the team.

Your next question comes from the line of John Liviakis with Liviakis Financial. Your line is now open.

Hey, Rob, what an amazing story. You know, the market's overreacted to the change in the Tesla, the evolving of the Tesla relationship, and down to a 0.71 cap to sales in a peer group that's around 3 to 1. So we're so underpriced, I would argue anyway, although it's showing some turning here. Really amazing it's gotten this low. Any comments you can make about two things? One is, as you're consolidating a fragmented space with these smaller podcasters, what kind of benefits by consolidating? Are you getting some SG&A overlap reduction? Are you getting... What kind of benefits are you seeing from that by consolidating?

Following the full question, Aaron could probably answer that, but most of the consolidating was already done, right? That's not something that's happening now, John. That happened in previous quarters. But what I can tell you, and I think where you were heading before, is that trading at 70% of revenues when the industry is trading at 3.5% at this point, I think it's 3.4 times revenues, right? We've been humbled again. Our stock has had multiple lives to it. right? It's dropped to these levels and we've gone through tough cycles, both business, so on. We're a public venture capital company, right? And I've been through this, whether it was Digital Turbine, whether it was I-1, whether it was Jesco, whether it was THQ, for my entire career, we've gone through cycles where stocks go up and go down and they almost look like a heart attack, right? And know fortunately you know some people made fortunes in the stock and they get an opportunity to do it again right we're going to go through a little bit of a difficult time to fight through when the revenues kick in for tesla and when those subscribers convert but at the same time when you look at the optionality of this and you think about how much upside is you know you got to think about all of it right we have 46 patents we have one of 10 with the number 10 largest music subscription platform in the world order winning right um There's multiple parties who may have to buy us as well in this, right? So there's big opportunities there, but you also have a $220 million NOL, and you're looking at a podcast network that's number 11 or 12 in the world, right? Now you're going to our publishing and our celebrity brands, right, and our live streaming. You have five verticals here that could have a billion to a hundred billion dollars of upside. And when I say that, I don't say it cavalierly, right? Spotify just came out and said they're going to be 1 billion subscribers to music by 2027, and Goldman Sachs said there's going to be 1.7 billion paying subscribers, let alone free, so probably be like 5 billion. You just need to get to 10 million subscribers, which we're going to get to. One big B2B deal can take you there tomorrow if Tesla conversions happen as well as we think. That could be taking you quickly as well. We have massive opportunity here, massive optionality, and to trade down to these levels, there's only two things we can do. We can get into the bunkers and fight. We did it during COVID stock dropped to 60 cents. And six months later, it went back to seven and a half. We went through the same thing in 2021. We've had almost every two years, we've had this cycle and it's been a really tough micro cap market for everybody. Um, but no excuses. What are we doing? We're buying back stock. We bought back four and a half million shares of live one and an average of 173. Obviously we're going to buy a lot more, a lot more back here, right? Same thing in podcast one, we spun it out, right? We converted all of our debts. So there's no debt, all the debt converted at $2.10. In podcast, all of it converted at $3, right? So those are out of the way. So we got, you know, the major missiles out of the way. Now we got massive upside. And, you know, previously we went through these cycles. We had a lot of debt, right? We don't have that anymore. So Aaron and I excited. The team is, the team is excited. And then We'll put our money where our mouth is. You'll see that myself as well. I bought back a bunch of podcasts, one when the window was open. We'll do the same thing here. And yeah, I couldn't be more excited at where this is going. And I look forward to the updates and giving you guys updates on the B2B deals, as well as the conversions of Tesla, as well as the celebrity brands. So all those massive optionality, we got work to do. I've always said we're going to win on hard work. We're going to outwork any of our competitors. We're going to stay in the game and we're going to tough it out. When we go through tough times, we get stronger and we get a little angry. I can tell you my team was literally working through the night on a B2B deal until 4 o'clock in the morning this morning. Right. It's not easy. It's not just the signing of the deal. It's actually the launching of these deals. Right. And I couldn't be more proud of Brad and the tech team and Kit and the podcast team and Josh's music side of it and Sarah and the celebrity side of it. This is the A team. Right. And what they do, you know, that first B2B deal, $24 million. We've proven not only did we sign it because it's great to sign it, but it actually worked. Right. And yeah, I'm hoping that deal is going to expand this year. Maybe that deal goes to 30 or 40 or 50 million.

