iHeartMedia, Inc. (IHRT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the iHeartMedia session at the 2020 UBS Global TMT Conference. I'm Alex Iosilevich. I will be moderating this discussion. I'm joined today by Bob Pittman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Rich Bressler, President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer; and Mike McGuinness, Head of Investor Relations for iHeart. The session is held in a fireside chat format. I will be running through some of the prepared questions, and then the audience should feel free to submit their own questions through the system, and we'll do our best to address them.

With that, I'd love to kick it off with a brief discussion of the recent performance of the business. Obviously, you guys posted a terrific Q3. There was a strong recovery in the broadcast segment. Good performance across digital and podcasting. Can you talk a little bit about the last few weeks since the earnings release, how the business is tracking? Any surprises, any updates in terms of performance of the individual segments?

Well, we, I think, don't want to say anything that's not -- that we haven't disclosed before publicly. But I think we can sort of give you the overview of what we're seeing. I think like everyone else, we're seeing the virus come back, and you're seeing a bit of pickup in that. But I think the difference between now and when it hit in March and April is that people have sort of learned that it's part of life. And I think it is -- they are not, I think, as fearful of it. As a matter of fact, it seems like the consumer demand is there, no matter what's going on with the virus now. And the only thing that tamps down businesses is government controls on what people can do. And I think also advertisers have figured out that if they don't advertise that when we come out of this and with the therapeutics now today, and certainly, the vaccines, I think everyone is confident we're coming out, just an issue of timing. And if they don't advertise, they begin to lose that consumer. So I think in terms of our business, we're feeling pretty bullish in spite of the downturn. And feeling -- and Rich and I and the company are really focused on, okay, what do we do post vaccine? And how fast will it snap back at that moment? And again, I think the encouraging sign is that the consumer demand is there. Every time it's unleashed anywhere in the country, it comes roaring back. And I think that's a heart of the economy. So -- and I think when you look at our stack of products, we've gone from our original company was basically a radio company to this now a true multi-platform company with leadership, not only in broadcast radio but also in podcasting, in digital radio, in social, in virtual events, et cetera. So again, we are, I think, pretty well positioned. And I think we now understand the dynamics of this, and I think, sort of the consumer, and probably, more importantly, for the business, so to the advertisers. Rich, I don't know what you want to add to that?

No. Good morning, everybody. The only thing I'd build upon what Bob is saying, if you look at the way, at least the 2 of us and our management team is spending much more days, it's watching all the trends that Bob talked about and just making sure that we're prepared for the snapback. I mean everybody could debate when the snapback is going to be? How strong it's going to be? How it's going to work its way into our economy? How it's going to take consumer demand and to take that demand and transcends itself into purchases? But the one thing we all agree on, as Bob pointed, is that assuming the consumer demand is coming. And we're also trying to look at every -- really reflect on everything we've learned during this period of time. And again, we're not Nostradamus. I think many companies in the country are looking at the same learnings that how do we operate more efficiently? And how do we operate more efficiently during this period of time? And I'm sure we're going to get into talking about costs, that how do we really take that and institutionalize it as we move the company forward.

What do you guys think will be the biggest opportunities for you coming out of this?

