Destiny Media Technologies Inc. (DSNY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us on the webinar today. Before we begin, I'd like to announce that we will be referring to today's earnings release, which was sent to newswire earlier today. I'd also like to remind everyone that this webinar call could contain forward-looking statements about Destiny Media Technologies within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements are based upon current beliefs and expectations of management and are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements. Such risks are fully discussed in the company's filings with SEC and SEDAR, and the company does not assume any obligation to update information contained in this call. During the webinar, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. The non-GAAP financial measures are presented in the supplemental disclosures and should not be considered in isolation of or as a substitute of or superior to the financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP and should be read in conjunction with the company's financial statements filed with the SEC and SEDAR. The non-GAAP financial measures used in the company's presentation may differ from similarly titled measures presented by other companies. A reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in the earnings press release. Following the presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] With that, I now would like to turn the call over to your host, Fred Vandenberg, Chief Executive Officer.

Thanks, Sean. On the call today will be myself, Fred Vandenberg and Glenn. And Glenn will present a little bit later on in the presentation. This is our second webinar or second earnings webinar, I guess, I should say. And we've made some changes, but similar to last -- the last webinar we've presented -- prepared a PowerPoint presentation that will follow along and hopefully, that will assist in the discussion. I'll just share my screen here. Okay. So the structure of the call today, I really wanted to focus in on our longer-term goals, where do we see ourselves in 5 years? It's that old job interview question. Where do you see yourself in 5 years? The second item would be how we're going to get there, our strategy; and third, what we did in 2021 to get there. Play MPE has grown by about 22% over the last 4 years, I think it's 29%, if you go back 5, but we wanted to talk about where we see ourselves going in the future. So looking forward, Play MPE is a B2B business of music promotion. This is our revenue by source over the last 5 years that give you sort of a foundation of the recent history. It's got an addressable market, we think of about $40 million. We think that's conservative. But we really view Play MPE as an anchor stone for additional businesses. We like Play MPE. We think it is a business with a lot of potential growth, and it's a high-margin business, but we look to grow beyond that. So where do we think -- where do we see ourselves in 5 years? The -- this graph here is really to give you a sense of scale or a bit of perspective. We've used $15 million as our revenue amount in 5 years, but will that take longer to get there? Will it be sooner? Will it be higher or lower in 5 years? These are all questions that I think as you go through our strategy, you'll get a sense of it, it's kind of hard to predict. But it does give you a sense that we are targeting a higher growth rate. I'll talk a little bit more specifically later on. But as we have added staffing and especially product engineering staff, we've started to dedicate more time to new products. So we think we're targeting growth, higher growth with Play MPE, but concurrently, we're starting to invest more time into new products. So how do we get there? I'm going to spend the majority of time and then bear with me, I think it will be a useful discussion. But on how we grow and add revenue and how we acquire new markets. Play MPE is a little bit unique in the sense that, think of it like Facebook, if you're the only one of your friends there, it's going to be a pretty boring conversation. So in acquiring a new market, we have to build up that network of use. So how do we do that? Really, the first step we take is adding content, getting desirable music. That tends to be music from major record labels, 1 of the 3 major record labels or all 3, I guess? And in some cases, it's more major independent. Anyway, it's content that's desirable. And how do you get that is really a strong business development group and an easy-to-use platform. The second step would be adding recipients, getting recipients to actively use that. The -- again, it takes it easy-to-use platform on the recipient side, intuitive, languages, local languages. And we add a lot to the recipient player that facilitates a really good experience. The second -- sorry, the 3, 4, 5 here, this is the order that they typically come in, but they can be a little bit less sequential. It's more of an iterative process there. But it's really adding lists. So we can sell these -- it's critical to selling to independent labels where they don't have the resources to manage list and know who to contact. We establish commercial relationships or agreements typically up until this stage we're providing that network of use and then we start coming to arrangements, and they can be any kind of commercial arrangement where it's a smaller pilot agreement that just funds some of our investments or they can be full commercial agreements. And then the fifth step is really your block and tackling, adding independent sales, marketing, lead conversion -- lead generation, lead conversion, all that sort of steps. This slide is really talks about where we are and it builds on that previous slide where colors match up. So you can sort of see where each market is. It's never as clean as this slide would suggest. For example, we don't have independent sales in the Baltics, up in the part of -- northern part of Europe up here. And United States is a bit of a split market where we have a lot of room to grow in rhythmic and urban and top 40 music where but we also have an established presence with country and Christian and alternative music. South Africa, we'll talk more about what we did there. But Northern Europe, Australia and New Zealand are all sort of more on the block and tackling stages. So our immediate focus really is to expand our Latin initiatives. We think South Africa is a bit of a stepping stone into Africa generally. And we want to take advantage of this active recipients receiving a lot of content in Europe. So how do we get there faster? I think the first thing I need to say is that establishing a new market takes time. It takes time to educate recipients. It takes time to get the content. And there's really no way around that. But I think the reason I'm confident that we can tip that revenue scale up is because we've seen it before. We've done it before. We've experienced everything we're experiencing now. But how do we get there faster? It starts with content. So how do we get more content in