Minimum Familiarity: None, although it might be helpful to know that MSG insists on calling their venue “Sphere” and not “the Sphere.” I for some reason obliged in this post.
When it launched to much fanfare in fall 2023, Sphere came with lofty ambitions, including the promise that the concert venue in Vegas would “[redefine] the future of live entertainment.” At a glance, it’s a beautiful venue, covered inside and out with massive LED screens, and containing a massive theater space devoid of pillars or obstructions of any kind. The scale of Sphere is difficult to comprehend, and the innovation at work expands beyond the obvious to an invisible but highly effective sound system, a modern and well-thought-out audience experience, and, owner MSG would argue, revolutionary seats that vibrate (resembling nothing seen before anywhere, ever).
I don’t think anyone would debate the fact that Sphere is quite cool. At a reported price tag of $2.3B, it better be! But is it actually the future of live entertainment? Probably not.
Sports Sports Sports
The biggest artists in the world today tour through venues originally designed not for music but for sports. The sports industry reliably gathers the biggest crowds in the world, and sports arenas have long moonlighted as concert venues to provide additional revenue on off days (resulting in very cool time lapse videos). Arenas and stadiums weren’t designed for live music (at least not primarily), and the quality of the concert-going experience has suffered as a result.
Concert tours that play sports venues bring their own sound equipment, usually installing systems hours before a performance. The tight turnarounds of the tours and the venues they visit dictate this timeline, which makes it difficult to customize a tour production to any particular venue. It’s more like “throw the system up and hope for the best.” Anyone who’s attended a concert in an arena or stadium has probably experienced the results of these constraints, with vocals often unclear, certain instruments lost in the mix, or odd echoing effects from the concrete walls opposite where you’re sitting.
Sphere does not have these problems, because its designers always planned for concerts to be the primary form of entertainment hosted by the venue. And, in a move unique to venues of this scale, Sphere relies on a theater layout, with multiple decks of seating facing towards the stage and massive video wall. The venue still reaches arena-like capacity (up to 20,000 in some configurations), but in a format more conducive to effective and intelligible acoustics.
Taking advantage of this favorable layout, Sphere contains a sound system with an unbelievable quantity of speakers that, per a press release, provides “each audience member with a truly exceptional and personalized listening experience.” It really does sound unlike any concert you’ve experienced in an arena, and the press release offers up an explanation for why:
Traditional loudspeaker technology in large-scale venues can result in audio quality that diminishes as distance from the speakers increases, due to the uncontrolled nature of sound wave propagation.
Sphere’s designers have managed to harness this apparently daunting sound wave propagation, and it shows.
It’s About the Experience
Most sports venues feel utilitarian, maximizing the quantity of ramps, staircases, etc. to get huge crowds in and out efficiently. And the process of entering and leaving these venues feels indistinguishable from attending a basketball or hockey game. The designers of Sphere put a lot of attention into distinguishing their pre- and post-show experience from what audiences have come to expect at a concert. From the walkway purpose-built to connect to the Venetian to the stunning installations in the lobby (and the super-cool holographic screen), entering Sphere feels like an event. And the amenities mix stadium-like efficiency (giant fridges of beer with a fancy self-checkout machine) with more polished night-on-the-town experiences (multiple bars themed to different equations integral to Sphere’s design and engineering).
While there have only been two productions at Sphere so far (U2’s opening residency and an off-night experience featuring a dressed-up nature documentary by Darren Aronofsky), both lean into the audience journey leading up to the actual event, instead of focusing solely on the show itself. The lobby is stunning and customized to the event going on that evening, to the point that it serves as a photo op in itself. This, of course, is part of the intent behind the venue. As Lionel Ohayon, CEO of the company that designed these entry/exit spaces described in an AD article:
We wanted to start the experience in the buildup to arrival, we wanted to pull the proscenium to the front door, as soon as you walk in you walk into the experience of Sphere. We didn’t just want people to walk through the space, but to inhabit it.
The thoughtfulness around these aspects of audience experience stands out among any concert venue I’ve seen. I have to hope the positive responses to Sphere’s focus on audience experience will inspire other venues of the future.
In fairness, the execution on the process of exiting Sphere has definitely lagged that of the entry experience. The bridge to the Venetian gets jammed to occasionally concerning degrees. Apparently there are escalators somewhere if you want to walk back on the street, but the actual exiting process didn’t feel nearly as clean as the entry, which naturally staggers based on when audience members choose to arrive.
Sign Me Up!
Exit experience aside, anyone reading this probably wishes their concert experiences resembled the one I’ve described here. In many ways, Sphere succeeds at creating a model for how concert experiences could be. Unfortunately, the chance of a Sphere popping up where you live anytime soon looks pretty unlikely. Presumably a second Sphere wouldn’t cost quite the $2.3B of the first one, but there would undoubtedly be a heavy, $1B+ price tag, and justifying that cost is difficult in most markets.1
It actually comes down to the conversation about sports above. Sports venues fill their extra nights with concerts, but if you build a venue that works for concerts but not sports, you either need a concert most nights or something else to fill in the off days. Sphere has the advantage of residing in the nonstop tourist bonanza that is Las Vegas. The venue offers The Sphere Experience on days with no concerts, and tourists drop $80+ per person to wander around in the lobby, meet an AI robot, and watch a fancy nature documentary as part of their vacation. But anywhere other than Vegas, those extra nights become an issue that makes it difficult to generate enough revenue to survive. And Sphere’s lucrative side-hustle as a giant billboard becomes less of a sure thing anywhere that’s not visible from the always-crowded Strip.
There is also a novelty premium associated with Sphere that’s allowed the venue to charge immense sums for tickets to concerts there so far. More Spheres (and just the passage of time from the original’s launch) would reduce the novelty and therefore pricing power.
…Or Not!
So the Sphere may not work financially where you live. But you may still get a new basketball stadium, or football stadium or soccer stadium. And even though your new stadium will be distinctly less spherical than Sphere, I hope the designers of these new venues will take inspiration from Sphere and the way it attempts to elevate and center the concert-going experience. Premium amenities and Instagram-worthy photo ops make the entire process of attending a concert memorable. From a venue owner’s perspective, the costs associated with a more premium experience will be offset by audiences spending more on the additional amenities: fancy cocktails they can take pictures of, VIP packages that grant access to exclusive lounges, that type of stuff.
So in this sense, I hope that Sphere does inspire the next evolution in the entertainment experience.
All the LEDs We Will Not See
But what about the flashiest part of Sphere, the massive exterior and interior LED walls that soar to unfathomable heights? Those attributes fall on the more gimmicky end of the spectrum, maybe well-suited for Vegas and the endless throngs of tourists, but not actually that ideal for a concert venue. In U2’s concert the band itself perched on the stage often feels lost amid the scale of the vast LED landscape that surrounds them. The designers of the show use the LED wall in incredible ways, suitably flashy for the venue’s christening. But the end result feels like a hybrid movie-viewing/concert experience, rather than an elevated concert. You literally cannot look at the band and keep the entire screen in your eyeline at the same time. Seeing a concert there is a once-in-a-lifetime experience that I’d highly recommend, but don’t hold your breath to see another Sphere touching down where you live any time soon.
- In early 2024, MSG withdrew a proposal to build a Sphere in Britain, blaming political challenges in getting the project fully approved. No other Sphere locations have been announced as of March 2024. ↩︎
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