Well, I think that the biggest opportunity is that I think every business in America today is focused on efficiency. When times are going really well, everything is clicking. No marketer wants to rock the boat. And if they have had declining efficiency, but whatever they're doing is still effective, they stick with it. I think at times like this, it causes every marketer to say, okay, wait a minute, I got to focus on efficiency again. And things that turned out to have gotten inefficient, I think, are under a lot of scrutiny. And have avenues, venues, media like ours, which is very efficient, I think, get a better look. And the best case study we have for this was pre-pandemic, a while back, but when P&G made a decision to cut back their marketing spend a few years ago. Marc Pritchard, legendary CMO there, relooked at everything they were doing with an eye toward efficiency. And as a result, team went from not even being, I think, in the top 200 radio advertisers to, I think, the top or the second largest, the third largest radio advertiser in about a 12- to 24-month period. And that was because he focused on efficiency. By the way, the punchline is that he had the best results they had, had in probably a decade in terms of sales performance. So I think as people are looking today, coming out of this, everybody is looking, Rich mentioned cost, everybody is looking at cost. So if we're going to spend $1, I got to get the most for the dollar. And we are probably, by far, the most efficient of any of the major media. And also, in terms of reach, what's happened, too, is, I think even the pandemic has accelerated it, is there's been a movement from ad-supported TV to subscription TV. And so the reach of ad-supported TV, I think, has been diminished substantially over time. Now broadcast radio stands alone as the big reach medium. And now with being able to -- we built out the suite of SmartAudio services, which are the data analytics that you're so accustomed to with the digital services. By adding that to broadcast radio, we've now put it in a whole other light -- in a whole other category in terms of marketers being able to use it and use it consistently with the other products they're using.

Sounds like you're fairly bullish on the radio industry coming back to pre-COVID levels. Is it fair to say that you've seen a continued demand from the advertisers, and you don't see people sort of reallocating away from radio as a consequence of this pandemic?

Well, I think we showed in the Q3 numbers and gave some indications. I think you'll see some pretty strong return of demand. And again, I think, as I mentioned, there are real reasons why it's got reach like no one else. It's got efficiency like no one else. And now we have the data and analytics on top of it. So an advertiser can use it and buy it the way they're accustomed to doing digital. And then you add it to the other platforms, which we can seamlessly coordinate for the advertiser, whether it's podcasting, digital radio or other digital services, even events, and in this case, virtual events through the pandemic, I think, has given us a real unique position in the world. We also, as a company, have, over the past 7 or 8 years, built out the capabilities to not only deliver media, I can give you some gross rating points, but also to be a marketing partner. And I think if you look at the major advertisers that we have, probably the heart of the relationship is this marketing relationship we have that we truly are partners. And you see this trend with advertisers, certainly in the past year or so, and I think accelerated by pandemic, is that actually while fewer media partners, fewer vendors, they're sort of -- they're going to the big players and sort of consolidating. And I think, given our size, I mean, we reach more people in the U.S. than anyone else, including Facebook and Google, I think, puts us in a very good position to have that kind of relationship going forward.

Hey, Bob and Alex, let me just add 1 or 2 things to what Bob said. If you look at the trends that are happening overall and our revenue improved 50% from Q -- I'm sorry, from Q2 to Q3, it's improved 100% since the lows of Q2. And yes, we've had the benefit of political, but even ex political, we've seen some real strength in the overall business in the last few months. So we have no reason to believe. And again, we're not going to give guidance or projections, either for the rest of this year or for 2021. We don't have guidance out there. But we have no reason at all to believe that the company won't return to pre-pandemic -- pre-COVID levels. I don't think that's going to happen in 2021, but I think you'll see us make significant progress as we go into 2021. And I'm sure we're going to touch upon, of course, here in a minute, maybe in more detail. But just as a reminder, we don't need to get to 2019 revenue levels to get back to 2019 EBITDA number of slightly over $1 billion. Again, no projections for next year. I don't think we're going to get there. I'm not projecting we're going to get there next year, but we are going to make significant progress to that. But again, I think the important takeaway is, no, reasonably, we won't get back to those levels as we move forward with the company.

And I think the important part to that, Alex, is that as a business, what we want all of these new exciting revenue streams like podcasting to do is be additive growth revenue streams, certainly not replacement for any decline in the radio business. So our view is built on -- we want to build out radio. Now understand this is going to be a much slower growth rate and success, but build that out, and again, I think, building the marketing capabilities for it and also building out the SmartAudio suite has been really essential to that. The other point that helps us with radio is actually, we have some people that weren't interested in radio, but they were interested in podcasting or they were interested in events or they were interested in our digital products. We began the conversation there, and then we can add the radio to it. So we have a lot of doors for advertisers to come in to us other than through just the radio door, even though they might wind up using the radio inventory.

