LiveOne, Inc. (LVO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and thank you for attending the Special Joint Shareholder Meeting for LiveOne and PodcastOne Conference Call. My name is Elissa, and I will be your moderator. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to pass the call to your host, Aaron Sullivan, CFO. Aaron, please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to our special joint Shareholder Meeting for LiveOne and PodcastOne conference call. Presenting on today's call with me is Rob Ellin, CEO and Chairman of LiveOne; Bradley Konkol, Head of Slacker and Bill Wittress, SVP, Head of Business Development. I would like to remind you that some of the statements made on today's call are forward-looking and are based on current expectations, forecasts and assumptions that involve various risks and uncertainties. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the future performance of the company, including expected future financial results and expected future growth in the business. Actual results may differ materially from those discussed on this call for a variety of reasons. Please refer to the company's filings with the SEC for information about factors, which could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements, including those described in its annual report on Form 10-K for the year-end March 31, 2023 and subsequent SEC filings. The company encourages you to periodically visit the Investor Relations website for important content. The following discussion, including responses to your questions, contains time-sensitive information and reflect management's views as of the date of the call, June 5, 2024. And as except as required by law, the company does not undertake any obligation to update or revise this information after the date of the call. I'd like to highlight to investors that this call is being recorded. The company is making it available to investors and media via webcast, and a replay will be available on its website in the Investor Relations section shortly following the conclusion of the call. Additionally, it is the property of the company and any redistribution, transmission or rebroadcast of this call or webcast in any form without the company's express written consent is strictly prohibited. Now I would like to turn the call over to LiveOne's CEO, Rob Ellin.

Thank you, Aaron. Ladies and gentlemen, today, we celebrate a milestone year Slide 1 marked by unprecedented growth and achievement on unwavering commitment to innovation excellence has yielded remarkable results solidifying our position as a leader in digital media landscape. Showing our first $24 million annual B2B contract diversing our revenue streams and cementing our partnership with a major streaming player. Our subsidiaries have tapped in into a massive TAM, addressable mall for the $45 billion music streaming industry, the $25 billion podcasting industry, $150 billion influencer [indiscernible], $72 billion video streaming market and $30 billion digital publishing business. Our achievements, our dedication to driving growth and innovation and value for our shareholders and partnerships, we are poised to revolutionize the industry with our up-and-coming B2B partnerships, featuring a groundbreaking multiyear partnership with our first $100 billion company, the full details will be announced imminently. The future of Digital Media is bright and LiveOne is leading the charge. I want to thank everyone for joining, and now I want to introduce my B2B team led by Brad Konkol and Bill and the team will provide you a full update of our B2B opportunities this year. Thank you.

Thank you, Rob, and thank you, everybody, for joining today's call. So last year, we took a close look at our strengths, unique capabilities and our market opportunities from a product content, engineering and just an overall strategic perspective. We discovered as part of that analysis that we have excellent customer NPS scores. We have innovative bespoke programming capabilities, a broad and customizable technology platform, reliable infrastructure with the history of powering applications for some of the biggest companies in the world. We also have operational efficiencies and a flexible pricing architecture, which allow us to provide the best deal in music for consumers and businesses alike. Based on all of this analysis, we redefined Slacker Radio's company vision. To be the global leader in innovative, bespoke lean-back audio for businesses seeking creative solutions to engage customers and drive growth. In short, we're developing unique customizable audio experiences, and we're focusing on B2B growth. So this emphasis, it's already paying off. As Rob just mentioned, we announced a $20 million plus B2B partnership for our audio division, and we're poised to finalize another significant deal with a $100 billion partner, which will greatly impact our B2B strategy. Over the past 12 months, we've doubled down and focused intensively on our B2B initiatives. And during this time, we've refined our strategy to maximize our opportunities increased our success rate associated with those opportunities and to expand our partnership pipeline. A pivotal component to these efforts was the hiring of Bill Wittress, our Senior Vice President and Head of Business Development. So with that, it's with great excitement that I introduced Bill, who's going to share insights into his background and more importantly, provide detailed updates on our strategy and our recent progress. Bill?

