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concert production

It was a year in which Rammstein blasted plumes of fire from a backpack, The Weeknd destroyed a miniature city in a hurricane of black smoke, Pepe Aguilar sang on horseback amid Aztec warriors and equestrian acrobats and Elton John gave a “Rocketman” tour of space from a video screen that bled into the stage. artists provided fans with endless stadium explosions and other over-the-top spectacles. Even though Inflation and supply-chain issues considerably jacked up expenses for 2022’s biggest tours, cutting corners was not an option. “It’s really important that we don’t short-change anybody,” David Furnish, John’s husband and manager, told Billboard in November, just before the singer’s final U.S. farewell tour show.
And in 2023, stars who continue or return to stadiums after emerging from COVID-19 quarantine are unlikely to scale down. “Our show is evolving,” Aguilar says from his Mexico City home. “Once I experimented with it, it’s hard to go back.”

Here are the stories behind five other ground-breaking concert special effects in 2022:

Bad Bunny’s floating dolphins and live-video merry-go-rounds

Befitting the year’s highest grossing tour, Bad Bunny went big with stadium special effects. The giant dolphins floating above the crowds were the most instantly eye-catching, but Bunny also integrated video into the shows in new ways. During “Callaíta,” he built on the merry-go-round imagery of his 2019 video and projected a 3-D live feed of his performance, as well as captured shots of individual fans and other elements of the show, into the frames of the rotating structure on stage. “There’s a lot more to it than meets the eye,” says Adrian Martinez, creative director for Sturdy, the production company that created much of the tour’s visual imagery. “A lot of shows just use loops and clips here and there and kind of just repeat. We wanted to make sure people were looking at something new pretty constantly.”

Coldplay’s LED spheres

After Coldplay‘s designer approached Frederic Opsomer with the idea for a new effect— hovering spheres festooned with LED strips— his staff at PRG Projects began two months of problem-solving. First, they considered “hardshell with a trussing system inside.” But that could have required seven or eight trucks with a crew of more than 60, which was unsustainable given the band’s mandate to be environmentally conscious. “We have to come up with another way,” Opsomer, PRG’s vp of global scenic, told the staff. So they concocted inflatable spheres, tested lightweight fabric coatings and determined they could fit in a fractional portion of a truck with just one crew member for maintenance. After accounting for rainy and windy stadium conditions, they built structures for the tour that began in March and tested them in factory settings, but didn’t feel fully comfortable until they lit up in bright colors on the first date. “How did we celebrate?” Opsomer asks. “I think we had a big smile on our face.”

Kendrick Lamar’s shadow play

During Kendrick Lamar‘s The Big Steppers tour, which ran from June to December, the rapper hunched over with his microphone, creating a big-screen shadow during “Count Me Out” with arrows wedged into Shadow Kendrick’s back when they did not actually appear in Real Kendrick’s back. “It’s this little photogenic moment that plays with reality,” says Mike Carson, one of the tour’s show designers and show directors, who helped coordinate choreographers, directors, lighting designers and video programmers to make it work. “It’s like a magic track. I read reviews and people describe what it is and still can’t pinpoint how he did it.” (Watch the whole show here.)

Adele’s piano on fire

It was Adele‘s idea last May to light her piano aflame during “Set Fire to the Rain.” That prompted five months of designers and crew members plotting and building a faux white Yamaha grand piano that bursts into flames while Adele sings during a manufactured rainstorm at her Caesars Palace residency in Las Vegas. Those flames spread more than 100 feet across the stage, part of an effect that involves a high-tech fire suppressant and huge troughs of water. The piano, says Paul English, Adele’s production manager, is “like a bath. It contains a load of water, so there’s a moment where [the piano] falls over and the water spills out. Then it sets itself on fire.” The flames heat up to 300 degrees, which means everything around it is at risk of melting or burning – which requires an elaborate rain “curtain” to keep in check. “So, yeah, it’s been challenging,” English adds.

Lady Gaga’s flaming cannons

For her Chromatica Ball stadium tour that kicked off this summer, Lady Gaga contrasted a brutalist-architecture set design inspired by 1920s German expressionism with non-stop explosions. Her “cold, very stark feel” in the set created a gray landscape that allowed her longtime production designer, LeRoy Bennett, to go crazy with orange-and-yellow pyro, aided by Rammstein’s special-effects company, FFP. (The flaming cannons are technically known in the special-effects industry as “liquid flame giga,” or LFGs.) “We’ve always had some pyro here and there, but never really went full-on big metal or Rammstein-style flames,” Bennett says. “She loves those kinds of effects. She’s a big fan of fire and the power and drama of it.”

Few things faze Noah Assad, Bad Bunny’s manager. But even he admits that launching a stadium tour barely three months after an arena tour was a bit daunting.

“We knew it was going to be a learning experience and something none of us had done before,” Assad says now, “but we went for it and worked through it with the help of old and new partners and set new industry standards.”

Bad Bunny ends the year as the top touring act of 2022, grossing $373.5 million from 1.8 million tickets across 65 shows, according to Billboard Boxscore, and that number doesn’t even include his last 20 Latin American stadium shows. This makes Bunny — born Benito Martinez Ocasio — the first act who doesn’t perform in English to ever top the year-end tally.