Understood. Understood. You mentioned, Bob, benefits of scale and your guys' leadership position in the radio industry. Talk a little bit about sort of any further benefits that accrue to you as the largest player? Maybe speak a little bit about if you expect further industry consolidation in radio?

Yes. It's interesting, Alex. I don't really view us as a radio company. I view us much more as a digital company. And given the kind of growth rates we have and where we've invested, I think you see real evidence of success there. I mean we're the only company that has radio platform that has a national reach. So we really do something different than all the other radio players do. And when we talk about reach, we actually outreach the broadcast TV networks, we outreach the cable networks, we outreach Facebook and Google in the United States. So we are -- we stand alone as the #1 reach company. And I think that becomes critically important to a lot of advertisers. It becomes really important when they're looking for efficiency as well as effectiveness. And now having those analytics under it, really, I think, separates us from almost anyone in traditional media that has not made that investment. And I would say, in many ways, we're ahead of the TV people in terms of our data and analytics in what we can do and the scope and scale of it.

Great. Maybe switching to podcasting. That was a good problem to talk about that business. You guys have seemingly recognized the growth potential and established yourselves as an early leader in the category. Could you talk a little bit about what does the podcasting ecosystem look like today? And where do you see it going in the next 12, 24 months?

Sure. And let me start, and Rich will jump in. Podcasting is exciting because podcasting has grown faster, I think, than probably any new service. It now reaches more than the streaming music services like Pandora or Spotify, and shows no sign of slowing down. It appeals to a young audience. The core of it is probably millennials. So younger than typical talk shows on radio. And it has been a very clear adjacent business to what we're doing. Adjacent in the sense that it is a radio-like experience. It's host-driven. And if you -- unlike TV, which is sort of story and production quality driven. And so in this case, we can take stuff and move it back and forth from the radio. And most importantly, we can promote a podcast on the radio to make it a hit. Now you can't make something that's not going to be a hit, a hit. But we can give it the exposure required to make it a hit. And I think that's really the secret to how this company has gone from not being a player in podcasting to being #1 in podcasting, being the clear #1 among commercial podcasters, almost a 2:1 lead over them in terms of podcast publishing. Means, we have content, we have the advertising, we have the economics. And the ecosystem today is, we're #1. NPR is very close. We have battled it out for about a year there. New York Times, ESPN, Wondery and some other players down below in terms of the publishers, which again is where the economics are. In terms of platforms, this is a business that we really do distributed content. We put our podcast everywhere, including on the iHeartRadio app, but we also use Apple and Spotify. Apple clearly is the #1 distribution platform, although beginning to fragment with others coming in. Probably, we and Spotify are the next largest. I think you can expect to see Amazon coming up as a platform. And then there are just lots of little places that the podcasts go where we pick up distribution. And -- but the economics are not with the distributor, the economics are with the publisher because that's where the ads are. And I think some people are trying a subscription model in which they're saying, "Okay, we'll have a smaller audience, but we'll charge a fee for it." We haven't seen success with that. You have examples of it. And that's not to say it won't happen. But people often use the Netflix example of, "Ah, look, what happened to Netflix." People forget actually that Netflix was a cheaper way to get movies and TV shows than when you were buying them one by one on demand. In the case of podcasts, podcasts are free. So you're asking people to go from free to paying something versus Netflix, which was go from more expensive to less expensive, and that was one of the original draws of Netflix. So I think it's an imperfect and probably a confusing analogy when people use that one. I think if anybody uses the Netflix analogy, it probably is us because it was the clear adjacent business to television, and instead of television doing it themselves, they license their product to someone doing it, which at a certain point, siphoned users off from their platform. In our case, we saw podcasting as an adjacent platform and said, you know what, we're going to own it. And we're not going to own it, we're committed to being #1. And within a pretty short period of time, we were able to do it. But again, I think we have a secret weapon, not so secret, which is our big reach broadcast radio, where we can afford to advertise these podcasts and given the exposure they need. Rich, I don't know if you want to jump in on this?

