You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: When we spoke last in February, I was optimistic that we would soon be returning to live events.
And since then, our confidence has increased for our key markets.
In the U.S., over 40% of the population have received at least one vaccine dose, and most states are now fully or partially reopening with more restrictions being lifted daily.
In the U.K., over 50% of the population has received at least one vaccine dose, and their reopening road map is tracking to plan.
And although Europe remains a few months behind on vaccinations, they are progressing, and recent discussions about reopening to international visitors this summer are encouraging.
Around the world, people are showing the need to get out and socialize once again, which reinforces our expectation that a return to concerts will be the logical progression as vaccines are readily available to everyone who wants one.
This is generally already in the case in the U.S. where we are confidently planning our reopenings, particularly for outdoor shows.
And we expect other major markets will follow this summer.
Alongside these trends, we are seeing the effects of significant pent-up demand.
The fans are buying tickets, and events are selling out faster than ever.
In the U.S., Bonnaroo, Electric Daisy and Rolling Loud festivals all sold out in record times at full capacity.
In the U.K., we have 11 festivals planned this summer, including our largest ones, Reading, Leeds and Parklife, where tickets are already sold out.
New Zealand, the country's largest festival, Rhythm and Vines, quickly sold out.
And as we get further clarity on reopening time lines, we are announcing more tours for late this summer, including Dave Matthews, Luke Bryan, Maroon five and others to come, showing artists' increasing confidence in performing this summer.
Given the longer lead times associated with global arena and stadium tours, we expect these will start later this year and into 2022.
As we've discussed, we are already seeing confirmed major tour dates for 2022, up double digits from the same time prepandemic.
Many of these artists will have multiyear tours spanning in the U.S., Europe and often Asia or Latin America, setting up for a strong multiyear growth run.
Complementing our event pipeline, Ticketmaster continues to build its global client base to further accelerate its growth.
This year, we have already added new clients representing over five million net new fee-bearing tickets, which we expect to grow further throughout the year as more venues prefer for 2022.
And with Ticketmaster's client base increasingly shifting to digital ticketing, we continue to enhance our offering, ranging from upsell and improved advertising opportunities as well as blockchain and NFT ability at the Ticketmaster platform.
Our brand partners remain engaged and are responding well to our reopening.
And like our concert business, our sponsorship pipeline of committed activity for 2022 is up double digits for next year relative to where it was prepandemic.
Like so many of you, I'm excited to go back to concerts over the next few months and even more excited to see what I expect to be a nonstop 2022 that continues roaring into '23 and beyond.
For the first quarter, all the key costs and cash numbers improved relative to Q4 2020 and are at or better than what we expected at the start of the quarter.
We remain confident that our actions taken to cut costs and increase liquidity will provide us with the runway we need until we bring shows back, which will begin to scale in key markets outdoor this summer.
As we move toward reopening, we continue to balance strong cost and cash management.
We're now making the necessary investments to grow the business.
While we expect the second quarter to be our first year-on-year improvement since Q4 of 2019 and to also be generating positive AOI through the second half of the year, we still plan on reducing costs this year by $750 million and reducing cash spend by $1.5 billion relative to prepandemic plans.
Looking at our Q1 AOI results.
Our AOI loss for the quarter was $152 million, which consisted of $323 million in operational fixed costs and $171 million of contribution margin, which included $149 million from operations, along with various onetime items, including insurance recoveries.
Ticketmaster's ticket sales began to pick up at the beginning of March, particularly in the U.S., with weekly ticket sale count significantly ramping as concert on sales have restarted, including the Bad Bunny on sale, which was the top Ticketmaster artist on sale day since 2018.
As Michael noted, sales for our Live Nation festivals and concerts have been strong, demonstrating the tremendous pent-up demand for our shows, with many festivals selling out in record time and a number of tours substantially overperforming relative to their historical levels.
And our artist management and merchandise businesses also grew their contribution margin relative to the fourth quarter of last year.
And our artist management businesses, artists continue to generate revenue through nontrain activity, including publishing rights, while our merchandise business has grown its retail and e-commerce businesses.
Looking at free cash and liquidity.
We ended the first quarter with $1.1 billion in free cash compared to $643 million at the end of 2020, an increase of $462 million.
Our free cash, along with $964 million of available debt capacity, gives us $2.1 billion in readily available liquidity, up from $1.6 billion at the end of 2020.
Benefiting our free cash position, in January, we raised $417 million of net debt, and we had a $181 million timing benefit, largely associated with deferred revenue classification.
Our total free cash usage in the quarter was $136 million or $45 million per month, which included $100 million per month of average operational burn, roughly in line with Q4, plus another $4 million per month of nonoperational cash costs to get us to $104 million average per month in gross burn.
This gross burn includes the benefits we realized from the sale of a nonstrategic minority investment and timing on interest payments and severance costs.
And in Q1, we had $59 million average cash contribution margin per month, roughly 50% higher CM than we averaged in Q4.
Now on the other balance sheet items, ticket refunds.
The global refund rate for Live Nation concerts that are rescheduled and are in or have gone through a refund window or windows was unchanged from the prior quarter at 17% through the end of Q1.
For tours that have gone for a second refund window, the refund levels continue to generally be much lower for the second window as the casual fans requested their refunds during the first window.
On our festivals where fans were able to retain their tickets for the next scheduled event, 65% of fans are doing so.
On deferred revenue, at the end of the first quarter, event-related deferred revenue for shows that will play in the next 12 months was $1.5 billion, the same as at the end of Q4.
Ticket sales in the first quarter were $200 million, but this was offset largely by a shift of deferred revenue from short term to long term for shows that were rescheduled into 2022.
This long-term deferred revenue will then largely shift back to short term during Q2 and Q3, reversing the timing benefit in free cash this quarter.
Finally, looking forward, as Michael said, we continue to expect concerts to scale this summer in key markets, notably outdoor, and led by the U.S. and U.K. Given this expected activity through Q2, we will continue to ramp up our operations, enabling Ticketmaster to run its own sales, the concerts division to staff up for the amphitheater and festival season, and sponsorship staff to support delivery for brands of these events.
Between this ramp-up and the reversion of some of the Q1 timing benefits, we expect the average monthly net burn for the first half of 2021 to be roughly in line with Q4 of last year.
Before taking questions, I wanted to cover one other thing.
Kathy Willard, our CFO for the past 15 years, will be retiring as of June 30.
She will be then staying on as an advisor throughout the end of the year.
As of July 1, the plan is for Joe Berchtold to become CFO.
Kathy, as you know, has been an invaluable part of our executive team for the past 15 years and been with Live Nation for over 20.
We are a much stronger company because of her, not just from her role as CFO, but as a champion for women at the company and the industry, an important advisor to me on a range of issues.
Because she built such an effective finance organization, I'm confident we will remain in good shape as Joe steps in.
He and Kathy have been working together closely for over a decade now, and he has gotten more deeply involved over the past year as we have been planning this transition.
In addition, late last year, we elevated Jackie Viato to EVP of Operations to take on greater responsibility and give Joe the bandwidth he will need for the job.

user
$750 million cost reduction and $1.5 billion cash management program targets in 2021.

assistant