All right. Thank you, Bradley, for the warm introduction. It's great to be here and share with everyone the exciting things that are happening here at Slacker. For those who don't know me, I've been involved with the Crossroads in music and technology for most of my career. I got my start at a law school, working for streaming Pioneer real networks for 5 years. I've got 2 tours of duty encompassing 14 years at Microsoft. A fun fact about my time at Microsoft is that I invented a product called the Portable Media Center, which eventually became what you guys would know as the Zoom. I also works on Windows, Xbox, IoT, automotive and mobile. After Microsoft, I was recruited to work at [ High Fidelity ] and Surround Pioneer DTS. And then I spent 4 years building a B2B business development pipeline at SAP. That opportunity led a several years of working for payments and banking start-ups. I think it's safe to say that over the course of my career, the deals I've worked on spend hundreds of millions of dollars. But at the heart of it all, I've always been with the confluence of music and consumer electronics. When the opportunity to join Slacker presented itself, I jumped to the chance. I was brought on because of my specialty working in large-scale complex B2B deals. I was able to leverage my past work with companies such as Amazon and Apple and Google to help augment the Slacker B2C business and transition it into a scalable B2B business. When I came on board 8 months ago, we had 6 engagements. Today, we've grown the pipeline to 60 plus, which includes multiple new major engagements. And that's been, we've closed 4 new deals and are in production and will be introduced when our partners launch. We currently have 4 deals pending that I hope to close imminently. The partner pipeline continues to grow, and we're hopeful that it's accelerating. And as such, we've invested in growing the team. We are currently 4 and soon to be 5. Strategically, we decided to take a diversified tiered structure approach to optimize time to market and time to revenue. The current mix spans the gamut of non-customized distribution deals to heavily bespoke complex custom partner deals. It's important to note that for us, our B2B strategy is not limited to white label partner brand experiences. It also encompasses leveraging our partners' brands and distribution channels to drive user acquisition for our B2C apps. In other words, for us, B2B is also B2B to B2C. We will drive deals that make sense and they are profitable regardless of whether it's under our banner or under our partners mantle. Contrast that with our competition, user acquisition strategy, which has primarily on direct user acquisition. That strategy can undoubtedly drive growth but are also inherently a losing proposition in terms of profit. For us, profit is a core tenet under our strategy. In order to best balance profit and time to market, we've taken a diversified approach to building a partner funnel. At the top of the funnel, we have a series of relatively low complexity and modest revenue deals. This is to get the revenue flywheel turning, while we lay the groundwork for more complex opportunities. The next logical step is the strategy of medium complexity and medium volume deals to ensure that we have revenue over the next 12-month window. These 2 strategies lay the foundations for the complex, but profitable long-term prospects. We are obviously focused on the automotive space, but that deal didn't happen overnight. Likewise, with other OEMs, these deals tend to take a long time. However, when closed, they tend to have a very long shelf life. Let me talk a little bit about the categories. We realize that we can't boil the ocean if we're going to be successful, therefore, have to recess prioritize, where we spend our lend pressure. As such, we have targeted 8 categories of large-scale partnerships. And just to name them quickly, automotive, mobile, CE devices, associations, travel, air, fleet and kids. I'm not going to go all of them but I will point out a few highlights from each of those categories or at least a few of those categories and the more active engagement. For automotive is obvious given the test relationship that we've focused here. We are actively engaged in 8 of the 10 worldwide automotive OEMs and many of the supporting companies such as their Tier 1s interconnectivity binders. For mobile and connectivity, were partner refwith 1 of the top 3 mobile carriers in the creation of kids branded peripherals. Further, we are partnered with a large international carrier for direct-to-car connectivity in 1 of the largest OEMs in the world. CE devices, we partnered with just about every type of device in the market from headphones to sound bars, to receivers to handsets. But currently, we are seeing the most traction in the embedded TV space. While we work with 3 major TV manufacturers directly, we also work at the operating system level. An example is we're working with the top 3 TV manufacturer to better our offering into the OS that powers 27 million devices. Associations associations are always looking for value-added services and ways to improve customer satisfaction as well as retention. Adding Slacker is an obvious choice to do that. By targeting underserved organizations, we've opened up opportunities for millions of new potential customers. Electively, the associations we are engaged with have tens of millions of members. Travel, being able to bring the comfort of home with you and your personal music when you travel is an area that is ripe for partnership. In many ways, the scale of motivations are similar to the membership programs, whether it's listening to your personalized music in the back seat of a plane, having a music play in your long-term rental. The operators are looking for a level of engagement can only be achieved with personalization that [indiscernible]. So that's just the taste of some of the categories. And of course, we can go into more detail. But I want to transition a little bit into innovation and personalization. So in addition to building that robust One of the things that makes this company great is our willingness to take risks and adopt cutting-edge technologies. One simple example of that is the automotive OEMs. They've been very clear that they're looking for differentiation and innovation. For example, every single car in the market comes from the factory equipped for surround sound and nobody is taking full advantage of that yet. Starting this fall, that's one of the things we are going to be fully immersing ourselves in. So in summary, we focused on B2B to increased opportunity and scale. We've grown our pipeline 10x. We have targeted categories that matter to our consumers. And lastly, we have analyzed where our key differentiators overlap with our differentiation for our partners. We have adopted the bleeding [ X ] technologies to offer something unique in personal. As I said from the beginning, I've been doing this for a very long time for some of the biggest companies in the industry and for many, many decades. I can unequivocally say that the future is very bright for Slacker. For closing remarks, let me pass it back to Rob.

