Sphere
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London Mayor Sadiq Khan has rejected Madison Square Garden’s long-standing proposal to build a Sphere arena in London, less than two months after the company debuted its first Sphere project to critical acclaim in Las Vegas.
News of the rejection came by way of a letter from Khan to Anthony Hollingsworth, director of the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), which oversees London’s Olympic Park properties. On Nov. 6, Hollingsworth had written to Khan to inform him that “the local planning authority is minded to grant planning permission” for the Sphere project. In the letter dated Monday (Nov. 20), Khan explained to Hollingworth that after considering a 111-page report commissioned by the Greater London Authority (GLA) advising the mayor to reject the plan, he was now ordering the LLDC to “refuse planning permission” for the venue.
A statement from Madison Square Garden Entertainment officials said they were “disappointed in London’s decision” but added, “There are many forward-thinking cities that are eager to bring this technology to their communities. We will concentrate on those.”
A proposal for the venue was submitted in 2018, and Sphere London initially survived key votes by the city’s local planning authority. But with his letter, Khan has seemingly doomed the project.
The mayor said his main reason for rejecting the proposal was the impact he believed the venue would have on the surrounding area, writing that Sphere would “cause significant light intrusion resulting in significant harm to the outlook of neighbouring properties.”
He also said the size of the venue — 300 feet high and 400 feet wide — “would result in a bulky, unduly dominant” facility” that failed “to respect the character and appearance of this part of the town centre and the site’s wider setting.” Lastly, he criticized the venue’s high “energy intensive use,” which he says “does not achieve a high sustainability standard, and does not constitute good and sustainable design.”
“GLA officers have concluded that to grant permission would be contrary to the Development Plan,” adds Khan in the letter, citing a document that lays out the spatial development strategy in London for the next 20 to 25 years. “[It] would prejudice the implementation of the policies within the Development Plan relating to residential amenity, good design, and the conservation and enhancement of London’s heritage.”
The Sphere project had previously faced pushback from some local residents as well as AEG, which operates London’s O2 Arena, located just four miles from the proposed site of the venue. In January, after the London Legacy Development Corporation’s Planning Decisions Committee greenlit MSG Entertainment to initiate work on the project, AEG called on Khan to reject the project in a statement that read in part: “The advertising façade is at a wholly unprecedented scale for London and totally out of keeping with the surrounding area. The design was conceived for the heart of Las Vegas and has been transposed onto this east London site: it’s the wrong design, in the wrong location.”
Sphere, the stunning venue that has transformed the Las Vegas skyline and redefined the concert-going experience, generated $4.1 million from U2’s first two concerts in September, its owner, Sphere Entertainment Co., reported in its quarterly earnings release on Wednesday (Nov. 8).
The $2.3 billion Sphere is a 366-foot tall, 516-foot wide spherical venue with a wrap-around video screen that envelopes a seated audience of 17,600. Sphere’s external skin — called Exosphere — is covered in 580,000 square feet of programmable LED exterior lights that advertises the venue’s technological capabilities.
Sphere also made $2.6 million in additional revenue, primarily from advertising on the Exosphere that began in September.
With only two concerts under its belt through the end of September, Sphere’s earnings release was about the venue’s potential, not its revenue to date. “Our journey with Sphere is just beginning,” said executive chairman/CEO James Dolan during Wednesday’s earnings call. “And while it will take some time for Sphere to realize its full potential, we’re off to a great start.”
U2’s original 25-show residency has been extended by an additional 11 shows that will occur in January and February 2024. The company expects to host two additional residencies in the second half of the fiscal year that ends June 30, 2024, according to Dolan. “We’re having conversations with artists across a wide variety of genres, including discussing runs of varying lengths,” he said.
Sphere had an adjusted operating loss of $83.1 million in the quarter, an increase of $19 million from the prior-year period. It also had $2.8 million of venue operating expenses in the quarter and $2.2 million of event-related expenses. An additional $2.1 million in advertising costs were related to the Oct. 6 launch of The Sphere Experience featuring the film Postcard from Earth by Darren Aronofsky. Selling, general and administrative expenses amounted to $84.2 million.
The Las Vegas venue is the first of what Sphere Entertainment expects to be multiple Sphere venues. Dolan was light on specifics but said there is “a great deal of interest and substantive discussions” in several additional markets. “I will say that it does look like Sphere will be a global brand,” he said, “and so we should expect the expansion globally rather than just in the U.S.”
Sphere Entertainment had total revenue of $118 million in its fiscal first quarter ended September 30, down 4% from the prior-year period. MSG Networks contributed $110.2 million of revenue, down 10% year over year. MSG Networks, which operates two regional sports networks, joined Sphere following a spin-off of MSG Entertainment in April. That same month, Sphere reached an agreement to sell its stake in Tao Group Hospitality to global luxury lifestyle company Mohari Hospitality for about $300 million.