Yes, that would be great, Bob. Thanks. Look, the only thing I want to add, it's interesting -- I'll take maybe a couple of different points. From a financial profile point, just to start with that, our podcasting business had extremely healthy EBITDA margins. Not -- the absolute EBITDA number and the absolute revenue number are not material at this point to overall iHeart. But it's both significant in terms of the revenue, the absolute dollars of revenue, and the EBITDA margins are healthy, and they are above our overall EBITDA margin. So when I say that, above our overall pre-COVID EBITDA margins, which got close to about 30% out there. So I think that's one important point. It is amusing sometimes when I think almost every other podcasting company out there maybe on the New York Times said, "Oh, we're going to give you a path to when we're going to become profitable." We are profitable and significantly profitable down on day 1. The second thing, just to build upon what Bob was talking about in terms of the platform, is we continue to attract and collaborate with the leading talent, whether it's -- we just signed Malcolm Gladwell, I'm sure many of you saw that with Pushkin Industries. We've got the Black Effect Network with Charlamagne tha God, and Charlamagne from the Breakfast Club, and its majority of Black-owned [indiscernible] by Charlamagne. We've got Will Ferrell. We've got Shonda Rhimes. And I just bring up those specific examples because, we've got not only the details of any individual person's other opportunities out there but Bob mentioned the paywall. You've got to believe almost every one of the individuals I've just named and many, many more have the ability to go behind a paywall and maybe get some significant minimum guarantees. But they come to us and will continue to come to us, that level of talent, because of the platform we have, as Bob talked about, the multi-platform, our ability to promote the podcast. You've got the best podcast in the world. But if no one can find it, if no one could promote it, if no one could talk about it, it doesn't do you any good. And then with our partnership with them and our relationship with advertisers, again, the ability to reap the financial rewards along with iHeart out there. So that's really in terms of the podcasting and its growth, why we are in the position we're in, that Bob articulated, and we're very optimistic about it going forward.

Terrific. I was going to move past podcasting, but it's clearly a hot topic as there's a flurry of questions from the audience. So I'll continue for a little bit if that's okay with you guys?

Sure.

Sure.

Talk a little bit about the M&A environment and the valuations you're seeing around the podcasting segment. It seems like there are rumors about some of the smaller companies being out for sale, fairly aggressive valuations being paid for -- in these processes. How do you see this environment? And maybe what is your view on the valuation of your business in podcasting?

Well, let me jump to the first part, and I'll let Rich take the second part. I think there's a -- I think there's a recognition that audio is hot and that podcasting is super hot. And I think companies that aren't in it are trying to buy their way into it. And it's understandable. And I think that, obviously, if you look at sort of the growth rate of podcasting, too, it sort of justifies pretty reasonable prices in my mind on what's going on out there. I think in our point of view from our company is we have such a content machine now that we're not able -- we really don't go out and buy podcasts because we have the capability to make them partner, as Rich pointed out, because we have the #1 reach and because we have the #1 monetization machine, anybody wants to do a podcast probably comes and talks to us first. So the only reason we probably don't have them is, we don't like the economics, and we have the luxury to be picky about the economics we choose because of the volume we have and the success we have. And I think from our standpoint, the people we've added and the companies we've added to our ecosystem are really the ones that are, we think, can speed up our monetization, add to our tech stack. And as we look at how we build our business, we always look at make, buy or partner. And in the case of content, we're making almost everything we have. In the case of the tech stack, we have made, we have bought and we have partnered. And the strategy looks like it's working very well, given the success we've had both in terms of the audience and the success we've had in monetization. Rich, you want to hit the valuation piece?