Great, Bill, and thank you very much, and thanks, Brad. Just to highlight, we have now since Bill has joined secured a $25 billion streaming partner, a $100 billion media partner. We have, obviously, our massive partnership with Tesla that continues to grow. And we see the floodgates opening, we see the doors opening to massive growth here. This will be our biggest quarter as we've stated, right, of that $25 million contract and our biggest year is we've just raised our guidance to $140 million to $155 million. And if any of those additional deals close, you'll see additional guidance discussions coming from this company. So I want to thank everyone for joining. I see a big group joining today. I want to thank you for joining and thank you for being part of this company and part of this mission. That team that Bill is talking about in B2B, we had 0, 8 months ago. We now have 5 people and growing, and that will be a way up to 10. This would be the first time we'll start to talk in a long time about growing the staff instead of shrinking the stuff. We've taken it down from 350 people to 125. It's now time with the growth that we have the economics we had. We've said we're going to throw off over $17 million of cash from the core business. It's now time that we continue to grow and expand that and as Bill lands and the team lands it, B2B deals will continue to add salespeople and B2B people to grow this to $1 billion over the next 4 years. Thank you, everyone, for joining, and let me open it up for questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Brian Kinstlinger with AGP.

I have a handful. The first, if we can start with the $20 million to $25 million partnership that you announced at the end of last year, can you talk about the evolution of content they have taken and will take. And give us a sense for how long does it take to reach this kind of annual range?

And that's happening. It's scaling up and we can't give you any more details on that. But I can tell you, you'll see it right in this quarter, and you'll see it in the following quarter, and it scales up throughout the year and will continue to grow.

Okay. And then you talked about a $100 million partnership, I think. This potential partnership, are we to understand that it's $100 million in potential annual revenue lifetime revenue I'm just confused and maybe just add some more detail that Slacker are podcasting?

Yes. We can't add anything yet. We will be opening the [ kimono ] imminently right to that partnership announcing a multiyear deal with a $100 billion-plus company, right? And then we'll be able to open the kimono, as I said, imminently.

Got it. So you said a $100 billion company, sorry. And then I think you spoke of 4 deals pending for Slacker. Just want to make sure I heard that right. And can you provide any more details? Is this where partners pay like Tesla? Or is it a service that's going to be offered to consumers through some platform or brand?

So I'll take that one, Rob, and then Bill, maybe you can chime in as well. At this time, we can't announce the deals that have closed. The reason for this is because they're yet to launch. And so they are either new programs that we're building or they are things that are complete, but they're not going to launch until Q3 or Q4 of this year. And that's kind of the process with a lot of these deals in the pipeline. You closed them if you're building new technology or you're partnering your technology together in order to deliver something to the marketplace, it takes a little bit of time. And if it's new, it's in self mode, those things don't typically get announced we're not able to announce them and tell our partners already as well. And all 4 deals will close...