there faster. We'll talk a little bit about product developments or platform developments later. But we get more content from Universal, for example. They tend to be a foot in the door in a lot of markets, but we've -- we're working on things like localizing our app. We've localized -- when I say localized, we translated into the local language. We've localized our web player. We want to do that to the mobile app as well. But it's a strong business development. We've made some progress there that Glenn will talk about a little later. We've made the release creator a little bit more intuitive. We launched that I think it was in January of 2021. We're working at other things to get to automate content, getting content in the system quickly and just better marketing. And so on the recipient side, it's kind of the same process. It's ways to make a recipients engage more. There's a lot of things we've done over the years that make our recipients experience quite good. We tend to invest in that quite a lot, and we were going to continue that. The next one list is a big one. This one, I want to spend a little bit more time on, but list, we present lists for sale that's presenting people to independent artists and record labels or even the majors. But we present them in 12 countries now, and we have a couple of lists that are more international in scope. But this is critical for independent sales. And we've undergone some things this year that help our list management department produce those lists faster, more efficiently. But no other competitor really have the international presence that we do. And oftentimes, when we enter in a new market, that new market wants to send to international destinations. It's not just with that local market. So in this type of sale, you need active recipients and then you need to tell people who they are. You also need an easy-to-use platform. And one of the things we'll be working on this year is in fiscal 2022 is checkout function. We have a really easy-to-use distribution release creator, but we want to have customers check out at the end of it rather than go through a quoting system. One of the things that's probably interesting here is that 2/3 of the users of Play MPE internationally are not on our list. So this is a great opportunity for us. Another thing we're working on in this aspect is facilitating ways for those recipients to become on our list, like getting them to do the work for us. That will be a little bit further down the road. Then commercial agreements, that's really Biz Dev, better marketing, customer education about our benefits. Independent sales, this goes back to the checkout feature that we're talking about and better marquee. And the last thing, as we -- so how do we get there faster. Part of it is R&D into new products. As we get further down the track in improving software development processes, we're able to spend a little bit more time on R&D. We're not -- we're never short of ideas. The space is evolving all the time. I'll get into it a little bit, on the next slide, I think it is a bit about what we did this year. But we are spending more time exploring what comes next. So what we did in fiscal 2021. The first part is investments in the core Play MPE. I talked about the release creator that's a bit more intuitive. That sort of builds on the -- we did a web release creator back in 2018. In fiscal 2021, we updated it to be a little bit more intuitive, a little bit slicker, more powerful announcement preparation. But in the second half of the year, what you see here is the left-side NAV in the Caster software, that's the distribution software. And there's all sorts of components that are within that platform. This year, we really focused in on the contacts, the release sharing and within releases is release scheduling. And I would love to spend some time talking about each of these models -- modules rather to tell you all the great things that are within them. But I think the biggest takeaway here is that the functionality within these modules for lack of a better word, is critical for UMG's global agreement. It's critical to their workflow. Contacts management is very powerful. Again, I'd love to get into the detail of what -- why it's good, but it really helps our list management group manage lists efficiently. And that's why we are able to present as many lists as we can. I mean it's -- that functionality was somewhat in the PC version, but we've added some functionality and a web-based platform that will make it even faster. The -- these pieces of software are very complex in their building, but they result in a very easy-to-use and powerful flexible platform for our customers. Release sharing in particular is, well, context in particular to, but release sharing is something that's critical for UMG and Warner in Northern Europe uses it as well. With these investments, the implication will be that Universal will expand their usage or at least that's what the plan is. We've already seen it this year, we've added a lot of increased distributions in Israel is a 1 territory where UMG has added. But I think with this, when they move over to the web-based platform completely, they'll be able to expand worldwide. And what that does is creates many more opportunities for us to have that foot in the door in new markets. Second thing I hinted at earlier was investment in new technology. We started the year exploring ways to partner with other providers of aeroplane monitoring. That's something I think we were thinking at the beginning of the year that we could partner with them. And we thought that, that would be a good idea for Play MPE because our customers are asking for this all the time. But -- as the year progressed, we started thinking that maybe we can do it ourselves. And we've built a prototype. It's really just at a prototype stage. I know that people will want to know what the addressable market is. I can tell you that I think it's a very appealing market for us to pursue. It will be complementary to Play MPE. One of the things that I think is interesting in this technology is that it doesn't have the same kind of latency in terms of market expansion. Like Play MPE, you have to invest in the market and build that use up. And then eventually, you'll be able to establish commercial relationships and grow it. This won't have that same sort of latency. But the reality is it's at a prototype stage, and you don't want to build up expectations too much because we still have to build out our team to build -- to design and build what we think is a salable product. That's something we're going to pursue aggressively. We have the cash to do it. We think we can do it with that cash. And then the last thing is, this year, we added product and design staff. One of the challenges we've faced is engineering staff, generally, they are in hot commodities, especially in Vancouver. So we've expanded our search for that. But also with added product and design staff, we think we can really leverage what we have more efficiently and produce more. And with that, I'll turn it over to Glenn.

