Toby Parks

And there's a significant downturn in people drinking.

Like, great for people being healthy, but it's really hard on the pocketbooks of small music venues.

It's a battle every day.

And people who do this work, those of us in the independent sector, we don't do this because we think we're going to make tons of money.

We do it because we love our communities and we love helping develop artists.

There's no...

I always like to say there's no Taylor Swift without stages like mine, you know, and that's why we do it.

And, you know, I'm fortunate enough that XBK isn't my primary source of income.

Me, like, you know, every other person in America right now has multiple jobs.

So I can't complain.

I am.

I am an IP attorney, an entertainment attorney, and also have recently just started a new tech company.

As we're talking about the economics of the live sector, we as concert promoters and venue owners pay a lot of money into royalties to public performance societies.

And so I've created some technology to help make it easier for artists to submit setlist data so they can participate in the royalty pools with their respective PROs.

Correct.

They represent songwriters and own the rights to the underlying compositions.

It's 100% parallel.

And I think that from the perspective of artists, as we said, it's so expensive for artists to tour these days.

And we need those bands to be on tour to keep our doors open.

So we're doing everything in our sector to help them.