Shares of Sphere Entertainment fell as much as 8.4% to $30.58 on Wednesday morning before recovering to $31.90, down 4.4%, by mid-afternoon. The stock price took a bigger hit on Monday, however, dropping 9.6% following the company’s announcement late on Friday that CFO Gautam Ranji had left the company. Dolan attributed Ranji’s departure to Sphere being a new type of business. “It’s pretty challenging,” he said. “I think we both came to the conclusion that it probably wasn’t a great fit.”
Financial metrics for the first fiscal quarter:
Total revenue of $118 million, down 4% year over year.
Adjusted operating loss of $57.9 million, up 88% year over year.
Net income of $66.4 million, up from a $44 million net loss in the prior-year period.
Sphere revenue of $7.8 million.
Sphere event-related revenue of $4.1 million.
MSG Networks revenue of $110.2 million, down 10% year over year.
Sphere Entertainment Co. shares rose 11.1% to $41.99 on Monday (Oct. 2) — and reached a high of $43.59, up 17.3% from Friday’s closing price — after the world got its first glimpses of the revolutionary concert venue over the weekend. The $2.3 billion venue opened on Friday (Sept. 29) with the first of 25 […]
Music is only part of the audio-visual experience in U2:UV Achtung Baby Live At Sphere, the 25-date U2 residency that opened Sphere in Las Vegas on Sept. 29 and will run through December. For the show, creative directors Willie Williams and Es Devlin helped the band harness Sphere’s technological potential with immersive visuals, including pieces commissioned specifically for U2:UV and the innovative venue’s 160,000-square-foot LED screen.
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Among the creatives to work with the band was visual artist and filmmaker Marco Brambilla, whose eye-popping video collage “King Size” serves as the backdrop for “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” Achtung Baby‘s second track. For three decades, Brambilla, who began his career as a director, including of the 1993 sci-fi film Demolition Man, has created visual art pieces that grapple with subjects including media oversaturation, technology’s effects, and the nature of pop culture. In 2008, Brambilla began harvesting short loops of source material – clips of characters, landscapes, and backgrounds that were each one second or less – to make high-concept video collages that tackle “epic human themes, but interpreted in a way that’s very much about sensory overload in today’s media landscape,” he explains. After seeing one of his recent collages, “Heaven’s Gate,” at London’s immersive space Outernet Arts in early 2023, Williams reached out to Brambilla about becoming involved in U2:UV.
Brambilla’s no stranger to large-scale art installations – for one, Outernet bills itself as having “the world’s largest wrap-around screens” – but even so, Sphere’s unprecedented canvas offered new challenges and rewards. For Brambilla, whose rare musical collaborations include two operas with Marina Abramović and Kanye West’s 2010 “Power” music video, it also presented the opportunity to work with one of rock’s most visually daring artists – and on his favorite song off his favorite U2 album, no less.
“It’s fantastic, because Sphere is giving performers an opportunity to go into a space and be able to have visuals that you could never tour, without this technology and without the permanent installation of the LED screens,” Brambilla tells Billboard hours before leaving Paris for Sphere’s opening. “There’s all sorts of possibilities – and I think they’ve only scratched the surface.”
RICH FURY
How did you get connected with U2 and Sphere?
Willie went to see the [“Heaven’s Gate”] show and I got a call, and he asked if I would be interested in a commission for the residency that was coming up at Sphere. I had obviously heard about Sphere before and I became very interested very quickly, because the scale of the space and the technology was always really fascinating for me. From there, the only brief from them was really, “We want something really maximal, like, sensory overload.”
Then the concept of Elvis came up. The idea of the birth of Las Vegas and the death of Elvis became interconnected in my mind. I’d started watching a lot of Elvis films and doing a lot of research on his rise and fall. It seemed very prescient – it seemed like a really interesting commentary on what’s going on today. I put together the concept in a very short amount of time, it only took about a week. Then I started making the work.
Usually when I make a video collage I have scheduled anywhere between six months and a year. And in this case, I only had maybe three, three and a half months to make it. So it required a lot of new technology. I used a lot of AI to assist in making it and also to make versions of Elvis that would populate the canvas in AI.
How would you describe “King Size”?
It’s an upward scroll — the piece scrolls upwards from the desert. It starts in a very stylized, very theatrical version of the desert and Las Vegas, and then neon rises from the desert. Then, eventually, it becomes like a futuristic, hyper-version of Vegas, like a mega Vegas. At the same time, the characters are associated with every era of Las Vegas. So you have Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin in the kind of glamour years, and then it becomes more about performers and strippers and dance clubs as you go up.
And there’s also samples from many of Elvis’s characters he played in films, as well as samples from documentaries that we found that we were able to create gifs from. And so that became the population of it. But the architecture of it is really the birth of Las Vegas.
Did you come up with the concept with U2 and Willie?
It was actually in conjunction with Bono, because we were talking about how to express this idea of a myth – you know, like what happens to celebrities. Elvis was the first mega-celebrity, in a way. Bono said, “Oh, this could be about the death of Elvis, the death of Elvis is an interesting theme.” That was a departure point that became very clear, this idea of the parallel of excess and consumerism and the American dream and what’s happened to the American dream being personified by what happened to Elvis Presley. The lyrics in [“Even Better Than the Real Thing”] are exactly about that theme that I was exploring visually. It worked really well thematically, not just visually.