Thanks, Fred, and thanks, everyone, for taking some time out of your busy schedules to tune into our presentation today. I think if you had asked me 1.5 years ago, if we'd still be battling a global pandemic, I don't think I would have believed you. But here we are. But despite these obvious challenges that the pandemic has thrown at the industry, 2021 represents the fifth year of -- fifth consecutive year of revenue growth, while we make these investments for larger revenue growth. We believe this growth has been a result of a significant restructuring of our management team and marketing and business development groups over the last couple of years and our continued to refocus on our core Play MPE business, which has commenced seating network used to expand our territories. In regards of new staffing in order to nurture and grow our existing markets and facilitate and accelerate our new market acquisition during the year, we continue to restructure the team. During the year, we added 6 account reps and supporting staff in the United States and Canada for a net gain of our employees. Each of these account executives were carefully chosen for their wealth of music promotion experience in their respective formats and territories. And we believe that their in-depth knowledge of the industry and network of contacts help, and we'll continue to expand our engagement with our customers on both sides of the platform. Play MPE has a long-standing use -- has long-standing use in core markets such as Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, and of course, the United States. And our strategy in these existing markets is to increase marketing efforts to attract and educate new customers, expand distribution opportunities to new types of recipients and to expand distributions to Play MPE's growing global presence. Over the course of the year, Play MPE's marketing team worked along with the Biz Dev group to focus on new markets. We commenced a series of marketing initiatives that included partnerships with music-related associations and awards, social media posts, blog posts and advertising. Our marketing team has helped us immensely through a lot more detailed strategy and our lead generation over the year proved a little over 28%. Popping over to revenue. Thank you. The total revenue for Play MPE for the 12 months ending August 31, '21 increased by over 9%. And I'd like to highlight again that independent record label revenue grew by 23.1% for the year. The majority of this independent music growth is due to an increase in leads within existing territories where Play MPE has well-established use. Also contributing to this growth is independent record label revenue in new territories as the company has established sufficient use to begin attracting paid use from these newer territories. This includes VJ, Jazz globally, South Africa and some of the newer genres in the U.S. and Canada. In terms of territories and areas that we're excited about, the Latin music market, which is large and vibrant. But last one well-established system for promotional distribution and discovery of music is an area where we believe our platforms market-leading advantages will result in market acquisition. Our marketing team focused heavily on what we see as a key area of expansion for our platform. Our product website, we've got explanatory videos, Caster and player software are all now available in Spanish. Back in November of 2020, we hired a senior Latin music industry executive to assist our existing team to expand the reach in the Latin market. Over the course of fiscal '21, we -- fiscal '21, we continue to build on the Latin market usage of Universal Music Group with the addition of ceded content from Warner and Sony as well as several key independent labels. We're seeing very strong growth in usage. On the recipient side of the platform, our total active users in these markets grew by 130%. Concurrent to the efforts to grow the available content, our operations group began constructing distribution lists throughout key Latin territories. Preliminary experience suggests that well maintained and accurate recipient lists are critical, not only to independent record labels but also to the larger major independents and the major record labels. In addition to expanding our Latin list in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, our business development and operations team developed operational list in 19 additional countries. I don't need to list them all, but from Argentina to Venezuela, we've really, really spent a lot of time expanding these lists. Moving to South Africa, which is a great example of success in acquiring a new territory. Back in 2020, in fiscal 2020, we added Warner Music South Africa's trial used to the existing use of Warner Music in South Africa. And at the end of