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I'm Dan Runcy. Welcome to trap ital. The 2026 live music season is here and all eyes are on the flagship music festival in Indio, California. Coachella. After a few sluggish years for ticket sales in 2024 and 25, Coachella 2026 is off to a much stronger start. The festival sold out within days, partially thanks to an earlier announcement on ticket sales, but also thanks to a strong list of headliners including Justin Bieber. Bieber's popularity is great for Golden Voice, the promoters of Coachella, but it also raises a predicament that music festivals like Coachella have been facing in recent years. How do they attract the biggest artists in the world when the biggest artist in the world is can now make so much money doing their own live music shows? Let's look at Beyonce. In 2016 when Beyonce did her Formation World Tour and in 2018 when Beyonce did her on the Run 2 Tour with Jay Z, the average nightly gross for Beyonce's concerts was just over $5 million, which ironically is right around the same price that $5 million per weekend and which is what Coachella pays the headliners. But if we Fast forward to 2025 when Beyonce did her Cowboy Carter tour, the average nightly gross for Beyonce's Cowboy Carter tour was over $12 million. More than 2x what Coachella pays per show and more than 2x what she did on her own tours in the 2010s. And it's not like Beyonce hadn't been on tour in a while. She had done her Renaissance world tour in 2023. But Beyonce's case is not unique. The demand for these artists to go on their own tours, the stadium level a tier artist is higher than ever. So for a festival like Coachella, which is clearly starting to show that it is more headline dependent than a lot of people in the festival and live business thought that it was. How do they ensure that they can still have a high sellout profitable event year after year after year? To get into all of that and more, we're joined today by Dave Brooks. He is a music correspondent at Puck and he is the host of the Decibel and Docket podcast. I hope you enjoyed this one as much as we did. Let's dive into festival season. Hope you enjoy. This episode of Trapital is presented by All People Powered, a live concert and pitch competition coming to Oakland on April 11. The creators of Co Founders the sold out Bay Area musical about an Oakland navigating Silicon Valley are bringing the fictional startup accelerator from the show to Real life as an event. It's called All People Powered and it's a live concert and pitch competition where three real Bay Area founders pitch on stage for $30,000 in actual funding. The judges are Nate Jones from the Kapor center and Monica Poole Knox from Good Trouble Ventures. The performers include the original cast from the co founders plus Grammy nominated artist Bosco Conte and the soul slappers fresh off of E40's NPR tidy desk appearance. With music led by William Randolph V and J.Q. johnson from Hamilton, this is Shark Tank meets Soul Beat. The event is April 11th from 2 to 5pm at the Henry J. Kaiser center for the Arts in Oakland. Tickets are going fast and there's a link in the show notes where you can get them today. All right, we're here to kick off festival season 2026 and we're joined by Dave Brooks. Wanted to have you on because Coachella is right around the corner. After a couple of years of questions about slow ticket sales, it looks like things started to turn the corner. What's your take on Coachella 2026 and what you think Golden Voice may be doing a bit differently?
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Right. Past couple years, Coachella has struggled to sell out. Right. It's split over two weekends, about 125,000 people a weekend. So about 250,000 tickets total. Coachella had previously been kind of announcing their LINEUP, you know, January 1st, and then everybody would follow with their lineup. That was kind of a contractual requirement Coachella had with agencies. They got to go first this, this year. They announced it in the fall. The year prior, they announced Justin Bieber as one of their headliners. It was interesting because at the time I wrote, you know, they really could use that extra time to sell those tickets. It takes a long time to sell quarter million tickets. It turns out they didn't need the extra time because once they announced Justin Bieber, the festival sold out in like five days. So it was kind of a funny result. That just shows you the demand for Bieber who hasn't, you know, toured since prior to the pandemic, I think for
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so many years, especially in the 2000 and tens, if we're being frank. The headliners that Coachella was able to get were at a higher level than the current artist slate that they've had in more recent years. Maybe Bieber wouldn't be fair to put him in that category, but just because of the popularity of some of the biggest artists in the world and what they can do on their own. But this showed that there still is a limit to that. Right? Sure. Coachella may have some flexibility, more than a festival that may be less established. But still, who you have on that stage does matter to push tickets.
