If you think that we had five years in a row, where 90 million people are now watching Rock in Rio. If you can just get 1% of that audience to pay a pay-per-view ticket at $0.10 on the $1 on what they pay for the live event, you can add billions of dollars of revenues over the next couple of years. And we see it as one of our giant growth engines with almost no risk to us anymore. You just — you see each of the announcements that we make. We announced Hockey Wars, we’re getting paid for that upfront, right? We got margin in it, and then we have the upside of all the additional revenues from it that can drive it, including pay-per-view, merchandise, NFTs, et cetera, across the board and obviously the pay-per-view.
Kevin Dede: Then how do you cultivate these relationships with Live Nation and AEG and building a pay-per-view audience or a pay-per-view opportunity against something that they might want to do internally?
Rob Ellin: It’s a great question. And what I would tell you is that Brad and the tech team have brilliantly on top of the 45 patents we have in the history of 20 years in building Slacker Radio and being one of the 10 platforms in the world that’s really left, right, in this market that’s tens of billions of dollars, there’s only 10 of us left in the world that may be able to do it. Brad and the team have brilliantly built a pay-per-view, digital meet and greets, NFTs, we partnered with Polygon, and we really positioned ourselves as the thought leader in it. And I don’t think anybody has ever streamed with the quality that we have to really to perfection from everywhere from Brazil to China to Japan to Sziget in Budapest to Jazz Montreux in Switzerland.
And now it’s just moving — the next move to that is who’s really going to be able to deliver that production at that level, who’s going to be able to deliver the pay-per-view and make sure that it works and lasts, and I think we’re the only ones in the world that can do it at that level.
Kevin Dede: Okay. Last question is just for clarity’s sake because I think things are a little scrambled up in my head, Rob, and I apologize. But you in addressing Brian’s question early on, you thought that most valuations in the podcast space were coming in about 1 times rev. So I just like to understand how you’re looking at those valuations versus your perception that LiveOne is itself is and its trading is overly discounted, how are these acquisitions going to become accretive based on — sort of based on your perception…
Rob Ellin: Yes, Kevin, I think you heard wrong. The valuations for podcast businesses, right, have been — literally have been 5 times to 30 times revenues. So the last deal that was done, Sirius Radio just bought a podcast network seven months ago and was doing $10 million in revenues. It’s not even on the charts of top podcast networks. And it’s sold for $150 million in cash. And if you look at just about every deal in the space because the industry is growing so fast, it’s grown from $400 million pre-COVID to $1.6 billion this year, right? And it’s going to $7 billion to $10 billion over the next five to seven years, right? There’s going to be this unique opportunity right now that we can roll up some of these smaller podcast networks that really there’s not a home to go to right now.
They need the sophistication and the talent that Kit and his team have and the hand holding process and the relationship with the creators. So it’s really unique, but it’s not a 1 time revenue. It’s really, really been 5 times to 30 times revenues for these businesses.