fiscal 2020, we entered into a reseller agreement with South Africa and South Africa with stamp communications. And then in August of 2020, we commenced our first independent record label sales in South Africa. But I would like to mention that shortly after 2021 fiscal year-end, we entered into an exclusive 2-year agreement with Warner Music in South Africa. We expect to see similar revenue growth with South African independent record labels and to expand into the sub-Saharan African market. And perhaps most importantly, we believe, as Fred mentioned, that the South African market will act as an influential strategic stepping stone to the African market generally. We've already commenced some small distributions and training beyond South African borders. Looking to the U.S., where we've had a long history and strong user base with many music genres, including Christian Country, Jazz, noncommercial college, out of contemporary and alternative formats over the course of the year, we worked to strengthen our business development team's engagement in these existing markets through strategic hires, refined sales processes, marketing initiatives and product improvements over the course of the year, we secured several multiyear contracts with some strategic and major and major independent labels. We do have stronger competition in other formats, including urban, rhythmic and top 40. It's within these underserved genres where Play MPE can grow substantially within the United States. The company is focused on capitalizing on recent investments in the platform, commercial arrangements with major labels in the United States and the platform functionality as we've discussed. As part of the additions to the business development group during the year, we added a team member with broad promotions and radio experience in these rhythmic, urban and top 40 formats in early '21. And with our focus on these segments, we have new and increased usage from several major sub labels and major independent labels in these formats. The improved flow of content, which is distributed through the -- through our platform has fostered stronger engagements with recipients in the various formats. Just an example to compare the number of active recipients comparing it to the previous year. Rhythmic, we've got almost 25% more active users; urban, 23.5%; top 40, up about 13%. So we're going to continue to focus on these genres. And the focus is also on the independent record business that we'll promote. Moving on to Canada. Back in 2019, the company saw an opportunity to expand into Canada due to the relative strength of our platform over an established system which operates within the country. Though we view our system as having numerous competitive advantages, our key Canadian competitor benefits from brand awareness and process inertia. So to initially attract users we focused on our business developments on garnering major label and major independent content. In late 2020 -- late January 2020, Universal's Music Canada commenced distributing all releases within Canada through our platform. And by Q3 of 2020, Sony Music Canada had commenced sending significant content through Play MPE. And in Q4 of 2021, Warner Music Canada commenced as well. All 3 major labels are regularly using Play MPE in Canada to varying extents. Late in the year, we onboard a new business development team member within Canada with 17 years of promotions, marketing and project management skills and he's having worked for our major and major independent labels as well as broadcast groups within Canada. We've seen a significant increase in Canadian usage in fiscal '21. And by the end of fiscal '21, active recipient users in Canada had grown by 52% to over 1,100. Revenue from Canadian labels grew 170%. And as the market becomes more aware of Play MPE, recipients reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. The French Canadian content market subsegment, if you will, lacks a similar thing. There's no dominant system. And following a brief but successful trial period, Play MPE signed one of the largest distributors of French language content in Canada to a 1-year agreement. Thanks to our list in a variety of global territories, it's very easy for labels to distribute to international recipients. As Canadian record labels become aware of our global presence, labels have commenced distributing to international recipient lists. We plan to add recipients lists in French-speaking territories due to the demand from French Canadian artists. And as we add new French-speaking territories to our distribution list, it will be very easy for a company like a French Canadian distributor to deliver to France, for example. Basically, if you -- if we build a list, if you build it, they will come ultimately. And with that, I'll pass it back over to Fred.