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Yeah, absolutely. There is. It's a huge contingency of people, especially young people, who will go to Coachella no matter what. Right. I still think it is the premier festival globally. If you're an artist, it gets the most media attention and the most looks right from outside media. And I think they were able to kind of ride that for a long time. But we've seen the last couple of years that, yeah, the headliners definitely matter and move the needle on the show, and they need really strong talent to sell all those tickets. Fans have so many options these days for entertainment. There's Coachella. There's Electric Daisy Carnival in Vegas. There's. There's a festival in the South Bay called Beach Life. There's. There's a festival up in Napa called Bottle Rock. There's just a lot of, like, festivals to go to. Coachella is not like it's the easiest either to go to. It's really difficult to go there for the day and come home, especially if you live in LA county, like, anywhere in LA County. It's a long drive. Almost everybody spends the night. It's kind of a harder festival to go to for people, while they've in the past, kind of rely on their credibility, their authenticity. I think we're seeing now that it just takes more than that. It takes Bieber.
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Right, Right. I think another piece, too, is just how large the festival's gotten as well. Right. You're trying to get a quarter million people in and out. This is bigger than even when Beyonce did her performance there. At some point. I know that every company wants to continue growing and up into the right. But at a certain point, there is a ceiling for a lot of this stuff. And I think we're starting to. We're starting to realize that.
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Yeah, I think we're there. You know, I think we hit the ceiling. I mean, with Beyonce. I want to say I think Beyonce was 2018, but I could be 2018. Yeah, 2018. Even then, it wasn't 125,000 people per week. They've slowly grown. We see that through the permits they asked for for the city of India, where it takes place. It's bigger than it's ever been. And that's a recent thing.
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Yeah. And then speaking of Beyonce, too, artists now, where eight years ago doing Coachella was a statement performance for an artist of Beyonce's level, now it seems like there's an artist that are few tiers below that that now see Coachella, frankly, as a stepping stone to then go do their own stadium tour. But I just wonder what the future for the festival looks like when the draws will be quite varied. Bieber was very strong, one of the biggest pop backs of the 2010s, so it was good to see him. But now Beyonce can make, or Beyonce's tour, rather, can generate $15 million per night at Sofi Stadium. The fees that Coachella offers are nowhere near that for the headliner. So at some point, the economics make it really tough for anyone that can pull in a stadium tour on their own.
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Right? And that's a relatively. Like you were saying, that's kind of a relatively new thing. Right? We think about, like, the going rate for a Coachella headliner to be like, about like $5 million, right, per weekend, which is a lot of money. Right. Ten years ago, it would have been really difficult for an artist to make that kind of money. People were touring stadiums as much, and fans just weren't going to stadiums. But like aeg, the parent company of Coachella, and their competitor, Live Nation, have gotten really good at the creating stadium shows, right, that, you know, can generate, you know, 10, $15 million grosses. It doesn't necessarily make sense now to play Coachella because they're going to require some exclusivity. They're not going to want you to go on tour right after you play. It doesn't necessarily make Sense to play one, two weekends for a $10 million payday and miss out on a tour where you can regularly make 12, $14 million per show. That's a challenge for Coachella because more and more artists are kind of able to seize upon those, like, big stadium economics. The sweet spot is someone like Bieber, right, who's looking for, like, a major moment. And that's what Coachella provides. Right. He'll probably use it hopefully as a springboard to relaunch his touring career, but it'll also get kind of all the attention and the focus of the entire country, you know, for one weekend on him, on what he's doing in the desert. The problem is that that's difficult thing to, like, repeat. And every year, Paul Toled, the guy who books and owns Coachella, he's wanted to do a reunion for the talking heads at Coachella, which would be one of those moments that would make a lot of sense. Talking heads don't want to do it. It sounds like it takes those kind of things. And there's just not that many opportunities out there. There's not that many artists that are looking, looking for that and need that. The timing is right. So it'd be a challenge to find enough headliners that kind of add up to the 250,000 tickets that Coachella needs to sell.
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Right. Another example of this makes me think of Jay Z. He isn't doing Coachella this year, but he's making a statement this year. A lot of people anticipate a 2026 album coming out. So he's headlining the Roots Picnic, but he's also doing shows at Yankee Stadium. Three shows at Yankee Stadium. If Jay Z wanted to, he could do a show at the Phillies ballpark. He may be even able to do one where the Eagles play Lincoln Financial Field. But he's clearly choosing to do it at this festival to make a statement, reach a slightly different fan base than may attend one of his concerts or pay for the tickets there. And he's already doing interviews, so we're expecting something big to happen. So that's when it happens. Jay z celebrating the 30th anniversary of his first album. Bieber hasn't been on tour or really in that type of setting in quite a long time. And yeah, to your point, how do you replicate that? And that's a lot harder than, oh, let's find Outkast in 2014. Oh, let's find Beyonce in 2018. Do you think that country music operates a bit differently in this way because Stagecoach seems like that thing is humming and continues to grow and grow each year?