Yes. Sure, Bob. And maybe just remind us all, it's interesting when you look at companies that Bob pointed out are trying to buy their way into podcasts. Fundamentally at iHeart, what we always do is follow our listeners, follower our consumers, follow our listeners. So the way we got into podcasting originally, which was way before anybody else did 3, 4 years ago, when I say way before, that's how quickly the medium has grown, is because we saw the trend that was happening and our listeners saw what was out there. And that led us, at that point, you might remember, to buy a company called Stuff Works. When -- and you can -- we combined Stuff Works with our podcasting business, the 2 of them combined are the nucleus for the podcasting business' center, the podcasting business we have today. But when we think about M&A valuations, I just want to make the point, we have a very, very high bar, Bob and I do, along with Mike, for allocating capital. We understand we have one objective, which is to drive the value of this company and create shareholder value. And we're never confused by that. And if you look at our track record over the last couple of years of acquisitions, each of the acquisitions, and I'll say Stuff Works that I just mentioned. I'm sure everybody on this call remembers when we purchased Jelli, which makes our broadcast inventory, simply said, look like digital and Voxnest, which pulls all the programmatic podcast marketplace together into one place and allows us to fill the holes around larger premium ad sales and around open inventory. Those 3 acquisitions combined, the 3 of them combined were maybe about $150 million. I think the trait that all those acquisitions have, as we look at the lens, will they make -- each of the acquisitions, will they make the iHeart asset base more valuable? And as Bob just articulated, will each of those acquisitions individually, and now together, allow us to grow quicker than we could have done without them? And that's really -- that answers, I think, the podcasting question, but also want to make sure from a holistic question and a capital-structured question, that's all ends.

Makes sense. Could you talk a little bit about the cost of talent for podcasting? There's obviously been -- there have obviously been announcements around talent signing up to large contracts with some of the other platforms. What are you guys seeing? And where do you think this is going?

Well, I don't think this is -- in that case, there's not 1 or 2 talent that control the audience. It's very diversified. And I would say we get probably first look on almost every deal of any meaningful talent because at the end of the day, what they really want is a successful podcast. I think the only way we'll probably lose them is someone's willing to pay them uneconomic dollars, which, in our case, we're not willing to do and don't have a need to do so. But we've had some talent that come to us, not -- and they -- we don't offer them the highest check. And there are people who are offering them uneconomic money, and they come with us anyway because at the end of the day, most talent want to be a success. They don't want to be hidden. There's an example of serial, which was the hottest podcast. And then Pandora offered them a lot of money, they went behind the paywall. You couldn't find them, and they sort of lost their momentum. And I think most people in podcasting look at that example and go, yes, I don't want that. So we've not participated in those big talent auctions. There have not been many of them. There are only a few. I think it's actually probably there's no way you could ever buy up all the talent. And the good news for us is a lot of our podcast aren't built around big hit talent. Some are, but most of the big ones are not. And you'll see us from probably every month, we'll have a hit podcast that you've never heard of, you've never heard the talent, you've never heard about the story. And those are the real money machines for us. But as Rich started out, we're also pretty rigorous on making sure we have an economic deal, that we're not willing to step into the world that -- where we take podcast margins below our overall margin that we expect this to be additive to our business in terms of margin, and we're really excited about that possibility. Now if we were in another situation and people are sitting on the outside, clearly, one of the ways they're trying to buy their way in is trying to buy talent as well. But again, this business has 1 million podcasts. I think trying to buy up all the talent probably is a fool's errand. And also, there's no way to predict who's going to be the next talent, that's unknown today.

Let's move on to the events business. Obviously, it's been a challenging sector for anyone in the live event industry. You guys have done some terrific virtual events. Could you talk a little bit about the business model of virtual events, whether or not you see it continuing after the pandemic? And just your outlook on the sector in general?