STUFISH ENTERTAINMENT ARCHITECTS
U2 has a rich history of creating forward-thinking, immersive concert experiences. What were they like as collaborative partners?
It was probably the best collaboration I’ve ever had. They really respect you as an artist. They commissioned John Gerrard, Es Devlin and Brian Eno to make pieces [for U2:UV], and these pieces are art pieces. They really wanted something that would stand alone as an art installation. The technical aspects of working with the scale of the screen at Sphere, that was incredibly complicated. The actual creative process, in terms of being able to make an artwork, that was incredibly easy and rewarding, because they were just fantastically supportive and really easy to work with.
How did realizing this piece on Sphere’s screen differ from other installations you’ve done?
I’d worked on large-scale, site-specific installations, as well as museum and gallery shows. But in this case, it was unprecedented. Both the scale and the resolution were so much more than anything I’d [previously worked on] – and I’d already worked on some fairly ambitious projects. This was, by a factor of four, more ambitious in terms of the technology involved.
What did that specifically involve for you?
The collage is a hybrid: It contains elements that are entirely generated by AI and elements that are computer-generated, but using AI pre-visualization. That helped tremendously in terms of the [expedited] schedule and being able to create something very dense and very rich. But [Sphere] also has very good tools to help you pre-visualize it. As you’re making the work, there’s a headset simulator that they have where you can pick any seat you want and you can choose to sit in the front row or halfway up or in the corner, and you can look at your work on the Sphere in this headset. I was able to do this remotely. I only saw it in Sphere about two and a half weeks ago.
STUFISH ENTERTAINMENT ARCHITECTS
What were the biggest challenges?
Just rendering files that are that size and to create the kind of sharpness and resolution necessary [for Sphere’s screen], it’s challenging. But it’s gonna get easier and easier. As the technology gets better and you have more computing power, you’ll be able to generate visuals at that resolution with in an easier way. So I think it’s kind of future-proof in terms of being able to create visuals; right now, it’s early days. We’re kind of inventing the technology as we go.
Tell me more about how you used AI to create “King Size.”
I was working on another project, for a show that’s coming up next year, using AI, and I was very happy to be familiar with it [when I started working on “King Size”]. I was able to speed up the process, because over the course of making so many of these [visual collages] over the years, I have a huge library of film clips. I was able to train an AI software called Stable Diffusion with all these clips. Basically, the library went into AI, and then I was able to call up images very quickly. It became a kind of a collaboration with me and the AI working to find images that would fit the storyline.
We started using a program called DALL-E in its beta phase and generated a lot of prototype visuals of Elvis and different versions of Elvis, these kind of fantastical exaggerations of Elvis using that program. The good thing about AI right now is I couldn’t have made this work without it in time I had – it would have been impossible to attempt to make something at this resolution and with this kind of detail.
How long might it have taken without AI assistance?It would have taken at least a year. “Heaven’s Gate” took eight months, and the resolution was 8K; this one is 16K, and it has probably four times the number of samples as “Heaven’s Gate.” With every increase in resolution for what I’m doing […] you have to create a canvas that has much more information in it. The rendering at that resolution becomes very time consuming. I was working with a really great post-production company called The Mill in Paris and we were able to output the files fairly quickly.
Courtesy Marco Brambilla Studio, 2023.
How might artists utilize Sphere’s canvas going forward?
They have a sound system that can localize sound very precisely. The screens are so sharp that you’re not aware of pixels, you’re not aware of any kind of resolution, it just looks like a window into another world. It removes the concept of being somewhere. You’re transported somewhere else. There’s so many things you can do with it, because the technology that’s in that building, that’s permanent technology, allows you to experiment with all sorts of interaction between the performance and the screens themselves.
09/30/2023
Billboard was in the orb for the very first night, and we’ve rounded up the best moments from the concert (and venue) debut.
09/30/2023
As Sphere, the innovative new Las Vegas venue, opens its doors to the public with the debut of U2‘s 25-date residency on Friday (Sept. 29) and the premiere of the Darren Aronofsky film Postcard From Earth on Oct. 6, it’s doing so with an array of cutting-edge technology — much of which hadn’t been developed when the project broke ground in 2018.
“A lot of this stuff didn’t exist — it just didn’t,” says MSG Ventures CEO David Dibble, who oversees Sphere’s technology and content teams. “Necessity is the mother of invention, and by God, we had necessity.”
Plenty of Sphere’s advancements feel unique to the facility itself, including the geometry of its bowl-shaped theater and its 4D multisensory technology, which can generate effects like vibration, wind, scent and temperature fluctuations. But two key components — the venue’s audio and visual capabilities — could soon have a ripple effect across the concert business and broader live entertainment industry.
Sphere audiences will hear audio via Sphere Immersive Sound, a system created in tandem with the Berlin-based audio company Holoplot. “The problem that we tried to tackle from the beginning was not to build another sound system — because the world has enough sound systems,” says Holoplot CEO Roman Sick, who founded the company in 2011 with the goal of creating “a realistic, authentic audio experience that is not mainly determined by the room you’re having that audio experience in.”