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Yeah. And you're totally right. So Stagecoach is a little bit smaller. It's 90,000 people and it's only one weekend. Right. Stagecoach is still a festival that relies a lot on its own. The experience, the book of the biggest names in country. But people have want to go to Stagecoach every year. People get together, people have reunions, they go. People know no matter what, they're going to have a good time. They're not necessarily going to see all the headliners. It's interesting that Stagecoach isn't totally relying only on country music. They've got Counting Crows on there. I mean, right? They're not country music got Journey on there. Bush Post Malone is headlining the third night. Now he's got a country show he could put on, but he's not traditional country artists. Hooting the Blowfish, Third Eye Blind. And then there are separate stages for Diplo, Pitbull and Ludacris. Stagecoach is much more, it seems like, about the country lifestyle this California desert Americana appeal is, is as much a music festival as it is a fashion style, a lifestyle, you know, and I think because it's a little bit of an older audience that, that, that they can kind of repeat that success year over year and don't have to just like chase the best, best, the hottest trends. Your audience is more 30 and 40 year olds who are going to be a little bit more reliable and really just looking for like a good time and don't have as many options either. Right. I mean this is kind of their event.
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It feels like it's an extension of the dynamics we see in country and how it operates different from pop music or hip hop. A lot more radio dependent, less dependent on social media, who's buzzing? Who is the number one artist on Spotify, top 50 or any of those traditional metrics that mean a lot more contemporary music. Not that Morgan Wallen and others aren't contemporary, but still it's a reflection that, okay, this operates a bit differently. It's less reliant on the zeitgeist and I think because of that it probably shows maybe more steadiness, if you will. May not be as big, but shows more steadiness and less susceptible to the ups and downs. As opposed to these other festivals that are more driven by pop and hip hop in recent years.
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Yeah, exactly. It's like much more driven by album cycles and what Nashville is focused on as a promote as this promotional machine. Right. It's kind of built for Nashville. How that city works.
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This episode of Trap Ital is presented by our friends at Symphonic Distribution who are celebrating Women's History Month by launching their fifth installment of their women's mentorship program. Symphonic pairs a select emerging talent with an established professional across the global music industry, which creates a space for guidance, growth and real connections. The applications are currently Open now through March 23, 2026. If you are interested, you should go to their website, symphonic.com woman empowered. You can go there. You can choose to apply as a mentee or as a mentor. So go to the bottom of this page, click there and you can choose one of those options again. The applications will be open until March 23rd. You can also click the link in our show notes to learn more. Coachella is having its dynamic and I think Glastonbury has a similar type of dynamic as well. Just with the headliners. They all do. That must trickle down. And I know that a lot of festivals have shut down and closed in recent years and I think the narrative around this can be a Bit convoluted, where there's a lot of articles and things you'll see that talk about, oh, what happened to the festival boom? What happened to music festivals? Are they in a decline? And sure, there's clearly some post pandemic economics, rising costs and just the demand in terms of the artists on that stage, that can make things tough. But the market also got quite bloated. A lot of people understandably tried to have their hand at festivals, seeing the great success that many of them had in the 2010s, and like anything, most of them are going to fail. Like any business you start, right. Think about starting a restaurant, starting a bar, any of that stuff. But I don't know if that context necessarily got layered onto the broader economics of running a live event and trying to do it year after year the way that these institutions, like a Coachella Bonnaroo, have done for decades now.
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Right. It got a little bloated. I think there was some cannibalization, I should say. The festival change challenge is that, you know, in order to kind of protect your, your brand, protect your investment, you have to do it every single year. Festivals, they're based in markets that aren't really going to support that. I think the costs are just very expensive. The artist costs are higher than they've ever been. And it's a difficult market, especially with weather being so unpredictable. A bad weekend, a rain, A rain event or a festival or a major weather. The cancellation can do a lot of economic damage to festivals. We saw a lot of companies wanting to get in on it and think it was a way to make a lot of money. I think it's proven it's not really a great investment vehicle. It's very difficult to make money in festivals. Only a handful of people are kind of able to do it. The other thing is, it seems like for every festival that is canceled, there's a new one popping up, right. Someone's always trying to get in. There's like, you know, like I said, if you live in Southern California or even Northern California, you always have some option to go to. Someone's always trying something out, you know.
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Yeah. Do you feel like you have a good sense for the profitability of certain events? I think the cost can be a bit tougher to get context on, while the revenues in the box office can be a bit more public. But I've always wondered, okay, which events are staying afloat because of brand name and some private donor or someone is pushing money to keep this thing afloat, just hoping that you know it'll pay off in a few years as opposed to okay, which ones are really humming standalone year after year. It is a profitable on a unit economics perspective.