Yes. It's interesting. Rich has started out by saying we're trying to take all the learnings from this and embed them into the company going forward. And the virtual event was a big learning for us. This year at the iHeartRadio Music Festival, we went virtual. We did performances one by one, COVID-tested performers in the iHeart Radio theater in L.A. and a theater in Nashville and other places; and put it together as a 2-night event, as we have always done. What's interesting is, yes, we lost the ticket sales. I think we could sell $20,000 a night at the T-Mobile arena, that's 40,000 tickets. We lost that. Good news is we didn't have to pay for the T-Mobile arena or any of the physical costs of that production. And what's interesting, the 2 metrics I watched the most are social impressions. Talk about what's going on? We're actually up 20% over prior year with a live event. And the live streams were doubled over prior year. So from a -- and now did we get as much sponsorship revenue? No. But did we get as -- do we have the cost of -- as much cost that went along with sponsorship revenue? No. So virtual events are thought to be a much better margin business. And so I think what we're going to find is that it's going to be a combination of both the live events and virtual events going forward. We had the commencement speeches for the class of 2020 was a big hit. We had the virtual prom party for the high school seniors, which was a big hit. We had the homecoming for HBCU, and that was also a big hit. So we've been able to build these, and I think, some of those will stay and -- permanently in our mix. And I think probably be good for us. I think in terms of the live business, we're not in the business of a live nation. I think Michael Rapino and his folks do a fantastic job there. And clearly, they've got a lot of pent-up demand of people ready to go to those big shows. When they come out, we'll be supporting them. And we'll have our big live shows, too, and -- but we're going to be a little pickier probably, because we realize that we can get a lot of the benefit on a virtual basis.

And by the way, the only thing I'll try to add to what Bob said is just back to what we said at the opening. When we talked about our ability and confidence get back to our pre-COVID levels in terms of EBITDA and financial performance and saying we don't have the effect on the revenue number to get to the pre-COVID EBITDA numbers out there and the efficiencies that we touched upon, part of those efficiencies is what Bob just said. Without all of the live events that we have today, we don't have the same revenue line, but the virtuals are clearly a lot more efficient and higher margins there.

Great. Rich, maybe on that topic, I certainly would love to talk about the cost initiatives and the efficiency initiatives you guys have been focused on over the year. Could you talk maybe a little bit about the key buckets of your focus and the results of that?

Sure. Maybe I'll start and then Bob will jump in. And just to remind everybody, we really had 2 buckets this year. We started out with a modernization initiative, which we announced back in the first quarter prior to pre-COVID and that was $50 million of in-year run rate savings for 2020 -- I'm sorry, $50 million in-year savings and $100 million of run rate savings starting in 2021 on that $50 million. And that really was a result of our that piece as a result of investing in capital expenditures, investing in AI technology, starting to take a look at our real estate, taking advantage of things like cloud computing and our radio station, geo, a wide variety of things. Then the pandemic hits, and we announced that we were going to take $200 million of in-year savings this year for 2020, and we will achieve that goal, just to be clear. And that really ranged in everything what you think about things like travel and entertainment. And also, the senior management of the company made pretty significant contributions in terms of their bonuses, reductions to some of us in -- out of our compensation. Bob took -- Bob himself took 0 compensation for this year. So that had a lot of different buckets outside consulting -- consultants that we cut back also. And then we recently announced that we're going to take that $200 million and that will be substantially permanent in the company. And that really goes back to -- and again, we're not Nostradamus, I'm sure many companies are doing this, what we learned during the period of time. I think Bill Gates said recently that he thinks 50% to 60% of business travel will never come back. We haven't put a percentage on ours. But I don't know whether it's 50% or 75%, but we are agreeing that our significant piece of our business travel, travel and entertainment, our real estate footprint around the country will be more -- will clearly be much more efficient. We'll still keep offices in every location, but we are going to be much more efficient as I think we all look to what the work environment looks like post the vaccine is out there. And again, continuing to take advantage. I think everyone on this call will be surprised about the benefit we get from AI technology. Our programs get predictable behavior out there, cloud computed, what a radio station physically will look like 3 years from now and what it looks like today. And by the way, what it'll look like 3 years from now. I think the term people like to use is everything has been brought forward 10 years in terms of speeding up. And our job is to take advantage of that in terms of how we allocate capital and drive margins to the bottom. So we feel good about where we are on the course progress as we move forward. Again, we haven't made any projections going forward. But the one thing I will make just a final point on this question is this is kind of what we do right in the company. Someone asked me yesterday on a call, gee, does this mean you're stopping? Are you not going to continue to look for more cost? Honestly, this is what Bob and I do every day. We're not giving away any more numbers. But it's a clear mandate of ours.

