Joe Berchtold
President and Chief Financial Officer at Live Nation Entertainment
Thanks, Michael, and good afternoon, everyone. Given the unique situation in 2020 and 2021, Q1 of 2019 is the best comparison for us in terms of understanding our operations and key performance indicators. So while I will provide some commentary around our results relative to Q1 of 2021, most of our focus will be relative to 2019. Overall, our AOI of $209 million for the quarter was $361 million, better than 2021, led by an improvement of $269 million in ticketing, $66 million in sponsorship and $26 million in concerts. This was our highest Q1 AOI ever, exceeding Q1 of 2019 by $94 million, which had been our previous record first quarter.
Let me give a bit more color on each division, then I will give you more on 2022 leading indicators. First, ticketing was again the star of the quarter, delivering $206 million in AOI, making it the second best quarter ever for ticketing and more than doubling the Q1 2019 AOI results of $100 million. The first quarter of 2021 was heavily impacted by the pandemic, resulting in an AOI loss of $63 million. Ticketing was successful across the board. Let me give a few key statistics for the quarter.
Our growth came from both primary and secondary ticketing with transacted GTV, excluding refunds, up 33% and 106%, respectively. Transacted ticket volume, excluding refunds, was 63 million tickets, our fourth highest quarter ever and seven million tickets higher than Q1 of 2019. Transacted ticketing GTV, excluding refunds, was $6.3 billion, our second highest quarter ever after Q4 of 2021 and 39% higher than Q1 2019. This was driven by concerts and sporting events, whose GTV were up 49% and 73%, respectively, relative to Q1 2019. A continued shift toward more market-based pricing helped grow GTV levels with average primary ticket prices up double digits for the first quarter relative to Q1 2019.
And in resale, our average price increased 18%, while our overall resale GTV doubled compared to the first quarter of 2019, indicating that demand for the top seats across all live events continues to outpace efforts by sports teams, artists and others to capture more of the full value from their events. As the first effectively normal Q1 since 2019, we are seeing that digital tickets have now become the norm across live events with the NFL and NBA leading the way with 96% of fans using digital tickets to enter games, up from 53% in Q1 of 2019.
More broadly, 72% of our tickets globally were digital in Q1 of 2022 relative to 33% in Q1 2019. With this level of digital adoption, we can now accelerate our efforts to foster our direct fan relationships this year and into 2023. Next, sponsorship continued to ramp up with the reopening of venues and expanded online opportunities. As a result, 2022 Q1 sponsorship and advertising AOI of $70 million grew by 75% relative to 2019 Q1 AOI of $40 million. This strength comes across both on-site and online, each delivering record Q1 AOI. The growth versus 2019 was driven by expansion of our online business, new festivals that launched in the quarter and the addition of OCESA's brand partners.
Finally, in concerts, our AOI was a loss of $49 million, which compares to a loss of $74 million in Q1 of 2021 and positive AOI of $5 million in Q1 of 2019. As we indicated on the last call, we plan for fewer arena tours in Q1 this year, which typically drives our first quarter performance, resulting in concert seasonality that will be even more Q2 and Q3 driven this year than has historically been the case. In the quarter, we had nearly 11 million fans attend 6,600 events, continuing to be led by the U.S. and the U.K., which accounted for almost 80% of these fans. In comparison, Q1 of 2019 had 15 million fans and 8,200 shows when all of our markets and all venue types were fully open.
For ticket sales through late April for shows playing off this year, our average ticket price was up double digits relative to the first quarter of 2019, again, mainly driven by demand for the best seats. At the same time, our average entry price remains less than $35 overall and less than $30 for amphitheater and club shows. Michael mentioned that no-show rates were back to pre-COVID levels. So I wanted to give a few more specifics to hopefully set the record straight. Looking at the full year through mid-April for the U.S., our no-show rates were the same or better than the same period for 2019. For arenas, they are 1% better. For amphitheaters, they were 4% better.