Sphere executives discovered Holoplot after the company deployed its 3D Audio-Beamforming technology in Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, Germany’s largest train station, in late 2016, allowing multiple audio messages at the same frequency to be sent simultaneously to different parts of the facility.
Holoplot’s X1 Matrix array.
HOLOPLOT
“If you boil it down, we have two core capabilities,” Sick explains. “The functional level, from our perspective, is you can determine where you want to have sound and where you don’t want to have sound. … And the creative bit is the ability to now move audio objects three-dimensionally across that whole volume [of space in a venue] — from left to right and up and down, but also into the audience back and forth.”
Holoplot dubbed the former aspect 3D Audio-Beamforming technology and the latter one Wave Field Synthesis. With Wave Field Synthesis, Sick explains, Holoplot can make the origins of audio imperceptible to create “a hologram of sound” — an accomplishment he calls “the holy grail of spatial audio.”
To implement these features, Sphere Immersive Sound utilizes advanced hardware and software. Behind Sphere’s 160,000-square-foot LED screen sit hundreds of Holoplot’s X1 Matrix arrays, which combine the functionalities of vertical and horizontal line arrays to allow greater control over the formation and shape of audio waves. Holoplot’s software then utilizes proprietary algorithms and machine learning to synthesize creative input and environmental data, collected by sensors throughout the venue, to further refine the system’s audio output.
Sphere Immersive Sound might sound complicated — and it is — but like many of the venue’s production capabilities, it’s designed to be plug-and-play for visiting artists and their teams.
“You don’t need to be a scientist,” Sick says knowingly. “You just say, ‘Hey, I want sound here and over there, for this configuration.’ And the system says, ‘OK, here it is.’” According to Sick, the system has “a large number of preset formats” — mono, stereo, 5.1, Atmos and so on — for artists to choose from. Once they do, “boom, then it’s the normal workflow,” says Sick, adding that an artist’s audio engineer can even use their normal desk: “From that end, nothing really changes.”
Of course, Sphere’s audio advancements didn’t take place in a vacuum. In implementing Holoplot’s technology, Sick and his team had to consider numerous other stakeholders, chief among them those conceptualizing Sphere’s visual capabilities. “You put something in front of a speaker, it’s going to have an effect — and it’s a negative effect, usually,” says Sick, summarizing the challenge of placing high-end audio equipment behind Sphere’s LED screen. Compared to point source or line array speakers, Holoplot’s matrix array had an advantage — it diffuses energy over a larger surface area, reducing the energy passing through an obstruction, in this case Sphere’s LED screen, at any given point. But Sick’s team still had to find “the best compromise between acoustic transparency and meeting the visual requirements.”
Big Sky, the camera developed by Sphere Studios.
Sphere Entertainment
“It’s such a unique and groundbreaking technology that, maybe for the first time ever in the audio-visual world, the images, as incredible as they are, are almost subordinate to the audio experience,” says Andrew Shulkind, senior vp of capture and innovation at Sphere Studios, the Burbank-based entity Sphere launched to develop technology and content tailored specifically for the venue.
That’s saying something: Shulkind became involved with Sphere several years ago to help it create visual content — like Aronofsky’s Postcard For Earth — suited to its massive, high-resolution screen. Initially, Shulkind and his colleagues shot tests using camera arrays, a common but cumbersome filmmaking technique that stitches together video captured from multiple cameras to generate a more detailed product.
“It became pretty obvious quickly that we really need a single-camera solution, for a variety of reasons, for weight and for mobility and ergonomics, and to be able to take all the difficulty of maneuvering something heavy out of the way,” says Shulkind, who enlisted a colleague, Deanan DaSilva, to help create a new camera fit for Sphere.
The resulting device, Big Sky, pushes the boundaries of modern filmmaking technology with a sensor 40 times the resolution of a 4K camera, lenses with high sharpness thresholds and even new data storage solutions to manage the large volume of information it produces. “This was something that [camera makers] weren’t expecting to do for another 10 years,” DaSilva says. “We had to figure out how to move that timeline up.”
Like Sick, ultimately Shulkind and DaSilva had to ensure that their advanced technology was accessible to the outside creators that Sphere wants to court. “We work with external creatives, they come in, they describe what they want to do, they have their support team and then we fill out the capture side,” Shulkind says. “We take the complications of any of these technologies out of the mix, and it becomes about, you know, what story are you trying to tell?”
Filmed by Aronofsky on every continent in conjunction with Sphere Studios, Postcard From Earth, Shulkind explains, was “really designed to take people to another place that they may not have been, or places that they may not have seen in that way before. Darren has been able to marshal all of the different aspects of the venue in service of that goal.”
Shulkind acknowledges Sphere Studios’ myriad technical accomplishments but has a broader view of their implications that transcends the wider implementation of any one of its technologies. For him, Sphere’s format could finally allow filmmakers to “break the rectangle,” or go beyond the rectangular framing of visual storytelling that emerged from rectangular film strips.