Yes. Brian, we're not announcing. Yes, If you heard, Brad at the end, there those already signed, right? They'll be announced with our partners in the near future, and those will be extremely accretive to revenues right and bottom line, right, as we're able to announce those. And these are all with the multibillion dollar companies that these partnerships have been secured.

Again, just to be clear, of course, you can't announce who they're with, but is it where there's prepaid from the partner to consumer or such as the case that Tesla starts with? Or is it where the services being offered to consumers through some platform or brand or partner to pay themselves.

Both. These are all individually unique deals. And again, as we can open up the come out and really giving you way more details on this, the exciting part is you've got 4 more done and you got a major one imminently about to be done.

The next question comes from the line of Sean McGowan with ROTH Capital Partners.

I also have a couple. One, and I'm not sure, who is before or anybody, could you describe some of the various forms that revenue would take under these various deals? Is there any commonality -- are we talking about royalties, fees, contracts to build things, some combination of all that? What should we be looking for in terms of the structure of the revenue deals?

Brad, do you want to take that or do you want me to take it?

Yes. No, I'll take it again and Rob, Bill, feel free to chime in. So Sean, thanks for joining. The answer is it's a mix, right? And that's intentional, too. So there's not just one model that we want to go after or limit ourselves to. Some of these are going to be bundled deals similar to the Tesla model. Some are going to be a little bit different than that. Some are going to be opt-in by our partners' customer base. Others are going to have a phased approach to revenue or multiple ways to revenue. There may be an ad-supported tier that we support for a partner as well as a paid tier. So we could have a single partner, but we're utilizing our ability to have different pricing tiers for their customers. So it's not just one. It's multiple fronts that we're moving forward on.

Yes. And I think from your side -- Sean, just think, as you know, as we're now heading towards $150 million in revenues, right, there's no interest in doing tiny deals anymore, right? The deals have to be super accretive. They have to move the needle, right? There's no -- nothing that's going to be done here that it's not going to be a multimillion dollar deal.

Great. Rob, that's helpful. And I want to shift to another kind of related subject on that. So the -- you've done a great job of rightsizing the business. Now you're talking about investing in growth. To what extent are we spend -- are we going to be spending heavily ahead of the revenue? Like what's going to be the impact of the add counting zeros on profit at Slacker?

Yes. I mean 0.

0 revenue, without reduction you mean?

No, no -- meaning, we'll be adding people as the revenues are coming on, right? So as we announced the 4 deals that Brad articulated, and the major deal that is imminent, right, we're going to be adding people as that revenue is kicking in as that's growing, right? We've added -- as Bill said, we added to Bill's team 4 people in B2B once we close that $24 million deal, we'll do something on the next major deal.

Okay. And then my last question is, to what extent can you talk about kind of connections between Slacker and Podcast with reference to these deals, like are we looking at this as a combination package or some of these things involving PodcastOne? Or is this largely just Slacker?

Absolutely. PodcastOne is part of it. Some of them are only audio, right, at least in the starting point, right, not only for radio, but most of them are a combination of not just audio and Podcast -- not the overall audio podcasting and Slacker, but they also include everything from our paper view, our live streaming, our celebrity brands. They cross over all of it, right? As we always articulated, this is a flywheel. We just continue to add more revenue streams. And now the objective is to have those B2B partners with massive audiences, right? $10 million to $3.5 billion like our Facebook deal we did, right, is to have those audience and then be able to leverage those audiences by giving them our very unique content.

The next question is from the line of [ John Levies with Lavaca ] Financial.

Well, I found Bill and Brad to be really interesting, that was beautifully described, very impressive, up to over 60 contracts in this pipeline. But I had a specific question related to that. The 8 out of the 10 major automobile companies that we're now working with in this pipeline relative to the big one we have now with Tesla, which is a great relationship, but the size of some of these -- can you give some idea of scope, or these 8 candidates that we have right now relative to what we had with Tesla? I'd be interested to get a sense as to scope here.

I think the answer to that question -- Go ahead, Brad. No, go ahead, Brad. You take it.