Well, given your track record, Rob, some of your big success stories in the past, and given the 46 patents and the five verticals, and it's amazing this is priced out here. It really seems strange. I can't believe it. I think the J.P. Morgan relationship, people are asking me if you could give a little more definition to what's happening there, what your plans are, as well as some of the B2Bs people want to know. Can you give a little more deep color on the B2Bs that are signed and those in the pipeline, some detail?

Yeah, I don't think I can give anything more than I've given today. I've been pretty clear on it. But on the banking side of it, I just flew out to Dallas, met with Craig Rosso, the head of media. Craig has been an amazing part. She's stuck with us in good times and bad. And then it keeps battling through. And, you know, obviously when you're one of 10 DSPs in the world, right. And you look at who the others are, right. You got, I've already called 6 billion. And then next level up is serious at 25 billion. And then it goes to Spotify. I think they're 70 billion or 80 billion today. It goes up every day. Right. And then you go to Amazon, Apple, Google, right. There really is nobody else. We're the only ones truly that can white label. We're the only ones that could be a partner. I think Facebook is missing a music service. Microsoft is missing a music service. Costco is missing a music service. Walmart is missing a music service. Many others out there that we can point to that could use their own music subscription, including Twitter. Twitter's in a lawsuit with the record labels for hundreds of millions of dollars already. As you know, all of these platforms, all these social platforms eventually settle with the record labels because you can't beat them, right? It means you can't have music. And I don't see any platform that has content not having music on it. So there's a lot of opportunities here, a lot of optionality. We'll continue to explore different things that are accretive to our shareholders. We'll continue to buy back stock, as I said. I'll personally be buying stock, as I said. And it's a very tough market. This media market has collapsed. The micro-cap market, you know, I've been outspoken about this because it's the first time in my career I've ever seen it where to get onto the Russell 2000 this year, to get on last year was $156 million. The Russell's up 20%. You would think the lowest end to get on this year if it was $156 should be $190. And it's crazy. To get on this year was $131 million. So we proudly got back on the Russell, which it didn't help us. you got onto the russell and then you hit the algorithms and the algorithms are so powerful and they have so much money they can quickly knock you down because they know that you're going to have when the when the rebalance happens every quarter they can knock you down those rebalances maybe we're starting to see that come the other way now right so they killed us in the last quarter we had 12 million shares of buying on the when we got onto the russell right then you had all the selling coming in the rebalance because we were down Maybe we'll start to see that now and you could get millions and millions of shares. And I'm a big fan of shorts. I've been telling everyone this for years. Digital turbine would have never run to $100 in a million years. It was never worth $12 billion. But it ran there because the shorts got clobbered. And you're starting to see that happen. You may see that happen now. We want one little short run here and the stock could have a run back into a big range. And we've never really had the opportunity to really get sizable acquisitions on, which you guys know I've done my whole career, right? Because we've never had a currency that's really been in a position to do it. I've always told everyone it takes me seven to 10 years. I'm in my seventh year. So I'm in my seventh year. I turned 60 in March. I'm not going anywhere. It's the only thing I want to do. I love going to work every day. I love my team. I love what we built here. We got obstacles we got to fight through. And, you know, I fully expect this will be the biggest. This will be the biggest company I've built in my career. And the team that I have is the best in the world. You look at our board and our management team. They built over $100 billion worth of media and tech teams. Nobody's walked away. They just get stronger.

Brilliant presentation, Rob. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Chuck. Okay, any other questions? Because I know we're getting pretty late here now.

There are no further questions. I will now hand the conference back over to Robert Ellen, CEO, for closing remarks.

Yeah, I think you guys have heard my voice enough. I'm super excited. I'm super energized. I'm super focused. My team is super focused. We're going to be here for a long time, and we're going to build an amazing business here and continue to grow this. And I just want to thank everyone for their support in the good times and bad times, and we're going to fight through this and win again. Thank you very much.

That concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for joining AMA Now Disconnect.