Yes. If I could add to it, Rich. We also are building out centers of excellence. When we started the modernization effort in the first of the year before we knew COVID was coming, at the heart of it was we can use technology now to tie people together, to consolidate services, to improve the quality of them, improve the response rate and save money. We also realized that we can take talent. We've got this incredible roster of great talent. We can take them out and put them in any market at any time because the technology allows us to do it. You don't have to be in the same geographic area. And throughout the first part of COVID, most of our people that are on the radio were doing it from home. And some of them will happen to be in locations thousands of miles away. And I think everyone got very comfortable with that notion that I can know about a local market, I can be a part of that community, but I don't physically have to broadcast for that community anymore because the technology now freezes. And now through COVID has given us a great comfort. So I think we're going to improve the quality of our products, and we're going to be able to give a bigger platform to our best talent. We'll be able to give a bigger platform to our up and coming talent, and we'll have better economics associated with it. And with the centers of excellence, we're able to take various functions, mainly support functions, and instead of spreading them over 160 markets or having them in New York and L.A. and Florida, we're able to find the most efficient place to put them, put them together and have them service everybody because you realize I can be serviced by somebody 1,000 miles away as well as I can somebody sitting in the next desk. And with that change, really unlocks a lot of quality improvements, and also unlocks a lot of cost opportunities.

Well, I think, Bob and Rich, we only got a couple of more minutes left, and maybe I'll just hit the topic of ownership. Can you speak about the recent foreign ownership ruling? And also with respect to Liberty Media, it seems that they recently increased their stake. Have you had any discussions with them about subsequent steps?

Rich, I'll let you start, and I'll jump in if needed.

Sure. That would be great. So a couple of different things. So the conversion, I think, that you're talking about is allowing the warrants to convert to Class A common stock. And the Class A common stock, just to remind everybody, is what you see -- is when you see trading in the marketplace today. Also, as a reminder, the reason why this is so important to us is because the warrants are about -- represent about half the capital structure. And so we got permission. This was a -- we had filed this some time ago. It was pretty standard. And other companies like Cumulus have had before to allow people that took their ownership in warrants for, quite frankly, a number of, I'd say, our key FCC, foreign ownership attribution reasons, to allow them to convert the Class A common stock. Everything -- the process started on December 4 when people -- a number of our big shareholders like PIMCO and others had to submit their paperwork. We won't have a final count, and the conversion will not happen until January 8, 2021. But we -- and we don't have any insight into the actual accounts I mentioned. But we fully expect a vast majority of our warrant holders, and we have no reason not to believe they won't -- will convert into Class A common stock. And again, the float on the stock, which is important to everybody on this call, I know, will come close to doubling or approximately double around that period of time. With respect to Liberty, I think there's a little bit of confusion. And I'll maybe just take 1 step back, Liberty has been incredibly supportive. Both Bob and I have had long-term relationships, whether it's with John Malone or Greg Maffei. They historically identified the audio space as a place to create shareholder value. Obviously, we're in full agreement with that, and they've been very supportive. They actually haven't changed their ownership stake. It's actually just because they were in the Class B common stock. And I think when people did the math and looked at all the conversions, they were doing it against a smaller pool of equity, not when you have all the warrants converted. So actually, there's been no change in their ownership, and we've had no dialogue with Liberty.

Thank you for clarifying that. I think that's about all the time we have today. Thank you so much, the iHeartMedia team for joining us this year. I hope to see you again in person next year.

Thanks, Alex. Count on us, Alex.

Thanks, Alex.

Thank you, everybody.

Thank you all.