Yes. I was just going to say that we have to be a little bit careful about what we share, John, just because we're under NDA with all of these companies. Some are bigger. Some are a little bit smaller. When you look at the rate of growth, I mean, almost nobody is growing faster or nobody is growing faster than Tesla right now. But the exciting thing here is nothing is exclusive to us. So we're basically taking our unique and bespoke programming capabilities, and we're presenting that to all these auto partners. And what that does is it allows them to use our music platform, our technology platform to brand music to their customers the way that they wanted to. And that's something that's really special to us. And that's part of our analysis that we did over the last year where we said, what is unique, what do we do different? Where can we compete that other DSPs in the space either don't have the technology or they don't want to repeat in those areas. And this was a big 1 for us because a lot of the DSPs in our space, they're precious about their brand. We're very proud of our brands, but we're very, very happy to power our partner brands in lieu of promoting ours to the consumer marketplace. And I'll just tell you that's really resonating, and that's a big part, the big reason why we're talking to 8 of the 10 biggest automobile companies in the world.

And if I might add a little bit of color commentary to this. So I spent a lot of time in the automotive space back on my Microsoft days, so I know how they operate and they are not a fast beast. And in fact, they are not even a friendly based in a lot of ways as they will and you gauge them and they will -- not so politely tell you, no. So when I came on Board, I told the team, I said, look, we're going to go target the top 10. And what's going to happen is the first 4 are going to be to tell us no. The next 4 are going to sort of be semi-polite about it, but it will be a no. And then the next 2, you might get traction with 1 of them. What's really happened now is all 8 -- 8 of the 10 have combined board and are working with us in some way, shape or form, some more engaged than others all on for these custom applications because, frankly, we are one of the few companies that can actually provide a mix of both custom offerings and custom content. This is really what gets these guys excited and keeps us on the line with them. It's incredible. I'm not -- I mean I'm not trying to overhype this, like I did not expect 8 people to say, yes, but here we are.

That's amazing. Well done, guys.

The next question is from the line of [ Louis Minister ].

Thank you. There's been a recent increase in fees, and I wonder if that's reduced or will reduce your subsequent subscriptions?

I mean candidly, if you look at the Spotify numbers, they've increased their prices dramatically. In fact, they increased in the second time. And is a nominal, nominal decrease in it. There's been a study done, very detailed study done that music subscription is so underpriced right now. Just think about that you can get 50 million songs right now at an average of $3.5 a month, right? And Spotify is going to $12 as of today, right, we're at $3.50, right? We have a lot of room to be able to raise those prices.

Yes. And I think that's an important point, Rob. Yes, we can -- just to add on to that real quick, we can raise prices and still be the best deal in music. So that's important to us. It's one way that we think we can win and raising prices. It doesn't mean that we won't continue to be that.

Well, the reason I asked is when I had a subscription to Sirius you get it for free with the BMW. And then after the first year, they want to charge me about $26. And I said, "Well, I'm just going to cancel it." And they said, "Well, we have a special deal for you" when it came out to be something like $6 and change for a year. So I wondered if -- that's why I asked that question.

Yes. Understood. I mean I think one of the things that I had mentioned is just how flexible our pricing architecture is. So you mentioned something that also represents flexibility I'm not saying we're going to do a program exactly like Sirius. I don't think we should. I don't think it makes sense for us to do that. But we do have a lot of flexibility that we can utilize in order to meet our partners, where they need to be from a cost perspective, but also to really reach the consumer where they need to be in order to make a decision to purchase. And it's a big value for us as we work with these partners.

The next question is from the line of Barry Sine with Hills Research.

Congratulations, gentlemen. I wanted to ask about the $24 million transaction. A couple of questions on that. I just want to clarify some points. First of all, I want to confirm, I think previously you've said that's not currently in guidance. And then secondarily to clarify, I think you've said that, that the customer, you can't say who it is, but it's a $25 billion market cap streaming company. Can you clarify on both of those, please? Can you hear me, okay?

Yes. No, I didn't hear it clearly. If you could just repeat that one more time.

All right. I took it off speaker. So I want to clarify a couple of things on what you've already said. First of all, everything you've talked about today, I believe, is within the Slacker segment, not in within PodcastOne?

No, of course it's over the whole company...

You know, we saw some of that. And then on the $24 million customer, I think previously, you said that is not in guidance. And then I also want to confirm the way you described the customer. I think you've said it's a roughly $25 billion market cap streaming company. Are both of those correct?