World’s Hottest Tour broke venue revenue records in 12 of the 15 U.S. markets that it hit, including Chicago and Washington, D.C., and New York, where he played Yankee Stadium. All told, the North American leg of tour averaged $11.1 million per show – the biggest per-show average gross by any artist in any genre in Boxscore history (dating back to the late 1980s).

Bunny also became the only artist to ever launch separate tours each topping $100 million in the same calendar year. His stadium tour launched after he played his 35-date El Ultimo Tour Del Mundo, an arena tour that earned $116.8 million from 35 shows.

So, how did an artist who only records in Spanish, who is signed to an independent label and has only been five years in the market achieve this feat? To find out, Billboard spoke with agents, promoters and producers to piece together the ingredients of Bunny’s spectacular touring success.

The seeds for World’s Hottest Tour, which ends with sold out shows Friday (Dec. 9) and Saturday (Dec. 10) at Mexico city’s Estadio Azteca, were sown April 15, 2021, when tickets went on sale for Bunny’s April 2022 arena tour. The tour sold out in a matter of hours, says Jbeau Lewis, one of Bunny’s agents at UTA, with some 200,000 to 300,000 people in virtual queue in individual arenas trying to score tickets, and it became clear how much demand there was for Bad Bunny concerts.

“I remember vividly Noah having a discussion that day and saying, ‘We have to hold some stadiums for next year.’ We saw the unprecedented demand for [2022 arena tour] Ultimo Tour del Mundo,” says Lewis. “And knowing that tour was going to be nine months away and that Benito had plans to release more music, the only way to provide enough supply to alleviate the demand was to move to bigger venues. And that’s when we started working on it.”

Last year Assad signed on with Henry Cardenas of Cardenas Marketing Network (CMN), Bunny’s longtime promoter who was already doing his arena tour who’d been booking him since he played 1,000-people club shows back in 2017 and 2018 in cites like New York and Miami. Cardenas brought in Live Nation, which has vast experience with stadiums, as his partners in the U.S.

In the U.S., the biggest challenge was not the prospect of selling out stadiums; Lewis felt very confident that wouldn’t be an issue if they stuck to those markets where Bunny had strongest demand. Scheduling was the problem, given that the tour was being booked just 15-16 months in advance, and MLB and NFL teams already had dates locked down. Assad and Bunny were also adamant that he not play more than two dates per city, so fans wouldn’t think that one market was preferred over another.

In the end, they settled on 15 U.S. cities and tickets went on sale before the tour design even was finalized, something tour producer Roly Garbalosa says is unusual. “Normally for a tour this big, you design, then look for the markets. Not here. Here we just went.”

Bad Bunny hit road Aug. 5 with a massive production hauling his massive “beach,” palm trees, LED screens and of course, the contraptions needed for his flying stunt, where he gets on top of a small island with a palm tree and soars over the crowd, singing all the way. While a typical tour will take about 20 cargo trucks, Bunny traveled with up to 36, carrying 100 tons of equipment. While CMN and Live Nation promoted the entire U.S. trek of the tour, in Latin America CMN took over seven concerts. The others went to independent promoters Assad has long worked with in the past, including Bizarro in Chile, Westwood Entertainment in Mexico and Dale Play in Argentina.

“Noah has a code of honor,” says Fede Lauria, the founder of Dale Play, who promoted Bunny’s two shows at Velez Sarsfield Stadium in Buenos Aires. “I promoted Benito’s first tour here in Luna Park in 2016. This time, it’s been the biggest production I’ve ever done. We sold 90,000 tickets, but I would have sold 900,000. We sold out in half an hour. I had over a million people in virtual line trying to buy tickets.”

For Latin America, Bunny again insisted on his no more than two shows per city rule. He also insisted that his show had to be exactly the same as what his fans saw in the U.S. This is easier said than done. Usually, promoters will pay artists their guarantee plus the cost of local production. But Bunny couldn’t rely on local production for such a technically complicated show. Many countries and venues simply don’t have the equipment necessary to replicated what can be done in state-of-the-art stadiums in the U.S. And many local promoters can’t afford to pay the costs of importing production and still break even, especially in countries that are suffering from massive devaluation. So, instead of modifying the show to meet local production standards, “He took all his equipment, put it inside a 747 jet, and took it with him,” Cárdenas says. “And he paid for that.”

Even then, says Garbalosa, adjustments were required. Bunny’s flying stunt in the U.S. is done commonly by hitching the equipment to the lights and towers. Because many stadiums in Latin America don’t have that capability, “We had to rent cranes and place them outside the stadium,” says Garbalosa.

Bunny traveled through Latin America with the 747 cargo jet for his more than 100 tons of equipment; a passenger jet for his 130-plus crew and personnel and a private jet for himself and his immediate five-to-six-person team. And he paid those costs.

“No other artist does that,” says Cárdenas.” I will say it in plain English: He’s the only artist who invests that kind of money in his production in Latin America.”

What that decision translates to is less money for the artist. Shows in the U.S. make more because ticket prices are higher and the cost of production, in this case, can be far less.

“But he said, my fans deserve the same show,” Cárdenas says. “It will pay off in the future.”

In some ways, you could say it’s already paying off.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years,” adds Garbalosa, the production manager. “I’ve never worked with an artist that creates this kind of frenzy.”