“Now that we have all the technology of the minute, whether it’s data storage, whether it’s the fidelity that we’re able to achieve with this high resolution, whether it’s the ability of creating glass that is able to be as sharp as it is, all the different aspects come together to create this greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts [product], radically rethinking how stories are told and how we experience content,” he says. “You’re looking at all these little composite technologies and all the growing currents of where technology has gone over the last 10 years. How do you apply that all for some creative purpose? I think that’s the real experiential success story.”
And that story isn’t over yet. While Sphere’s teams worked diligently to design and implement new technologies for the venue’s opening, Sick, DaSilva, and Shulkin all note that they’ll continue to iterate and improve their tools going forward.
As creatives “start to really discover how to tell stories in the venue … that’ll very clearly drive the technology evolution,” DaSilva says. “We’ve got a to-do list of all the things to try that we’ve not even scratched the surface on.”
“We constantly keep updating our technology,” Sick adds. “There’s new features that we will deploy over time, even after the venue has opened, that will give new capabilities to Sphere.”
It seems likely that at least some of these technologies will eventually move beyond the walls of Sphere’s Las Vegas facility to other venues — but what shape that proliferation will take remains unclear. After all, the Sphere team has already filed more than 60 patents. “One of the reasons we’ve been so aggressive on our patents is imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” Dibble says. “But we’d just as soon not be imitated, because we own it.”
Everything about Sphere, the state-of-the-art new live-entertainment venue on the Las Vegas Strip, seems designed to shock and awe.
There’s its size: At 366 feet tall by 516 feet wide, it’s big enough to fit the Statue of Liberty (a fact the executives involved in the project very much like to note), making it the world’s largest spherical structure. Stand outside, and it’s impossible to focus on anything but its skyline-dominating, dynamic LED screen Exosphere; stand inside, on the floor of its main event space, and cower beneath its 160,000-square-foot LED screen that curves and towers to an apex of 240 feet above.
And then there’s its sheer capability: When it opens Sphere on Sept. 29 with the premiere of its U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere show, U2 will be playing an eye-popping 25 dates at a 20,000-capacity facility in the Nevada desert. It all seems tailored to elicit the same response: the conviction that, after picking one’s jaw up off the floor, live entertainment will be changed forever.
And it very well might be. As the sands of the concert business shift, Sphere’s model — prioritizing cutting-edge production, embracing an unorthodox residency model and rounding out its calendar with high-margin programming produced itself — provides intriguing paths forward for major touring artists and the arenas and stadiums they play.
But as Sphere prepares to open its doors, significant questions remain about who will play the venue next, how it will continue to draw fans (and enough of them) in the coming years and what it needs to do to become — and remain — financially viable. And with its $2.3 billion price tag, nearly double the $1.2 billion initially estimated when the project was announced in 2018, the legacy of the figure behind the project, James Dolan, executive chairman and CEO of both Sphere Entertainment and the closely related Madison Square Garden Entertainment, feels inextricably linked to Sphere’s success. (Dolan declined an interview for this story.)
For now, though, existential questions about Sphere will have to wait. There’s a U2 residency to launch — no small feat — and, a week after that, the premiere of Postcard From Earth, the Darren Aronofsky-directed nature film that Sphere will screen from one to four times daily on days U2 doesn’t play and that promises to harness even more of the venue’s considerable stable of technological bells and whistles (while also, hopefully, quickly becoming a reliable revenue driver).
“This is essentially a new medium, which we call ‘experiential,’ ” Dolan said on an August earnings call. “Sphere is a brand-new, never-before-seen medium — and we believe it will take the world by storm.”
A month before Sphere’s scheduled opening, David Dibble, CEO of the Sphere Entertainment subsidiary MSG Ventures, is in a jovial mood, sitting on Zoom before a background rendering of the cosmos, the starship Enterprise soaring through space.
He drops references to everything from the ancient Greeks to the Gutenberg press to scenes from Jaws and Animal House — and links all these things to Sphere. The project has dominated Dibble’s life since Dolan first broached the concept to him in his office one evening in late 2015, shortly after the sale of longtime Dolan family asset Cablevision was finalized for $17 billion.
“He leaned back, looked out the window,” recalls Dibble, who was Cablevision’s chief technology officer before joining MSG after the former’s sale. “He says, ‘You know, Dibble, let’s reinvent the live-entertainment industry.’ Those were his exact words. And I said, ‘Oh, OK. Well, thinking small, are we?’”
For “at least three hours,” the two men “brainstormed and argued and laughed.” Dolan was resolute that his new venue should have an iconic shape. After ruling out a pyramid or a cube, he grabbed Dibble’s pad of graph paper, scribbling a circle and a stick figure, and holding it up. “I got it,” he told Dibble. “MSG Globe.” Dibble nixed the name; Dolan asked him why.
“I said, ‘Shakespeare’s got ‘Globe,’ man, come on. You’re good, Dolan, but you’re not going to compete with Shakespeare.’” Dolan paused and recast his concept: MSG Sphere.
