Steven Price
Analyst · Michael Kupinski with Noble Financial. Please proceed with your questions
Thank you, Claire. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Before I get into details of the second quarter, I wanted to take a brief step back. Half way through the year, I feel good about where our Company is today. Overall, we are, where we expected to be, both operationally and financially. And we remain on track to meet the 2016 plan we outlined to you earlier this year. Moving on to 2Q results, we are pleased to share another quarter of good performance. We are again delivering results that are in line or above our expectations. In the second quarter and on a pro forma basis, net revenue increased 2.1% over the prior year to $137.2 million within our guidance. And adjusted EBITDA increased 4.1% over the prior year to $25.3 million, exceeding our guidance of $24 million to $25 million. Our second quarter results can be summarized by two key things, solid performance across our local markets, and a predicted short-term dynamic in the music festival environments. In the second quarter, local marketing solutions, which include our local broadcast and local digital solutions, grew net revenue by 3.5% over the prior year period. On a year-to-date basis, this segment has grown nearly 6% over the prior year period. Overall, our markets are performing well and we are pleased with the results so far this year. However, despite otherwise strong local performance, we continue to see weakness in national, which is advertising through our rep firm and which is largely out of our control. Fortunately, national represents a smaller percent of our local marketing solutions business. Excluding national, our local marketing solutions net revenue increased approximately 5% in the second quarter and nearly 7.5% in the year-to-date period compared to the same period last year. Entertainment net revenue in the second quarter was flat to the prior year period. Our second quarter has historically been dominated by our legacy live events, including numerous multi-day music festivals that occur in May and June. Over the past several years, our music festivals have performed extremely well consistent with or in many cases better than the music festival industry broadly with each year, as we have noted the competitive landscape has grown more crowded. Last year we identified this trend and prepared for an eventual industry shakeout. We made a number of investments to defend our music festival position, which along with our competitive advantages in marketing and our unique geographic footprint has solidified our position as one of the premier festival operators in the industry. It's clear to us that we are in the midst of the shakeout in the music festival space in 2016. I'm sure that many of you have heard reports of numerous festival cancellations or abandonment this year from some of our competitors along with reports of lower attendance at long-standing traditionally successful festivals. By way of example, it's been reported based on public records that at least one major festival brand had its worst attendance year in nearly two decades of operation. The good news is that Townsquare's music festivals are generally strong and healthy and in some ways protected. We have leading festival brands and our festivals as you know, are regional events that are surrounded by the virtual mode of Townsquare marketing. For example, our Colorado and Wyoming properties around Country Jam, our New York properties around the Taste of Country Music Festival and Mountain Jam, and our Minnesota and Dakota properties around WE Fest. So, while our music festivals did not perform at a revenue or profit level consistent with prior years and hurt Q2 growth. Attendance at our major music festivals is flat, which we are extremely pleased about. And our festivals are profitable, which we believe is a strong outcome in this environment. Importantly, we believe the worst in the festival space is behind us, and believe our festivals are well-positioned to thrive and grow in the coming years. A less crowded competitive landscape will benefit Townsquare's festivals. For example, ticket sales for next year's festival are pacing up strongly. Further, we are considering launching one to two festivals in 2017. With all that said, if you were to exclude the results of our music festivals in the second quarter, entertainment net revenue grew 6.4% and total net revenue increased 4.3%. During the quarter, we bought back approximately $17 million of our bonds at a slight discount, reducing our growth leverage from 5.8 times at the end of the first quarter to 5.6 times at the end of the second quarter, and on a net basis to 5.4 times as of June 30. For the remainder of the year, our focus will be on delivering strong organic growth across our multiproduct platform and striving to hit our near-term leverage target of 5 times on a net basis. Once our leverage levels decline below 5 times, which based on our current outlook, we believe will occur in 2017. We will begin to examine returning capital to shareholders, potentially in the form of a dividend, although we will need to further evaluate the best allocation of capital when the time arrives. With that I will now turn the call over to Stu for further details on our financial results.