Yes, $25 billion company, correct. But we did not say that it does not affect guidance, right, or it is not built in the guidance. We have not updated guidance at all, right, since we just put it out 1.5 week ago.

Okay. And then the 8 of the 10 largest international car companies you're dealing with, I've just Googled them. And a lot of these are international, German, Japanese, Korean, and I don't believe you have streaming rights outside the U.S. So are you working on that? Will you work with these companies globally? Is that in the cards?

Absolutely. And I think you'll see, as you see the next announcement come out in the next partnership you'll see the next stage of where we're going with expanding the business. And most of the subscription businesses, like Spotify, Netflix and so on, half of their revenue is in the U.S. and half are overseas. We've really never had an opportunity and really haven't tried other than Tesla to expand overseas, right, until the balance sheet was cleaned up and until the company was mature enough and ready for that expansion, right? We're now ready for that expansion.

And just my last question, am I correct in assuming once you get international socially European streaming rights, that would have the potential to expand your relationship with Tesla. Is that correct?

The next question is from the line of Robert Prag with Del Mar Consulting Group.

If you could, it seems to me, and I want you to talk about your model. It seems to me that the differentiation in your model relative to other streaming music services is your avenue and modality of customer acquisition. And specifically, your cost of customer acquisition. So if you would, I think it's worth clarifying to folks, and maybe Brad, this is up your alley, to clarify what the Spotifys of the world how they -- how they had the customer acquisition cost relative to your model and your customer acquisition cost?

Yes, that's a great question, Bob. You're 100% correct. So Spotify, for example, they grow their funnel, their customer funnel, with what we refer to as direct customer acquisition. For example, they're spending money on advertising to try to get people to download their app and then upgrade. That's a losing proposition. And if you look at the financials, there's not too many quarters where they're profitable. And for us, that's just not an option. I think Bill said it multiple times. Every deal we're closing here is with a lens on profitability. And 1 way we do that is just focusing on growing our funnel through our partner channels through our partners, customers, right? But we still have to make sure that whatever we do to develop and launch a program with a partner. At the end of the day, it's profitable. That's critical to us. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense. And that's not necessarily the same strategy of our competitors in our space. If you look at Apple, you look at Amazon, their music services in a lot of ways are loss leaders, right, for their overall ecosystem. Again, that's not an option for us. So that's why the emphasis is there on using our partner channels, using our partners' customers to grow. And we're uniquely set up to do that. If you go back to 2007, when Slacker radio first launched, we were a B2C app for less than a year before we realized that we need to start powering other people's music experiences in order to really scale. And everything we've built over the last 2 decades has been with that in mind. It's literally ingrained in our DNA. It's ingrained in our technology. It's ingrained in our systems to be able to not only be extremely flexible because not all partners are the same. They're going to want different solutions, different feature sets, right? But we need to be able to create efficiencies so that any work we're doing for our own B2C customers can be leveraged by our B2B partners. And that's just part of everything that we've built proprietary or not over the last 2 decades. And so that's a really, really important differentiator as well. It's not just that it makes sense to grow customers and grow revenue this way because it's the best way to be profitable. but we're uniquely positioned to do so because our entire architecture is uniquely positioned to do so. Does that answer your question? Bob?

Yes, very good. So essentially, your customer acquisition cost is really just the cost for you to engage with your B2B partners versus what would be the typical modality or customer acquisition cost for other streaming services, which is just typical ongoing, correct?

Yes. That's a great way to summarize it. That's correct.

Okay. If you could, Rob and team, if you could, you made another celebrity brand announcement here over the last couple of days. I think it's -- I'd love to hear a little bit more about that strategy, some updates on the launch of the Chardonnay, but really how you expect to book revenues, how much capital outlay is needed, what your percentage ownership is in some of these celebrity brands.

