Kevin Dede: You mentioned, I think, what, 400 sponsors? It was — you just offered a lot of data really quickly, and I can’t hear that fast, so I apologize, but could you just review where you are with sponsors on which programs and which platforms rather and where you think that goes? I mean, with the sponsorship that you have with Slacker, the sponsors that you have with PodcastOne versus the LiveOne platform.
Robert Ellin: Well, okay. So try to simplify it for a second, right? Start with the fact that we bought PodcastOne, right? We had 1 salesperson, right? We now have a 15-person sales team, right? Those — that sales team, led by Sue McNamara and Alex Brough has combined 50 years background of selling for Sirius, iHeart and so on, right? Our sponsorships across the entire platform are growing. So we’re growing our sponsors in podcasting. We’re growing our sponsors across audio. We’ve just added podcasting to every Tesla car. And obviously, it’s only in the free tier of audio that you’re going to get sponsorship, right? Most of that is going to be programmatic. But in podcasting, you get both. You get programmatic as well as direct response as well has great sponsors.
And then across our live programs, you’ve seen so many of them this year from Hyundai to Volkswagen to a huge event we just did with eBay, and you’re just going to see those grow. You’re going to see more and more of those. And the only events that we’re doing now have to have a sponsor behind it, who was paying for it with at least 20% net margins on it.
Kevin Dede: Okay. So — all right. And just taking a step back, you offered in your prepared remarks, what — I think it was, what, 400 total sponsors currently now across all of your platforms?
Robert Ellin: By year-end. So I’m — we’re a March 31 year-end. So we’ve had over 300 so far, right, part away to closing the year with over 400.
Kevin Dede: Okay. And then where were you — I know you offered a data point for year-end March ’22. What was that number?
Robert Ellin: Year-end March ’22 for a number of sponsors?
Kevin Dede: Yes, I think you had a number of that, yes.
Robert Ellin: We’ve grown from 7 pre-COVID to about 300 last year to over 400 this year. And next year will be well over 500.
Operator: Our next question comes from Calvin Hori from Hori Capital.
Calvin Hori: Did I miss something? Did you say you settled the SoundExchange lawsuit?
Robert Ellin: Yes. Yes, we did. We filed it in 8-K. So we settled the SoundExchange lawsuit, paid out over 2 years with a healthy discount on it. What we announced is about $5.4 million of payables moving from short term to long term. So both the same day. It’s a $42 million swing in getting all the debt converted at $2.10. We also moved $5.4 million in long term. So a really exciting week for the company and really strengthens our balance sheet dramatically. We also said this morning that our short-term assets went up by $2.5 million, from $25 million we reported like 3 weeks ago to $27.5 million. So it’s very likely the next thing you got to see is a credit facility that we’ll be able to borrow somewhere between $17 million and $20 million against those short-term assets. And so this is a dramatic improvement for us. And if the stock stays down at these levels, we’ll increase that buyback from $2 million to weigh more than that down the line.
Calvin Hori: Okay. Great. And then one other thing, you mentioned that probably going to spin off Slacker sometime this year. Is there any sort of timing on that as well as a paper view unit?
Robert Ellin: Yes. I mean, I think you’re going to see something happen pretty imminently. The success of PodcastOne and the fact that now the PodcastOne S1 is filed, right, and shortly be up and trading. We’re aggressively and actively in negotiations for who will be the right partners to come in there. And obviously, Slacker, we’ve said, throws off over $10 million of cash. We just increased the EBITDA of the overall Audio business, right? I think we said $18 million today, right? So obviously, that $10 million of cash flow is going up substantially. So you’ll see a much — I would expect a much, much higher valuation like our peers are trading at 3.3x revenues, right. Our Audio Division does $80 million right, over $80 million, right?
You’re going to see financially higher than the $68 million that we did in PodcastOne, right? Otherwise, we’ll pass, right? It’s not — if it’s not a multiple of that. We would pass on it, but we’re seeing a lot of aggressive active interest in it. And on the pay-per-view side, it’s really interesting because we haven’t really pressed the envelope on this year as we’ve spent most of the time, right, consolidating, right, taking EBITDA up dramatically, that pay-per-view business has $1 billion of upside. And we’re seeing a lot of really smart, really serious interest around that division and that upside. And you probably know, I started independent entertainment 30 years ago and took that to like went over $1 billion but traded at almost $0.5 billion for an extended period of time.
That’s 30 years ago. I’m really, really excited about where we’re going with pay-per-view. And we’re doing an event. I think Aaron Windsor, Emblem3. We just shot at the other night. Wednesday pay-per-view….
Aaron Sullivan: That was Tuesday, not Wednesday.