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Well, I've seen a lot of festivals fail and go into bankruptcy. And so that kind of gives you a look at the books and it shows you like how. How many have really struggled to be to find profitability. I would say that I think Coachella is. Is generally a profitable enterprise, especially when you. It's combined with. They're able to utilize the same festival site for three events, the same staging equipment and that saves a lot of money and that kind of allows them to operate at scale. Another event that's been really successful because of sponsors is up in the Bay Area, Outside Lands Festival.
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I'm there every year.
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I think that's a profitable enterprise. I don't think. I think if it wasn't, those guys wouldn't be able to do it. And this year I. You look at what they did with concerts, bookending the festival. They had Dead and company Zach Bryant and they were able to turn a profit and be successful. But. But they're not huge profits. They're not huge margins by any stretch. It's. It's very challenging. There's a lot of cost.
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Yeah. Like Outside Lance, for instance, I saw. I think it was 41.4 million was the public box office gross for what they did in 2025. Having gone every year, very well run event. You can definitely tell that yes, they've got their reps in and if you go to enough of these, you can tell. Okay, this feels like a first time that you've tried to have a music festival versus a well run operation. I put Bottle Rock in that same category. Having gone to that a couple times. It's a newer festival than either ones we talked about, but still you can see that, you know, this works. And I think even there speaking about the clientele being slightly older and a bit more money, combine the Silicon Valley money plus the wine country money, it does lend itself to a customer profile that's willing to pay.
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Yeah. And Bottle Rock's an incredible event. I honestly, it's one of my favorite events and I think you're right. I think the hospitality side of it with all the different VIP packages they sell and how they pair it with food and wine allows it to be profitable. I don't know if it would be profitable without that. That event is interesting because the growth is capped. Right. There's not a lot of places to hold an event like that in Napa there, for better or worse, stuck at the fairgrounds, which is about, you know, 30,000 people. And so. But they make it work. The general admission tickets can be better than some of the VIP experiences at some festivals. You know, they just do a really good job. They've got a really high end clientele and they know how to treat people right. And people love that festival. And I love it too. I think it's one of my favorites.
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What's your read on Lollapalooza right now? Especially since they've expanded to Brazil and other locations.
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The Walpoloza brand is really healthy. I think the marquee event in Chicago and it still sells a lot of tickets. One of the highest grossing festivals every single year. And they've done a good job expanding it globally. Right. To different markets. They get a lot of subsidies from the local government, from the regional governments who want to bring Lollapalooza to their country. Think like Lopalooza India, Lopalooza in Chile. In Brazil there's a Lollapalooza like event. In Colombia, it's called a stereo Picnic. But they get a lot of support from the government, from the hotel sector who take a wider view of these festivals. It's a tourism boon for them. And also it kind of is a sign that we kind of we've arrived on the global stage. We're holding this big festival brand. When you say you're doing a Lollapalooza event, you can expect that's going to be a high quality, safe event because that's important. Especially like in an emerging market. People have to trust the brand. Somewhere like Brazil or someone like India. You're asking a fan for a lot of trust to buy a ticket in advance for a festival like that and that you're going to deliver on. And that's why I think Clubbaloozer has the credibility and allows them to bring these major artists to a market and kind of show. We've arrived, we're hosting this kind of event.
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I'm surprised we haven't seen one of the countries that has a big sovereign wealth fund. Try to get Lollapalooza there. Lollapalooza, Riyadh, Lollapalooza, Abu Dhabi.
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Right, right. We haven't seen that. But we. But they are trying other types of events. Right. Riyadh has, yeah, has Soundstorm, which is a huge event. Right. And then they also have the comedy festival and those are underwritten by the Saudis. They pay millions and millions of dollars for these artists to come out there. It's definitely kind of political and cultural trade off. Why Lollapalooza doesn't go there? That's a good question. I don't, I don't know really. You know, maybe the, these countries, they want a little more control over it, but it's a good point.
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Yeah. On a different note, outside of festivals, but with live music more broadly, I think one of the things that we've seen in recent years, both last year's and this year, is that there are artists who may not have the highest public image, to say the least. I'm thinking specifically about Chris Brown, who had one of the top grossing tours last year. There was a stadium tour that he was able to do for the 20th anniversary of Run it and everything he did with his debut. But you also have Kanye west doing shows at Sofi Stadium, India and other locations. What's your read on those? We can start with Chris that we can go with Kanye.