According to Sphere executive vp/COO Rich Claffey, who oversaw venue management for MSG Entertainment’s full portfolio before assuming his current role, Dolan began discussing Sphere in specific terms around 2015 — but had interest in a venue that would address similar concerns even earlier.
A cross-section rendering of Sphere.
Sphere Entertainment
“We would always talk about how we could make multiple events in a day happen without having huge changeovers and things of that nature,” says Claffey, who joined the MSG family as a stagehand at its flagship arena in 1983. “Ten years ago, we were trying to figure out the best way where we could do major productions, all in the same day, and [what it would look like] if we ever built a building.”
When Dolan conceived Sphere, he didn’t have Vegas specifically in mind and asked his team to prepare a list of candidate locations, according to Dibble. But around this time, he explains, MSG connected with Sheldon Adelson and Rob Goldstein of the Las Vegas Sands, then still owner of The Venetian, who found the idea compelling and “in their view, fit the direction that Las Vegas was going” — away from gaming and toward entertainment.
“Live entertainment defines this town, more so than gaming,” says Kate Wik, chief marketing officer for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the government agency tasked with marketing and promoting southern Nevada. “It has been over a decade that nongaming revenues exceed that of gaming revenues. We are an entertainment destination.”
Sands and MSG inked a ground-lease agreement for a plot directly behind The Venetian, and the project was announced in February 2018. “We had no idea how we were going to do this. I mean, none,” Dibble says with a palpable sense of amazement that Sphere was ultimately built. “All we knew was what we were going to call it and what the shape was going to be.”
Populous — the acclaimed architectural design firm behind facilities including Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena and Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum — was attached from the jump, with AECOM added as general contractor in 2019, when construction began; AECOM estimated the venue would cost $1.7 billion. But with the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation and attendant supply chain problems, the project was soon marked by delays and other issues. In late 2020, MSG Entertainment relieved AECOM of its role and took construction in-house. (AECOM remained involved with the project in a support role under a new services agreement.) Some key executives did not see the project through, including Jayne McGivern, MSG Entertainment president of development and construction, and Lucas Watson, MSG Sphere president, who parted ways with the company in 2021 and February 2023, respectively.
There was “a lot of skepticism around this project over the years it was constructed,” says Paul Golding, an equity research analyst at Macquarie Group who tracks several companies across the live sector, including MSG Entertainment and Sphere Entertainment. And some of that skepticism extended beyond challenges in conventional construction to the novelty of the tech that would make the venue much more than just another impressive Vegas edifice. “There was, throughout the construction process — and even starting from the early days — some concern [among the investment community] as to whether some of these characteristics or features would be feasible, and if so, at what cost,” Golding adds.
The Exosphere.
Sphere Entertainment
The team wanted best-in-class audio and visual capabilities — some of which didn’t even exist yet at the project’s inception. For the former, it partnered with Holoplot, a Berlin-based audio startup, to design Sphere Immersive Sound, which uses the German company’s patented 3D Audio-Beamforming technology to ensure that listeners anywhere in the venue hear identical mixes at identical volumes; algorithmic machine learning and environmental data collected in real time by sensors throughout Sphere further refine and standardize the sound attendees hear regardless of where they’re seated. And to ideate the venue’s LED display and 4D technologies, Sphere Studios, a Burbank, Calif.-based interdisciplinary team spanning creative, production, technology and software pros, launched to serve as Sphere’s in-house creative and production unit. Its proudest accomplishment to date is Big Sky, an innovative high-resolution camera system that far outpaces current industry standards and can produce content suited for the venue’s massive screen.
And as much interest as Sphere’s technology has generated, its business model is also challenging conventional wisdom about how buildings should be operated, particularly at the arena level. Traditionally, Dolan explained on the August earnings call, “if you have a team, they’re the first tenants in, but that generally only occupies 40 to 50 nights a year, and the rest of the time you’re renting out and you have a limited revenue stream.” Sphere, by contrast, “will be busy theoretically 365 days a year, because when we’re not bringing in someone like a U2, etc., we’re running our own content, and that business is a high-margin business.”
By all appearances, U2 isn’t playing Sphere because it’s forsaking the road or has a particular affinity for Vegas. Rather, from the multimedia-rich 1992-93 Zoo TV Tour promoting Achtung Baby and Zooropa to the 2009-11 U2 360° Tour, with “The Claw” — its striking, four-legged stage structure plopped on stadium floors around the world — to even Bono and The Edge’s wild, ill-fated Broadway experiment with Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the band has pushed the boundaries of live entertainment for more than three decades. Its Sphere show, described by a press release as “a futuristic Achtung Baby adventure in a unique desert landscape,” is another step in that progression. (U2, creative directors Es Devlin and Willie Williams, and other members of its creative and production teams were unavailable to participate in this story; manager Irving Azoff declined to comment and a representative for longtime Live Nation promoter Arthur Fogel did not respond to requests for comment.)
“U2 is on record publicly saying they wouldn’t have played Vegas if it weren’t for the Sphere,” Dibble says. “I think that that thesis is probably going to lather, rinse, repeat across a pretty broad spectrum of entertainers.”
