Some of the key initiatives include reorganizing to become more nimble while also reducing our cost structure by $200 million; building concert streaming and direct-to-consumer businesses to expand our revenue streams; advancing our technology initiatives globally while accelerating the shift to digital tickets to meet changing needs of fans, venues and artists; and reinforcing our balance sheet to endure this period while maintaining a strong position to build our business for the future and act on opportunities as we identify them, such as our recent acquisition of the streaming platform, Veeps; and continued pipeline bolt-on acquisitions throughout the globe.
The $2.4 trillion projected surplus in savings in the U.S. alone by June is a key indicator of consumer spending potential.
At the same time, surveys demonstrate the high demand for concerts globally with 95% of fans likely to attend a show when restrictions are lifted.
This is proving out in fan behavior as well with 83% of fans continuing to hold on to their tickets with rescheduled shows.
Given the limited touring activity in 2020 and '21, the pipeline for 2022 is much stronger than usual, with almost twice as many major touring artists on cycle in 2022 in a typical year, about 45 artists versus the usual 25.
And there remains plenty of scheduling availability at arenas, amphitheaters and stadiums to accommodate these additional tours, with over 2/3 of these venue nights unused by sporting events or major concerts in a typical year.
As part of this, we further reduced discretionary spending by another $50 million and closed 2020 with over $950 million in lower costs.
We also reduced our cash usage by $1.65 billion relative to our pre-COVID plans, $150 million more than we were projecting last quarter.
Our AOI loss for the quarter was $244 million, which consisted of $290 million in operational fixed costs and $46 million of contribution margin, which included $96 million contribution from operations along with various onetime items.
As we pointed out last quarter, this contribution margin from operations includes our sponsorship business, where we've been able to maintain close to 90% of the commitments that were in place at the end of February last year.
Half of this sponsorship moved into 2021, while the portion we retained in 2020 was repurposed in other assets, including streaming concerts.
We ended the fourth quarter with $643 million in free cash, which increased to $1.1 billion in early January with our debt raise.
This, along with over $950 million of available debt capacity, gives us $2 billion in readily available liquidity.
Our total free cash usage in the quarter was $308 million or $103 million per month.
We had $97 million per month average in operational burn plus another $44 million per month of nonoperational cash costs to get us to $142 million average per month in gross burn.
And then we had $39 million per month in cash contribution margin and ended up with a total effective cash burn of $103 million per month.
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 Q4.
But for festivals where fans could retain their tickets for next year's show, 63% of fans are doing so.
On deferred revenue, at the end of the fourth quarter, deferred revenue for events in the next 12 months was $1.5 billion versus the $1.4 billion we projected at the end of Q3, higher due to $100 million in ticket sales during the quarter.

Summary:
Half of this sponsorship moved into 2021, while the portion we retained in 2020 was repurposed in other assets, including streaming concerts.