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A
Well, I didn't follow Chris Brown tour a ton, but like, look after all the things the guy's done and his public Persona. You're right. I mean, he sold a lot of tickets. I think it was in the top 10 tours on the Billboard year in touring charts, made hundreds of millions of dollars. And I, I think it just shows that people who are music fans, I think they're less kind of affected by whether someone's canceled or not. If they're going to want to go see the person they're going to go, they'll pay money to go see it. I think the same as with Morgan Whelan. Right. Who gotten like a lot, has gotten a lot of trouble over the years. Various things he's done and still sells tons of tickets. I think music fans just don't care about that stuff as much. I guess it's the only thing I can kind of take away.
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Yeah. And I do think that the music fan that even would be willing to purchase a hard ticket for your event is in a different category than the person that is commenting on social media who may just be a casual fan or may not be a fan at all, but may still be a music fan. And Chris Brown did win a Grammy Award in the past year or two. Right. It wasn't, you know, like album of the year or anything like that, but he did win a Grammy Award. So not, not quite sure what, what, what cancel may really even mean in his regard. But ye is a different story because it's much more recent. Him still doing a show at Sofi Stadium means that okay. There are fans, there are promoters, there are people that are willing to put his name out there. So I'm very interested to see how. How this goes for him.
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I'm just kind of amazed that. Yeah. How many people. People. How many chances are willing to give the guy for just the crazy things he said and done. He's one of those artists. People love him. They think. People think he is a genius. They. They think he is one of the greatest artists. They're afraid to miss it. It's a total FOMO type thing. I don't totally get it. It's kind of incredible he's even able to get a show. Anyone's willing to work with him. After what he's done in the past with canceling on Coachella, I'm sure he still owes AG and Live Nation a bunch of money.
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B
Dave, before we let you go, are there any new festivals or new trends that you'll be following that let's say are different that you didn't think worth it even in 20, 25 or 24?
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Yeah, I'm watching Warp Tour. Warp Tour came back last year. It's coming back again this year. Warped Tour used to travel around the country, right? Kind of a Lollapalooza style. One of the last touring festivals played 30 markets last year. They did three markets. They did Long Beach, D.C. and Florida, Orlando. You know, they sold something like 250,000 tickets total. Right. Huge success. They're expanding. This year. They're doing a Warped Tour up in Montreal. It's. It's punk, it's nostalgia, it's hard rock. Genres people said were dead. And it's not. It's hugely successful. I also think that the hard rock festival format is really strong. Events like welcome to Rockville, there's one in Sacramento as well, a hard Rock festival. Those are strong. Those are coming back. And I like to see that. I like to see more kind of guitar driven music. Even though, like a lot of the artists, the headliners for these rock and punk festivals haven't recorded any music in like 20 years. I mean, fans are lining up to see rock bands again, and that makes me very happy. I want to see more rock outfits playing festivals. More bands like the Queens of the Stone Age and the Foo Fighters.
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B
You just made me think of Metallica at the Sphere. Right? That's another.
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A
That would be awesome.
- [28:01]
B
Yeah, I think it's happening, right?
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A
Oh, really? Yeah, I missed that. Metallica. Oh, my God, that sounds incredible. I saw Dead and Company at the Sphere and it was amazing.
- [28:11]
B
Yeah, no Definitely. Definitely a strong moment, I think. Yeah. Maybe not as much for, like, new rock coming out right now. I mean, I think there's some data that would show that it is. But in terms of touring in this conversation. Yeah. If you had hits 20 years ago, now is the best time to be on tour. Pushing it.
- [28:27]
A
Exactly.
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B
Well, Dave, appreciate you coming on. This was fun.
- [28:31]
A
Thanks, Dan. I really appreciate it. It was a huge honor being on the show.
- [28:37]
B
And that is our wrap for our breakdown on festival season. Thank you again to Dave Brooks for joining me on this one. Thank you to our audio and video producers G and Eric for everything that you do. Thank you to Roana on our team for everything you do behind the scenes to help make trapital possible. But most importantly, thank you for listening. If there's one person you know that would really enjoy this episode on Coachella and festival season or any of the topics that we cover on trapital, send them a link to the show. Word of mouth is still the best way to grow. And if you have a few moments, if you're not already subscribed on your podcast player of choice, hit that star button. Hit that follow button. You can follow the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube. Wherever you listen to shows, trapitol is there. And if you have a few moments, leave a comment or a review or a like that helps the algorithm do its thing and makes sure that trapital reaches the right people. Thanks again. Talk to you next time.