Yes. So we own the control positions. We're spending very, very little money. We've got tens of thousands of dollars, right, to launch them because what's happening with those celebrity brands as you see whether it's George Clooney, whether it's McGregor, whether it's Kim Kardashian, it's just social media that drive it, right? What we've done is we've leveraged music. So it's not just the social media. It's on top of social media, if they're streaming on Spotify in that audience that's on top of it, they're touring and taking it on the road. So as you know, Bob, with Chardonnay, we didn't spend a dime on marketing all the marketing was done from 56 shows that Jeremih did on the road, and we sold out of every bottle we had. Now that was a limited amount always 6,000 bottles we thought with, but we're seeing telltale signs the next 60,000. We sold very quickly as well. And what we've gotten that reaction out of that is as we've gotten distributors right, which we'll announce shortly will announce distribution obviously starting in the major cities, New York, Chicago, L.A., Miami, right, and especially, it is Jeremih, who is in Chicago, we just did a beautiful event with Jeremih literally -- accolades were literally throughout the city, press, et cetera. So we're really excited about the celebrity brands. And it's really just an extension of our audience and our traffic, right? There's billions of listeners and watchers that have crossed over our platform and using our excess inventory and using our social media stars, those artists or social media stars, podcasters to drive these brands. And out beauty is because we have such a big community, we get the leveraging. Anywhere we have the inventory. It's not just tile that's going to launch it's coffee. It's going to be on every podcast. It can be every music event we can that we have excess inventory we're going to buy back to give you very little cost and we have a control position in each of those companies. I expect to announce at least 7 of them this year, next year, 10 to 12 and the year after 12 to 15.

Okay. Okay. Good stuff. And then lastly, one of the things you spoke about on the last quarterly call, I think it was, which to me sounded quite exciting. It was the prospect of monetizing 1 or a number of the podcast series into video streaming, whether it is a Netflix network company, whatever it might be. And I think you talked about Varnamtown on that. But maybe if you could, this will be my last question. Give an update on that. And then maybe explain to people where you'll be sitting at the table, how LiveOne and/or PodcastOne, what seat will they have at the table if, in fact, you're able to cut deals with some of the existing podcast content on the media side.

Well, I can tell you, and you're going to hear a lot about it next week, the week after somewhere over the next 2 weeks, but we sold our second show. And what's really exciting about this is you're taking a podcast that's already profitable and you're selling it to a second window. And we sell that at second window, television film and for any of you don't know, why you're shown atmosphere films, and we own the rights there, the movie 300, Spiderwick Chronicle. So it was really a slate of movie and television and did about $1.5 billion in revenues. And we spent less than $1 million building, right? It's really about having these great producers. And what I love about this model is, is that we show already have a proven audience so that when you're going into the streaming networks, you're going in there with a mission. All right, instead of selling them a book or a [ ship ] for $1 million, right? Now you walk in there and you go in, hey, we have 10 million downloads, right? We have 125,000 people listening for episode, right? That's a very powerful model, a very strong model. And as you can see, what we did in Varnamtown, we have one of the biggest producers in the world, Patrick Wachsberger, right? Who produced it. We have Kyle MacLachlan as leading it you don't see those in podcasts, right? You're not going to see that. And I think there's a massive opportunity for us to build a $1 billion business over the next 5 to 7 years, just on the television alone. And I really expect that we're going to sell one show a year for the next 5 years. We've already sold 2 to television, we sold 1 is a documentary. And we're going into our fourth. We just launched Ransom and hopefully, everyone had the opportunity to listen to Varnamtown, which I think is one of the great, great stories, Coen Brothers, comedy, satires, but all true story, Pablo Escobar infiltrating it down in North Carolina, right? And you should listen to it. But we just want ransom by the producers that produced gold. We paid 0 money for it. We have a rev sharing partnership and owner in IP with it, and we're going out to television that somewhere in August. And we're #2 on Apple already, but this could be a very big business that develops out of this and way quicker than we expected. In fact, what we're doing now is we're going back and looking at all the podcasts that are out there. The guys that did ransom also did a show called cold, which had 35 million downloads and then it's sold to Amazon is an exclusive for $25 million. We're looking at all the podcasts that have been made are those true fine podcasts because most of them are made for television or the people that are making aren't thinking about television and looking them and see if we can skip those up and add to our slate with no cost to it and be able to take those out to our television partners. And when you got the likes of Peacock and CBS and NBC and the relationships that Patrick has with every streaming network and myself, we really are in a unique position that there's no other podcast business that has the skill set of selling these the second window. So huge opportunity and really exciting and selling that second show has really endorsed that phones are ringing off the hook. We're getting calls in advance as to what our next show is going to be.