Thanks, Glenn. With -- just before we turn it over to Q&A, I just wanted to sort of summarize what we've talked about today. I think Glenn has done a great job of taking you through the progress we've made in each of these -- each of our new market initiatives, the block and tackling with existing markets and then how we've gone about acquiring them. But really, I wanted to highlight and sort of refocus that we are aligning our product development and our staff development into moving our new market acquisition faster. And then the last thing is that as we move further down the stage of moving new markets on faster, we are also investing more time in new products that should come online. With that, I will turn it over to Sean to introduce the Q&A session.

Thank you, Fred. So now we'll begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Gerry Wimmer.

Congratulations on a good year to you and your team.

Thank you. I think we've accomplished a lot. It's been a very busy year. I can tell you that.

Yes. First question, just going back historically, for the financials that you just reported, one thing that jumps out is the revenue growth in Q4 is being flat. 9% of the year. Is there something specific in Q4 that would have resulted in a flat quarter?

Well, good question. I think there is -- we had Q4 in fiscal 2020, it wasn't a particularly good one. So you'll see the comparatives as strong, you still see some progress. I don't have it in front of me, but you still see some progress in various territories. We do see a bit of a negative impact from a reduction in Sony revenue in Australia. But otherwise, I think it's just a strong quarter that has a tough comparison. The real long-term growth is yet to come.

Okay. Second question, moving forward on your earning 3 spend buckets of technology, marketing, sales and marketing and admin. As a percentage of sales, say, going forward this year, are the percentages going to be the same as last year? Or do you see some deviation from those spend markets?

That's a good question. Well, look admin would be -- there's nothing that would grow admin. In fact, I would suspect that, that overall is going to decline. The -- we are investing in growth. So you see a lot -- we've hired net -- what was it, Glenn, net and that 2 account executives and 2 support staff in Biz Dev, is that?

That's correct, yes.

Okay. So the investments there are growing, and that's really focusing on growth. And then R&D and software development, there's a certain amount of maintenance and a certain amount that is all designed to grow the business and we grow that business by adding things to the software platform that will provide revenue in and of itself. Just a couple of things in there that will -- we think will be chargeable as a service. And things that will help our Biz Dev convert sales, convert to clients. So just nice to have improvements in the platform, additional functionality, whatever it is. So in terms of those buckets, it's -- I don't know off the top of my head what the ratios are, but we're essentially trying to bake more cakes, and we're adding eggs and flower whatever else goes into a cake. But -- so that we're growing expenses to ultimately lead to improved revenue.