Given U2’s success selling tickets at Sphere so far — as its residency launches, multiple dates are sold out and several others have extremely limited inventory — and the substantial creative investment made by it and the venue for U2:UV, Sphere could take a page out of the book of other popular Vegas residencies and extend the band’s run. After all, U2 announced only five dates initially, adding 20 more in three waves to meet demand. “I’m pretty sure we could have kept going,” says Josephine Vaccarello, executive vp, live at MSG Entertainment, who oversees booking for all venues across the company’s portfolio and added Sphere to her purview in January. Might that happen? “TBD. I think we’ll see.”
The Exosphere.
Sphere Entertainment
But who will play Sphere following the famed Irish rockers? The venue doesn’t have any announced bookings after U2 on Dec. 16 — and its team has been mum about what its calendar will look like in 2024 and beyond. “We expect to announce additional residencies shortly, which are slated to take place later this fiscal year,” Dolan said on August’s earnings call, citing a “real robust interest from the artist community.” But, he noted, “we expect maybe not as high profile as U2, but close, because those are the kinds of artists that have been coming to talk to us.”
“There are tons of conversations happening right now,” Vaccarello says with excitement. “It’s literally — it’s every genre.”
Still, in a report published after August’s earnings call, Macquarie expressed concern about the lack of additional concert announcements and said Dolan’s warning of future bookings being potentially lower profile than U2 “softens our view on venue rental revenues.”
In Claffey’s estimation, artists “probably would have to be able to do six to eight shows to be viable, just to make it worth their while and our while.” And though Vaccarello reiterates that Sphere’s doors are open to one-off touring acts, she’s skeptical that such plays are the best fit for them. “With the technology that exists within Sphere, it doesn’t make sense to come into Sphere if you’re not going to use the media plane [Sphere’s term for its LED screen] and let it do all the things that it can do,” she says. “Otherwise, you would just do your show in an arena.”
Sin City already has multiple such venues, including the relatively new T-Mobile Arena, the MGM Grand Garden Arena and an additional, in-the-works facility being plotted by Oak View Group, not to mention a just-approved baseball stadium and the recently opened Allegiant Stadium.
“There is a lot of competition, so if you’re really just doing a one-off [in Vegas], I could see why you would just go to one of those other venues,” says Jarred Arfa, executive vp/head of global music at the newly formed agency Independent Artist Group. At IAG, Arfa represents a roster that includes Metallica, Neil Young, Def Leppard, The Strokes and Billy Joel — the lattermost will notably conclude his monthly MSG residency after a decade in July 2024 — and he says several clients have expressed interest in playing Sphere. “What I’m curious to see is, does the Sphere help an artist sell tickets?” he wonders. “If we have an artist who’s maybe worth one or two arena plays in Vegas, does the Sphere make it seven?”
Both Sphere executives and Arfa offer a similar refrain: that the venue’s technology, and its capacity to allow artists to create unique shows that can’t play anywhere else, heavily incentivizes extended runs. And while Sphere’s decision to lean into residencies isn’t particularly innovative, the scale at which it plans to do so is. Massive stars with Vegas residencies like Adele and Usher play to far smaller rooms (the 4,300-capacity Colosseum at Caesars Palace and the 5,200-capacity Dolby Live at Park MGM, respectively) than Sphere. As Arfa says: “It’s weird, because it’s an arena size, but it’s the residency model.”
“If a roller coaster only went up, that’s what it’s like,” says Guy Barnett, Sphere Entertainment senior vp, brand strategy and creative development, 10 days before U2 debuts at the venue. “You don’t often get the chance to launch a brand that dabbles with so many entertaining things, from robots to giant screens to Aronofsky.”
Barnett helped Dolan develop an early “pitch reel” for Sphere when Dolan was developing the concept in 2016 and returned to the project in early 2023 to guide the venue as it established its identity. While concerts are an important component of Sphere’s business model, they’re far from its only revenue stream — and possibly not its most critical one. Sphere’s overall commercial success relies on how well it can establish itself as more than just a place for music, but as “a fusion of science and art, and what the outcome of those two things are,” Barnett says. “It has been our mission to fuse those two circles of influence — that we take science and art to create something wonderful.”
To that end, the venue has conceived something called The Sphere Experience, which starts the moment patrons enter the venue. Outside of the bowl-shaped theater, one of five identical, humanoid robots named Aura greets visitors and interacts with them about the venue’s technology. Activations in the atrium “tell the role of technology in humankind,” according to Dibble; he’s particularly excited about mathematical equations printed across the space with QR codes that, when scanned, explain how the formulas were applied in engineering Sphere.
Interior rendering of Sphere.
Sphere Entertainment
But The Sphere Experience’s centerpiece is exclusive content produced by Sphere Studios to be presented in the bowl — upon its opening, the Aronofsky-directed Postcard From Earth, a narrative-meets-documentary experience that was filmed on every continent. The show flexes the full potential of Sphere’s 4D multisensory technology, including effects like vibration, wind, scent and temperature fluctuations; it will debut with a per-show capacity of 5,000, with the possibility to increase attendance in the future (Sphere has 10,000 seats equipped with haptic capabilities). Across up to four showings, as many as 20,000 people will be able to experience Postcard From Earth on some days this fall, each paying between $49 and $249; as many at Sphere note, far more patrons will initially engage with the venue through Postcard From Earth rather than U2.