For theaters and clubs, they were on par. And all up, we are 2% better. We haven't had enough volume on other outdoor events to have meaningful metrics yet. But generally, those venues had strong reopenings last summer and so we don't expect any issues there. In general, the U.S. was ahead of the rest of the world, but the U.K. is now fully back to pre-pandemic no-show rates as well. And we have not seen any evidence in any markets of any long-term impact on our shows. Michael gave you the top line on our first quarter average revenue per fan growth, up 30% for both theaters and clubs and festivals. For theaters and clubs, key drivers include on-site concessions and upsells.
And for festivals, the growth was heavily driven by on-site concessions and increased VIP purchases, all indicators of continued strong fan spending as they look to make the most of going to the show. Finally, COVID continues to have less and less impact on our concert schedule. And by March in the U.S., we canceled only around 1% of our planned concerts. As we look to the remainder of 2022, looking at our leading indicators through the end of April, first, confirmed show bookings are up over 40% overall and up double digits for each amphitheaters, arenas, stadiums and festivals. Second, ticketing has sold 130 million fee-bearing tickets for events this year, up 26% from this point in 2019. Of these, 88 million tickets are for concert events which is 40% higher than 2019. Related to this, we have $3.5 billion in event-related deferred revenue, almost twice the level of Q1 2019.
These are largely tickets that have been sold by Ticketmaster for Live Nation concerts, but the revenue and AOI hasn't flowed through yet, and we'll do so over the course of this year as events happen. On the sponsorship side, commitments are up double digits from this point in 2019. And overall, we have more than 90% of our planned sponsorship net revenue for 2022 set. On the cost side, we're obviously tracking closely cost increases associated both with labor and in general with supply chain challenges and inflation. These costs tend to hit us primarily in the venues we operate; amphitheaters, theaters and clubs and festivals.
For amphitheaters and theaters and clubs, labor is the largest factor given we have our venues in place. Across this entire fan base, we expect our variable cost per fan excluding talent to increase by $2 to $2.50 relative to 2019. This remains well below our average revenue per fan growth. And so we still expect to grow average per fan profitability across our operated venues this year. Festivals have a broader range of costs given the wider set of equipment and services involved in building these events.
Current projections are the variable cost per fan, excluding talent, will be up 7% this year, which is well below our expected increase in ticket revenue per fan. Helping offset all these costs is the $200 million cost reduction exercise that we executed last year, which remains well in place. A few other points on 2022. We now expect OCESA will deliver full year results in line with 2019 levels as Mexico is fully active, with most of their AOI flowing through our sponsorship and ticketing divisions.
In light of the OCESA acquisition, we want to provide more guidance on a few line items below AOI, which impact our earnings per share calculation. First, on depreciation and amortization, we expect the combination of these accounts to be roughly in line with 2019. The addition of OCESA is offset by the impacts of our reduced investment in capex and M&A over the past two years. With the acquisition of OCESA and anticipated strong performance of our festivals, many of which are joint ventures, we expect noncontrolling interest expense will be roughly double 2019 levels.
We are projecting accretion to be about $150 million this year. Again, the increase compared to 2019 is largely attributable to the OCESA acquisition. As a result of the additional financing opportunities over the past two years, our interest expense is now roughly $70 million per quarter. Finally, in comparison to 2019, we expect income tax expense will grow in line with our AOI growth. In anticipation of the growth opportunities ahead of us this year, we continue to expect 2022 capital expenditures to be approximately $375 million with 2/3 of this spent on revenue-generating projects.
We generated $89 million of adjusted free cash flow this quarter and expect free cash flow conversion from AOI to be back in the 50s for the full year. We ended Q1 with $1.9 billion of available liquidity between free cash and untapped revolver capacity, giving us sufficient flexibility to invest in growth. We are comfortable with our leverage with over 85% of our debt at a fixed rate and our average cost of debt is roughly 4.3%, positioning us well in this interest rate environment. With that, let me open the call for questions. Operator?