So from remodeling or looking at it, would the percentage -- combined percentage of those 3 buckets, the increasing at a slightly higher rate than the increase in sales or stable? Or how would you -- how would somebody should look at that?

Sorry, I think the 3 buckets you said were admin, sales and marketing and products?

And R&D, yes.

Okay. So...

As a percentage of sales.

As a percentage of sales. Well, admin would decline as a percentage of sales. I mean, admin is admin and I think overall costs are likely to decline. So as revenue grows, that is even a sharper decline in terms of its proportion of sales. I think in the very -- in near term, both development and marketing and Biz Dev costs are going to grow as a percentage of sales. I don't have the split. I don't have the -- I can add that a little bit later and get more details on that, but we're really just trying to grow. And when you talk about R&D, you really have probably 3 different types of things. There's 1 that is maybe 4. There's 1 that is just really maintenance of the existing software. So it's improvements to the software in the sense that upgrading programming languages or fixing certain things or whatever. Then there is R&D that is really truly R&D, it's stuff exploring things for new products or new processes that are truly new. And then there is another bucket, which would be adding functionality to be catalysts or to provide new services.

Great. Two other questions. First of all, how should somebody view -- you talk about the exclusivity agreement that you got from Warner in South Africa. Investor standpoint, what's the -- can you put a ballpark figure what that means in revenue generation, say, in that market for your company?

It's a small -- if it was a material agreement, we would press release it in the sense of it being a big revenue generator. It's -- I don't know, I think it's like 0.3% to our revenue or something like this. Don't quote me on that. I'm just roughly. It's small, I think it's more -- the impact is more interesting in the sense that I think it gives us a foothold into Africa generally. And certainly, what you've seen in the past with independent sales in the United States, for example, you have this network of use. And we've grown independent revenue in the United States by 9% year-over-year for 12 years or something like that. If you add more -- if you go back further, it's higher percentages because you had that initial really steep curve. But we hope to see that same sort of growth within South Africa. It's a -- it's an interesting -- it's a little market, but it's an interesting one that I think in the sense that it's a foothold in South Africa. And I think Glenn touched on this a little bit, but one of the -- there's no provider of this service that I think has the same kind of global presence as we do. And certainly not when you consider curated lists, knowing who to contact in a foreign territory, for example, is a valuable commodity that we provide. We are working towards things that will allow us to provide more list in more territories. And we think that, that kind of snowballs result in exponential growth because you'll get South African Indies that want to hit the U.S. market or you'll want to get Australian Indies that want in the South African market or those kinds of things. And if you look at our releases generally, about 15% of them are more international. And I don't think any other provider of this kind of service is providing that. So we think that as we grow and we acquire a new territory, you will see interesting growth, like, for example, our Latin growth, we're very happy with the way it's going. We're starting to generate lift in those territories. That's going to take some time. But that's lists that are valuable to Latin music, but it's also -- I guess, what they would call Anglo music. It's interesting to -- for Anglo music going into South America. Justin Bieber is popular in South America as well. So that kind of -- those kind of international distributions are interesting. Sorry, that's a long-winded way of answering your question.

Okay. Okay. Just you touched at the beginning of your presentation on kind of the big picture. You talked about the growth rate you had 22% over the last 4 years, kind of between 5% and 10% annually. You also talked about getting $5 million to $50 million in 5 years. During the -- and maybe the question for your Board, too, the company has a pretty small revenue base. We're a public company. It's a small revenue base for a public company to attract attention or to build currency in your stock price. So the company would be thinking a little bigger, a little differently, maybe you shouldn't be a public company, because $5 million to $50 million over 5 years is still a very small public company. And it's pretty hard to generate currency in your stock price on even $50 million revenue basis. Can you just provide me a little viewpoint of you and the Board on the sense of being public at this size.