“It’s a new medium, and we were really figuring it out as we went along,” Aronofsky tells Billboard. “The joke was often that we were building the plane while learning how to fly it. And so I think now that we have made Postcard From Earth, which uses the form in perhaps its most obvious way, I look forward to seeing what filmmakers in the future do in this medium.”
On Sphere’s August earnings call, Dolan called original content like Postcard From Earth “sort of the backbone of the business. That is basically a high-margin business, because you’ve already invested your capital. You’ve made your show, you’ve built your attraction, and now your running costs are basically things like ushers, security, merch, those kinds of things. So the return on that is pretty strong.”
Postcard From Earth is slated to run well into 2024 and possibly beyond; it will likely become the first piece of content in Sphere’s library of nonmusical programming that exists in perpetuity.
“A core component, in our view, of the revenue picture for Sphere will be Postcard From Earth” and future Sphere Experience programming at the venue, Macquarie’s Golding says, though he expresses caution because tickets are “at a price point that is significantly higher, in our view, than what the traditional film exhibitor might charge. We are watching to see whether that demand comes through, given the large amount of supply [number of screenings and available tickets] relative to visitation to Las Vegas.”
In a report published in August, Macquarie outlined a scenario where Sphere runs 710 shows in fiscal year 2025 with 9,000 optimal seats per show — which would come out to a supply of about 6.4 million “optimal seats.” In 2022, 38.8 million people visited Las Vegas, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, which has a metro area population of 2.9 million.
But another core facet of Sphere’s business revolves around the people who never even walk through its doors. The 580,000-square-foot Exosphere envelops the structure — and offers creative and financial opportunity. Since coming to life on July Fourth, Exosphere has become an eyeball, a tennis ball, Mars and more.
“Sphere has not opened yet, and it’s already one of the top must-see attractions for this destination,” says Wik of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, describing it as “a character in and of itself” that people are already lining up to see.
And its features, of course, aren’t merely aesthetic. “Following our demonstration of the Exosphere’s capabilities, we’ve seen a significant increase in inbound interest from potential advertisers and marketing partners,” Dolan said in August.
On Sept. 1, Sphere launched two Exosphere partnerships that illustrate the primary types of programming it will display. Turkish American artist Refik Anadol became the first creative to make Exosphere his canvas with the debut of Machine Hallucinations: Sphere, an abstract, immersive digital experience he describes as an artificial intelligence “data sculpture.” Meanwhile, YouTube became the first brand to generate a campaign specifically for Exosphere, using it to promote its subscription product, NFL Sunday Ticket. For Sphere, the challenge will be balancing these two purposes — and finding creative ways to fuse them.
In conversations with Dolan, Barnett has sought to “[make] sure that we’re always, within reason, around 50/50,” he says. “We’re leading the way and inspiring a lot of our commercial partners to see what they can do on this. Part of the art is to make sure that we are always surprising and delighting our audiences, and we want our commercial partners to do the same.”
But while Dolan has encouraged patience — “You should not expect the venue to reach its full economic potential right from the start,” he said in August — financial realities may pressure Sphere to behave more aggressively in its business, including when it comes to commercial Exosphere deals. Sphere’s higher-than-expected price tag “puts a greater degree of pressure on management to utilize the capacity of the venue,” from programming and booking to brand partnerships to finding operational efficiencies, Golding says.
While the Vegas Sphere experiment unfolds, its team isn’t stopping there: Though planners have been stymied by government red tape and local opposition, another Sphere has been in the works for London’s Stratford neighborhood since 2018.
“Vegas is the first; by no means is it the last,” Dibble says. “By the way, we’ve got designs that can go from 2,000 to 20,000 people [in capacity], all maintaining the basic geometry of the bowl so that our content is portable.”
Don’t expect them to do it on their own the next time around, though. “We want partners,” Dolan said in August. “We’re looking at more of a franchise-type model. … Going forward, construction of additional Spheres will be, for this company, capital-light.” With construction lessons learned from the Vegas project and the possibility of smaller future Spheres, Dolan anticipates some iterations of the facility could be built in less than two years.
“The company has talked in the past about using this venue as a model for future opportunities to deploy this venue with partners or by licensing the design and the technology and the expertise,” Golding says. “It’ll be interesting to see if its success — if, in fact, it is successful — lends itself to other venue developers and managers seeking to deploy this format in lieu of what might be a more traditional opportunity in their respective geographies.”
Back in Vegas, as Sphere’s opening looms, the venue’s team continues to project confidence — with total sincerity, it seems. “If we’d listened to skeptics, we would have folded our tent years ago,” Dibble says without a hint of worry, citing the dozens of patents Sphere has secured to ward off imitators. “We think it’s going to be the hallmark of what is going to define the next generation of live entertainment.”
Or, as Dolan put it on August’s earnings call: “The proof is in the pudding — and the pudding is about to show up.”