Michael Rapino: On the global part, Joe — I don’t think the strategy has changed. I think if you’ve listened to us for the last 5 years, or longer. We’ve been talking about that live as a global business, the artist has been unlocked globally. Consumers, thanks to social media and others are driving global consumption with no gatekeepers. So we have 100 offices in over 40 countries. We have been on this march for a long time. And we think there’s still lots of opportunity, obviously, as we talked about in Latin America, Pacific Rim, Eastern Europe. But kind of plan is following as we kind of predicted the artists would continue to go global — more global artists and international markets would want to be just like New York and Boston would want to be hosting U2 and Beyonce’s of the world, so we had an opportunity to build out those markets. So pedal down, we see lots of great growth opportunity for years to come on that front.
Joe Berchtold: And on the bots, certainly, new technologies allow us to continue to get more sophisticated in trying to stop the bots. We’re regularly working on both the technologies as well as just new processes to try to weed out humans versus bots. Problem is some of the same technologies is also being deployed by the bad actors trying to jump the line and get those they have a $5 billion a year incentive to cheat get those tickets, which is why we’ve been continuing to advocate and I think we’ve seen a lot more visibility on some of the behavior that we need or we’d like at least more legislative support in terms of real punishments for the bad actors or the platforms that enable the bad actors, ending practices like speculative ticketing that is clearly price manipulative and anti-consumer.
So we’re continuing to do our part to fight it, and we hope that we’ll be able to get some help with some rules and with some real penalties for people that are trying to cheat.
Operator: And the next question comes from the line of David Katz with Jefferies. Please proceed with your question.
David Katz: I wanted to just get an update, if you don’t mind, on the digital process, right, digital ticketing, et cetera, and then the second derivative of being able to harvest and drive better returns off of the information gathered from it. So where is that today and where can it go? And how do you see that opportunity?
Joe Berchtold: Yes. At this point, digital ticketing is largely ubiquitous globally coming out of COVID. I haven’t seen the latest numbers, but I expect it to be the 90s that are now digital tickets. It’s a very informed shifting from barcodes to what we call safe ticks, which is rotating barcodes or NFC keep tickets from being counterfeited and sold over and over. So we have a number of initiatives that have launched them to use that data. We’ve talked extensively about some of the things we’ve done in marketing, bringing all of our data together to better understand the fan, how we market to that fan. How with the digital connection, we’re able to market to them on behalf of our Digimaster clients, how we’re able to market to them on behalf of sponsors, how we’re able to send them messages for upsells when they go to shows in our buildings.
So that all continues. And then in the background, we have Ticketmaster using the data that it gets for a range of, I’ll call it, machine learning purposes and tools in terms of helping clients figure out how do they price their shows, how they market their shows, what are the tools that they should use can help our concert folks in terms of understanding likely demand for tours and shows in specific markets. So certainly, now it’s the point where that data and now is used is permeated the business.