So just to clarify, and again, this is my last question. For those who are on PodcastOne, like myself, would it be a correct assumption that the benefit, the revenue, the IP ownership, the executive production, whatever it may be, where LiveOne and PodcastOne are at the table on these deals. Would this -- would all these accrue to the benefit balance sheet and nonincome statement to PodcastOne?

Absolutely, which in turn, right, all those revenues all the revenues go through us, right? And then we have partnerships, obviously. And the profits with no cost. -- right? There's 0 additional costs. The studios have already spent and as an example, on vigilant, they've already spent probably $0.75 million going to $1 million quickly as they just screen with that show. On Varnamtown they get have to spend $0.5 million to $1 million before they launch it, right? There's no cost to us in it and when they launch it. They're looking at 3 to 5 years of shows. It's millions and millions of millions of dollars in revenues and bottom line, right, to PodcastOne, which in turn, because LiveOne owns almost 80%. 80% of that also will show up on our income statement and balance sheet of LiveOne.

[Operator Instructions] The next question is from the line of [ Dave Welan ] with Miramar Beach.

Rob, I just have one question, and that's in regards to the revenues that come in for the Slacker like on Tesla and maybe in the future other car companies. Let's say, you have $3 and then you raised it, I think, $0.50 in the dollar. How does that break down to revenues for LiveOne in other words, if you're not keep getting 100% of it, I don't believe you are. Could you just go ahead and tell me how that revenue breakdown happens?

Yes, you want to take that, Brad?

I can take it. I just didn't understood the question. You're saying we get 100% of the revenue? Is that the question?

The question is, the $3, you charge $3 a month or say -- or $3.50. How is that actual revenue breakdown to LiveOne? I mean, how it's split or what's the dollar amount to you actually I mean I know you have an increase just increased your amount for $0.50 or $1. So I just want to know how the revenue breakdown happens.

The revenue breakdown between LiveOne and Slacker, is that specifically the question?

He's asking -- we pick up -- let me take it. We pick up 100% of the revenues, right? We raised our pricing from an average of $3.5 to $4.5, we pick up an extra dollar of revenues. I think what you're asking, Dave, because I think we've had this conversation before is does the record labels participate, right, which they do in those price increases, right? They will get some piece of that price increase. Now that depends on where the increase comes from it. It's just on music. We're going to be paying our typical 60-plus percent, right? If it's podcasting, if it's audio books, if it's live streaming, if you believe in automated cars and even on [indiscernible] to present a new automated car August 8, and we're all seeing the Google cars in New York, Chicago, L.A. and San Francisco. If you believe in automated cars, right, there's a lot of different revenue streams that a price increase can come from that may not just be tied to the music. If it's just tied from the music, we think of 100% of that increase in revenues, and we pay out about 60-plus percent.

There are no further questions waiting at this time. So I would like to hand the call back to the team for any concluding remarks.

Yes. I think my final comments to everybody is, we've just received notice that we'll be back on the Russell 2000 and 3000. I think it's exciting to have that institutional buying coming in and should start shortly. At the same time, the company, we like to put our hands in our feet in our mouth in the same direction. We're buying back a lot of stock. We've now bought over $5.2 million of stock. We've just increased the buyback to $10 million. We're that excited and energized by where the direction of all 5 subsidiaries are going. The management team has come together. This is a family. We really feel that strongly, and I'm glad you got to meet Bill and Brad and you're going to start to hear more and more voices across this company from the senior management team, not just mine. As the business has now matured to a $150 million business time to hear those executives, who have really helped me to build this and gotten me to bunkers and fought through the tough time and proven that they're resilient but are also skilled of delivering revenues. And we pitch ourselves somehow we went from $38 million. When COVID hit, we lost all of our live business, which was half of our business. And somehow we've turned this into a $150 million business in the last 4 years. And yes, we're humbly and confidently believe that this will be a $1 billion plus business in the next 4 years. So thank you, everyone. Thank you for joining. I appreciate you all the shareholders, and I appreciate and we look forward to our upcoming quarterly call.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.