It's not something that we think -- it's not something that we talk about. But I think inherent in the question is Play MPE, I gave the $15 million as a place marker. I don't know where we'll be. But what I would want to emphasize is that Play MPE is a really interesting and good little business. It's a niche business. It's a B2B business in the music industry. But I think it's -- our focus over the last few years was really to shore up the platform, shore up our staffing, make sure we're going in the right direction. And we think we can start growing that business more programmatically. And from that, we think we can add revenue streams. I think Play MPE is a really nice business in the sense that it's high margins. And it probably has -- I guess, what I would say is an outsized importance in the music industry that is I think what that means is really that we were more important than our revenue would suggest, which I think begs the question, how do we change that? And we are exploring ways to do that. But it is a nice business that we think we can really layer on things to it, whether or not we should be public, why not? It does take some of my time to do calls like this. You do Investor Relations and that sort of thing, but the costs aren't that significant, and it gives a lot of opportunities for people to invest in a pretty cool business.

Yes. I think my point is that you need to build currency in your stock price in order to leverage that currency to grow bigger. And it's at current growth rate, it's tough to do for a microcap company. And I think the stock kind of reflects steady state valuation give or take. I know it's not that liquid. That's the point. And I think you guys should think bigger if you want to be public and use the stock as currency because that's the point. I think you have a good business. It's just -- it's small. And small public companies were main small public companies on market capitalization. That is a reality, despite some different things you guys are doing so.

Yes. Well, okay. I don't want to harp on it too much, but I would beg to differ on it. I get what you're saying. I do think that as we grow revenue, even in the context of the Play MPE business by itself, a growing revenue base, especially with what we hope to do, will create some interest in the stock that will drive -- we didn't have a -- we had a pretty good year in terms of our trading, our volume. If you look at the last couple of months, maybe not so much, but generally, I think our volume is pretty good. And I think we -- one adding David Mossberg to the board is something that we are looking more proactively on generating interest in the stock. I do -- I really do believe we are -- we do have an unsized importance in the industry. And I think that in itself, as we look at more creative ways to invest in Investor Relations that it will generate some interest.

Okay. No, fair enough. I'm just -- my point is you always have to attract another generation of investor ultimately, going to other than retail investors, it's difficult to do when you remain stagnant in margin.

Well, I think that's true. I think the old way of doing IR is maybe not the best way to do it. And I think we're looking at creative ways to generate some interest in all sorts of interesting things will happen over the last year with stocks and trading. And I think we'll be smarter about our IR initiatives.

Okay. And finally, is the buyback still in place? Is that -- was that renewed or not? I can't recall.

It was renewed in January, I believe. I'd have to check the date exactly, but -- and so it's effective for a year, and that means it's still effective now. It is effective now. I know that.

And you plan to renew it or that's not known yet?

We haven't approached it with the Board, and we'll think about it. I do think -- I'm going to get some flak for this, but I think we're undervalued. But -- and we do have uses. I think in terms of your earlier comment about the size of the business. I think if we add these layers of business on, we will generate a lot of interest. I think it takes time. It will take time to build out these things, but we want to use that cash to do that as well. Just while we're waiting for the next question, if there is a next one. The one thing I have been asked this morning is the status of the universal agreement. The term expires at the end of December. We're looking at extending that with them. We have a certain strategy behind that, and there's nothing in -- anything I've ever seen that would suggest that there's anything but a successful renewal. What that looks like is a different question, but we're working towards that.

Okay. Thanks. [Operator Instructions]

I'll address another question I got this morning. And what -- is this -- what's the size of the Latin market? That's one of the ones that I think is pretty exciting for us. We -- when I talk about the addressable market cap for addressable market size for Play MPE, we say $40 million, we kind of arrived at that in a bottom-up approach, but it's -- we split at the market based on territories. And we think that very conservatively that would exceed our current revenue, just the Latin market alone. And as we've progressed further into it, we are starting to see that, that might be very conservative. Even it's a market that we're building out. So in terms of market share, it's -- we can't really say what percentage we have because we haven't commercialized it yet. But we have Universal distributing in various territories. We have Warner distributing in -- I'm not actually sure how many distributing territories. It's throughout South America, Spain, the Caribbean and the U.S. itself and Central America and a lot of independents. I think we've got a number of releases, and we're starting to build up that activity in this list. So it's really a market under construction, but it's one that's very exciting for us.

Okay. It doesn't appear there are any more questions submitted at this time. Fred, I'd like to -- we have 1 more question here from Lawrence Goldstein.

Larry, you are on mute.

Could you maybe do unmute your microphone?

Yes. I'd just like to comment on an earlier questioner and your response. I don't know what any shareholder wants in the way of promotion, Destiny stock is only up 69.5% this year. So they want 690%? I would not like to see you spend $0.01 on Investor Relations. I think you should just go about keeping a note to the grindstone and continue to do what you're doing, which is to build the company. And I am a shareholder, my firm as a shareholder, possibly one of the larger ones. And I think you should pay no heat to shareholders who want you to do promotion because 69% -- 69.5% year-to-date as of November 23, it's not bad.

Thanks, Larry. I'm sure we'll all take note of that. The reality is, and we've really been focusing on the business and...

Excuse me, excuse me, I just want to be on record because shareholders made a big to do out of it. And that gentleman should know another shareholder's view. And there's nothing more you need to say to me about it. Thank you.

Yes. No, appreciate that. Okay.

I do have some more questions here. And your next question is from Craig Johnson.

Can you hear me okay?

We can, yes.

Okay. You've said that your independent revenue is about the same as it is for the major labels. And it's going up quite quickly, but overall, your revenue is going up a lot slower. So I'm wondering what the reason is for the major levels? It seems like they're declining? And will that decline stop at some point so that the independent label revenue will shine through?

That's a good question. I think that's a hard one to answer holistically in general. The -- I think major label revenue will go up. It is when we sell into different territories, what you see is independent labels that their revenue comes second typically, certainly, the use come second as we build up recipient lists. And I think that independent label revenue will be a very interesting place to grow, and I think it will continue to see high growth rates. I do think you will see growth in major label revenue as we add services, as we add territories. So I can understand you've seen a decline or at least a leveling off recently. But as we add, for example, Warner South Africa or hopefully, Warner Center in South America as we build out that market, which I think would be a larger contract. But generally, I think independent revenue is going to be really interesting to see as we add new territories and you see that cross-border international appeal to Play MPE. And I think the more we expand, the more that cross-border label revenue will be.

Okay. So you would say that, look, it seems as just based solely on the percentages, it seems as though the major label revenue is going down or at least recently. So would you say that, that's leveled off now? That's my question.

Yes, I would say it's -- I wouldn't expect it to decline, if that's what you're really asking. I think it will grow. It might stay level for a little bit of period of time. But you'll still see a steeper growth in independents, but we will add territories, and so you'll get a step in major label revenue as we do that.

Okay. Thank you. We do have some additional questions, Fred. We have another additional question from Gerry Wimmer.

Further to our previous caller's point, my point was not spending on Investor Relations. My point was growing the company in order on its market cap on business in order to track next-generation investors. 2 very different things.

Okay. I don't want to get into a debate, guys. We -- I get the point, but I think...

To understand where I'm coming from.

Yes, I understand.

And we do have 1 more additional question if there's time -- an additional question from Lawrence Goldstein. Larry?

I don't have a question, but I thought you were inviting me to unmute.

Sorry, I thought you had a question. Okay. I think we'll stop it there. Thanks, everyone, for joining the call. I hope that was a good presentation for you to learn about our strategy. And I think we've had a very successful year. So thanks again.

Okay. That concludes the webinar today. Thanks for joining us today, everyone.